Episode 460: Pinterest is the Best Way to Drive Traffic to Your Blog (+Latest Pinterest Strategies) with Laura Rike

EBT460 – Laura Rike

Intro  00:00

Food bloggers, hi, how are you today? Thank you so much for tuning in to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. This is the place for food bloggers to get information and inspiration to accelerate your blog’s growth and ultimately help you to achieve your freedom, whether that’s financial, personal, or professional.

I’m Megan Porta and I’ve been a food blogger for over 13 years. I understand how isolating food blogging can be at times. I’m on a mission to motivate, inspire, and most importantly, let each and every food blogger, including you, know that you are heard and supported. 

Megan Porta  00:37

One of the hottest topics of the year from my perspective is Pinterest. And I am always looking for people to give new perspectives and strategies regarding Pinterest and getting traffic and maybe getting sales and just increasing all of that good stuff in our blogging businesses through Pinterest. When I started blogging, Pinterest was a much different situation, it looked so different the way I used it was completely different than it is today. So it’s always good to get different perspectives on this and Laura Rike from laurike.com joins me in side this episode to talk about her perspective.

And she brings some novel concepts to the episode that I hadn’t thought about before. And I always love learning new things and new ways to kind of view Pinterest. So she talks through Idea Pins, are they dying or are they not? What is going on with Idea Pins? she talks through how to do keyword research on Pinterest, and give some really great ideas for that. I would say if you can sit down at your computer while you listen to this episode, it might be beneficial because you can kind of click through and do the things while she talks through them. I found that really helpful as we were talking. Laura also talks about boards and how often we should be pinning, what size our pins should be. So many details that I think will be really helpful for you. And also about this new term called Design Relevancy Score, which I have not heard about. So she describes what that is and how we can use it to think through the content we publish on Pinterest. I know you are going to love this episode. It is number 460 And it is sponsored by RankIQ. 

Sponsor  02:21

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Megan Porta  03:29

Laura Rike is a Pinterest strategist who helps high performing business owners implement content growth plans, outsource their visibility and steadily grow their monthly revenue through her signature growth to greatness framework. With done for you services and course packages. She has helped clients and students bring in over $50,000 in monthly revenue. Her clients have become industry leaders with six figure businesses and are growing sustainably by ranking on the first page of Google and getting targeted email leads daily. Laura has been featured on Social Media Examiner, Tailwind MeetEdgar and Ecamm network. If you need a place to start, she offers a Pinterest foundation jumpstart so you can start getting more visibility online and grow sustainably by ranking on the first page of Google and getting targeted email leads daily. 

Megan Porta  04:17

Laura, thank you so much for being on Eat Blog Talk. How is your day going so far?

Laura Rike  04:22

Amazing. Thank you so much for having me.

Megan Porta  04:25

Good. Yes, it’s Monday, right?

Laura Rike  04:27

It is, yeah.

Megan Porta  04:29

I feel like the day is just starting but it’s not. It’s actually afternoon, which is crazy. This I feel like Mondays just go so fast for me.

Laura Rike  04:39

It does. Yeah. And I just got back from a quilting retreat. And so my Monday morning is like zooming through.

Megan Porta  04:48

Oh, that’s so cool. So you’re a quilter?

Laura Rike  04:51

I am Yeah, my mom got me started. She’s been quilting for years and she has this wonderful group of like 15 ladies who are retired and I go hang out with them and quilt for five to six days.

Megan Porta  05:04

That’s so cool. And I haven’t even asked you for your fun fact yet is your fun fact different from that?

Laura Rike  05:10

We can use that. I also am adopted. So it’s quite fun because everybody says, I look like my mom when we’re on these retreats. But yeah.

Megan Porta  05:19

Oh, that’s funny. And then I have to ask you, because we’re talking about Pinterest today, do you use Pinterest to tap into your quilting?

Laura Rike  05:29

100% I was actually on Pinterest a lot this past week, because we were trying to quote unquote, get scrappy with it. And so we were trying to use all our fabric scraps that we have in a unique and good way. And so I went to Pinterest to try to find small fun projects to learn to be able to use my fabric scraps, and I ended up with a set of mug coasters for my mother-in-law.

Megan Porta  06:02

Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah. Love the creativity in that too. That’s super cool.

Laura Rike  06:07

Yeah, it was really fun to see what the ladies came up with one of them actually had for any crafters out there. They have those edges on the fabric where it’s got like the name of where the fabric came from, or different quotes or symbols or whatever. And people normally cut that off and throw it away. And she actually saves them all. And she made this cute, adorable side satchel purse, just sewing together all these quotes and labels and all this thing. And it was so adorable. So yeah.

Megan Porta  06:39

Oh my gosh, I love that sort of thing so much. And I love taking time for creativity, whatever it is, whether it’s quilting, or you know, like, whatever, just having a weekend with people like you did, doesn’t that just feed your soul and you come away just feeling refreshed and rejuvenated, ready to work?

Laura Rike  06:54

Yeah, it was amazing how just a few days too I was like, Oh my gosh, this is like giving me so many different ideas that I even thought of like for my son’s school project for my work like all these different things. So it was it was much needed. And I was super excited to have all these little aha’s was through that.

Megan Porta  07:17

I bet yes. Okay. I love how this ties into our topic, because you’re going to talk to us about Pinterest today. I feel like it is so hard to get a hold of people who really have a handle on Pinterest as it relates to food bloggers and food blogging. Yeah. So I’m really curious to hear your thoughts today. Pinterest has a lot of potential, as you know, just for traffic and for driving sales for our products and so much. And I hear often in our space people just expressing pure frustration because Pinterest is not what it used to be. It’s changed. And people are like, I hate Pinterest. And like no stop hating Pinterest. There’s so much potential there. What do you think of that? Do you feel like… do you feel that same thing? 

Laura Rike  08:05

Yeah, I mean, I have a number of different food bloggers that I work with in my agency side for the management. And so like, I know, it is still really good for them. We have a client who still gets over a million sessions back to her site. And about 85% of her traffic comes from Pinterest. So yes, it might be a little more frustrating than it was four or five years ago. But it still is one of the best traffic sources we have found for a lot of individuals, especially for food bloggers, still. Yeah, one of the things I also hear in the groups when there’s that frustration and things like that, is stopping their account and starting over and it makes me want to cry. Yeah, it’s like the new thing that people are talking about, I guess right now. So my first, I guess, jump into food bloggers is please don’t do that. Because you actually are going to lose all of the algorithm’s stamina that you have built up whether you feel like it’s bad or not, it’s going to be really, really hard to start from the bottom back up again. Because everything is dynamic on the platform. So even if you feel like you’re doing not as good as you want to be doing, it’s dynamic. So you could change that tomorrow, you know.

Megan Porta  09:25

It’s interesting that this is a trend. I have not heard people doing this, but yeah, I would think no, don’t do that. That seems like a terrible idea. Yeah. So you’ve noticed quite a few or not quite a few but you have noticed food bloggers doing this. And is it just because they want kind of a clean slate? Like out of frustration. They just want to start over or why? I don’t quite understand. Yeah, 

Megan Porta  09:52

Yeah. So, I’ve had a lot of questions about it recently. A lot of times when they come to me they’ve heard about it because they think because that one, maybe they’ve done something where they keep getting put in the spam filter. And so they feel like they’re not getting the reach they should. One person came to me and said that they think that they’re getting misclassified. And no matter what they’re doing, they’re not getting the right classification in the algorithm. So it’s kind of dependent on if they were doing good, it seems to be the individuals that feel like they were doing really, really well. And then all of a sudden, they had a major drop off. And it’s never really gone back to what they wanted. And so that’s kind of, I think, the underlying factor that they’re dealing with. And then there’s just a couple of different reasons that people come to with, I guess, their idea that they heard, you know, from someone else, it’s the I call it the Pinterest rumor mill. Yes, because there’s so many different conversations out there. I mean, it’s not a bad thing that people are talking about it but it’s just make sure to check their facts.

Megan Porta  11:00

It is a rumor mill, right? Like there is this like little? Yeah, I would call it just that a rumor mill of Pinterest variety that you hear like, Oh, I heard this and the same things tend to pop up in those conversations. So that is something that I’ve heard. And it makes more sense to me that you explained that is that, like, people believe they get put in spam filters, or somehow are out of good graces with Pinterest. And is that true? Do you think can that actually happen is that happening,

Laura Rike  11:30

You can get put into the spam filter. And there’s a couple of different reasons for that. I mean, there are some very, very seldom that happen, you know, because of the computer program accidentally, right? The majority of the time, if you had been put into spam filter, or if you’re noticing a crazy instant drop off, you’ll also notice other things, like when you go to save one of your own pins, it will give you an error, say something’s wrong with the URL or things like that. So most of the time, you’ll see other outliers that are kind of pointing in that direction. We have had a couple people where, you know, they were saving too many pins too fast to the same URL or something like that. And they were a newer account. So Pinterest isn’t sure what’s kind of going on with all the AI stuff out there. So you might get put on a hold for that things. I mean, you’ll know it’s very apparent. But we do still have people that yes, can can have that happen to them, but it’s not likely for the majority of people.

Megan Porta  12:38

Okay, it’s good to know that other thing, other discrepancies would be popping up to kind of alert you that something is amiss, right?

Laura Rike  12:46

Yeah, there are different ways to check it. And I mean, you can always go through if you ever felt that way, I mean, I wrote a blog post on my blog that like went through step by step on how to contact Pinterest to be able to make sure that’s not happening to you. Like, if you feel like you’ve tried everything else, it doesn’t hurt to send them an email, the worst they’re gonna say is no. But then that’s totally fine. Because you know, that’s better here than a spam filter. So there’s, there’s a number of different ways to check. It’s not something that’s like, detrimental or dire to your account.

Megan Porta  13:20

All right. So I know that idea pins went away, but then they kind of didn’t like for some people, myself included, there still the option to create an idea pins, honestly a little bit confused about, are they completely going away? Are they kind of like what is the deal with idea pins?

Laura Rike  13:38

Yeah, so idea pins are completely going away. My biggest tip for food bloggers right now is if you were pinning a lot of idea pins when they were, you know, new and hot and heavy, slowly start to make a schedule for yourself to go back in and add the links to those that has been one of the biggest strategies we’ve been working on with our food bloggers, is they’re still going to be out there on your Pinterest account if you saved them prior. And so now everybody is getting access to adding links to them. So go ahead and do that. I wouldn’t say in our strategy, we don’t go through and spend like hours and hours doing them right away. But look in your analytics, you know, and see which ones were the top impressions and make sure that you have a link going back to the correct blog posts that you want to go to for that purpose for anybody that didn’t do them and they’re like, I still see them here or you were doing them and you still see them. They’re actually merging it. So what’s happening is they’re gonna focus on static pin and video pin only. And so, what happens is if you upload multiple images, like you are going to do an idea pin or short videos and you do multiples, or a mix of the combination, whatever your strategy was, they’re actually going to merge all that together, and put it together as one single pin. And it’s going to turn into an automatic type video. So either a slideshow through the images you do, or a slideshow to the video, however, you have those coupled together, so they’re actually automatically going to start turning into a video pin for you.

Megan Porta  15:29

Okay, thank you. And then do you know, when idea pins are going to be gone for good?

Laura Rike  15:38

That’s a great question.

Megan Porta  15:39

Is that up in the air?

Laura Rike  15:42

They were already supposed to be gone. So I don’t have an idea on that for sure. I know that most of the accounts in my course and in my management side, are already done with them, we only have probably about 20% of the accounts that we touch on a daily, weekly basis, that still have access to them. Regardless, they’re not totally going to go away. If that makes sense. Organically, they will completely disappear. But they are still leaving them for the ad side. So I think there’s if I could speculate my two cents, as I think that’s why they’re still slowly going through things, because we’re going to be able to use them as an ad as an idea pin. So you still will see them on Pinterest. It just depends.

Megan Porta  16:36

Okay, very interesting. It’s so fun, kind of like some people would not call it fun. But I think it’s fun to just watch this evolve. And like, Oh, this is what they’re doing this year. And I know, last year, they were heavily focusing on idea pins. They had the Creator program, I can’t remember what that was called. But yeah, it’s like their vision apparently has changed. And we were just here for the ride, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Laura Rike  17:03

I actually am kind of glad with their changes. For me personally, I think it’s a lot more fun to kind of get back to the basics of Pinterest, like how it was, you know, when it was invite only and they just had static and video back then I kind of see that happening again, with the changes that they’ve been making and putting into place more recently, which is great, because the static pins, in my opinion, are going to be the biggest help to anybody’s account in terms of traffic and visibility. 

Megan Porta  17:35

Okay, can I ask you a few questions about static pins? 

Laura Rike  17:38

Yeah. 

Megan Porta  17:39

I’m sure you get all the you know, like, how often and all of that. And I think a lot of that depends on, honestly, your blog and your business and how much content you have and all of that. But how often should we be pinning static pins? 

Laura Rike  17:53

Yeah, great question. So there’s another thing out there where people are saying you have to do five a day or 50 a day, right? According to the backend of Pinterest and all their rules and guidelines, we kind of dug deep with one of my mentors, and they will stop indexing past 20 to 25 pins per day. Regardless if that’s static and video mix or static only. So really be specific in your strategy. How much content do you have? If you’ve been a food blogger for years, you might be closer to the 15, you know, pins a day mark. If you are just getting started out, you might be closer to two or three. And that’s really okay. I’ve done a case study before where we had a blogger who was doing two pins a day versus a blogger who was doing 13 I think it was and they had the same similar growth patterns. What I mean by that is like they would grow their followers by 10% ish around the same side. I mean, one, you know, would have five followers, maybe the other one would be 15. But for their overall growth, and some it was similar percentages across the board and growth and traffic and things like that. So it’s really going to depend on your consistency, the amount of content you have. And then one of the other things we really like to teach is I had mentioned earlier my willow tree method. And so this is something that I teach in my rock stars course where we go through and say, when you have new content, you want to be focusing on that more heavily than your repurposed content. And so you are going to see you know, if you post a blog every Friday, you want to make multiple pins, targeting multiple keywords for that new blog post. And then schedule about an interval so that it is not considered spam. But across the course of the next week to two weeks, that is your main focus. So even if you go into it saying, I’m going to do two pins a day, and then you post a new blog one day, one week, you might have up to five because you have this new content. And you’re trying to get it put into the algorithm for those pillar keywords that you want to rank for.

Megan Porta  20:28

So the intervals you mentioned, do you have a recommendation for minimum intervals like days between a pin for the same URL?

Laura Rike  20:37

Yes. So if it is new content, my general rule of thumb is to be very careful, this is, again, take it with a grain of salt. This is what I’ve seen work for me. I know, there are many, many wonderful Pinterest managers and strategists out there, and a lot of them are my friends. And we still differ on this point, right? So test and do what works for you. For me, and my clients in my agency, we typically do a three to seven day interval, when it comes to new fresh content, meaning a URL that has not been put onto Pinterest whatsoever at all. For any repurposed content, I tend to stick on the higher side. So I go from anywhere from 15 to 21 days to make sure that I am allowing myself time for that URL to go across multiple different boards before I start back over again. So that it’s not back to back since it’s already repurpose content anyway.

Megan Porta  21:40

Okay. And then boards, do you have a recommendation for how many boards we should have? Should we not go over a certain number?

Laura Rike  21:48

 Yeah, great question, I do a thing that I call a board planner. And so it’s that is going to depend really highly on what focus keywords you want, what pillar keywords you want. Because I make sure that I have anywhere from three to five boards that have the pillar keyword, and then three to five boards that are supporting the pillar keyword. Because if you are in we’re going to keep this very, very basic, if you are talking about apples on your blog, you’re going to have three different ways you can say apples, right, you can have different recipes for different apples and things like that. And so maybe we have apple, a apple be an apple see, well, now if we’re talking about, say, a peach and an apple recipe, we’re gonna have boards that have peaches, and apples. So then your fourth board would be peaches and apples, right. But you can still pin your apples to the peaches and apples board. So three to five pillar keywords, and then three to five supporting those pillar keywords. Once you go through that interval series, you’re going to have anywhere from six to 10 different boards that you can cyclate your content through, that is still going to be highly relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

Megan Porta  23:18

Okay, so to go along with that, what if you have a pretty generic blog, food blog, so you don’t necessarily have a niche that focuses on, you know, just a handful of ingredients or a handful of methods or whatever, you could have potentially 100 boards is that okay?

Laura Rike  23:35

In my opinion, it’s better to have very concise boards and not like 100 different boards that you can pin on. So at that point, then if you’re not very niche, I will go back to what you have as your main navigation for your blog. So if you have Keto recipes, and then you have breakfast recipes, and then you have… those are going to be more of the pillar keywords. And then you can have three to five supporting keywords. Maybe it’s easy, 10 minute breakfast recipes versus keto breakfast recipes, you know what I’m saying? So you can kind of mix and match those as well. But really, what you’re trying to do is just like in keywords for your blog, you’re trying to create that taxonomy, where you have that main category, and then you have the supporting tags under that main category on your blog. All of that’s going to help you with SEO, and it’s going to be the same for your boards and your pins, right. Your boards need to be that main taxonomy. And then your pins are those tags underneath. So everything is building this matrix for you to be able to specifically tell the computer algorithm on Pinterest: this is what I talk about and this is what I want to be ranked for.

Megan Porta  25:02

I love your, just how you said like, basically simulate what’s on your main blog navigation that makes so much sense to me. Yeah, you aren’t going to have 100 different things on that. So just kind of emulating that a little bit. 

Laura Rike  25:18

Yeah, 100%. And then you have a more concise direction, where if you did want to branch out and add, you know, one or two extra boards to build out that matrix a little bit more, by all means, go ahead, but then you will end up with 100 200 different boards on your profile that’s really hard to maintain.

Megan Porta  25:38

Yeah, that is a lot, I have gotten to the place before where I’m like, oh, gosh, because I’ve been on Pinterest for many years. So mine can get really overwhelming. If we’re not careful, we have to kind of keep an eye on that. And then you can, if there’s a board that is just not relevant anymore, you can either archive it, and I’ve just learned recently that you can also merge boards?

Laura Rike  26:01

You can. Yeah, what I would suggest is kind of an If This Than That scenario, I love doing that kind of stuff, because it kind of goes through analytics and digging deeper into why that board may not be working for you. The first thing that I would do is that if this then that is go to your analytics. And when you do your overview under analytics, you can always sort by the last 30, 60 or 90 days. And so I typically choose the last 90 days. And then I scroll down to where it will say top, some of it will say product, top group boards, top, whatever type of account you have on Pinterest, and then go to outbound clicks. And it will sort for you the most outbound clicks you get from your boards, in terms of high impressions and the album clicks, and then start going through and looking so like some boards that I have on here, I will see that they have really, really high impressions, but not a lot of outbound clicks. So if that’s the case, then maybe the board itself is bringing in the visual because of my pillar keyword. But my pins are not highly relevant to what those people were searching for. So that classification doesn’t line up. And so then what I would do is look to see, because boards are dynamic they’re ever changing, right? And so you could change a board title, and have it start performing better, or a board description or the pins on the board. And there’s a lot of different strategies for that. So I would work on that first, to see if then you can change that dynamic.

Sponsor 27:55

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Laura Rike  29:18

For example, I teach on Pinterest, of course. And I had a board that I just called Pinterest strategy. And it was doing okay, but not a lot of times do people go to Pinterest searching for Pinterest strategy, right? So I started researching a different pillar keyword. And now my board my top board changed from Pinterest strategy, same pins, higher outbound click because I now have it called Inbound Marketing with Pinterest. And so just that little change actually really helped. Now, I have other boards that I will archive, regardless of the topic or things like that, most of the time, it’s because it’s out of season. So for like your food blogger type boards that are like Thanksgiving or Christmas, or back to school or things like that, don’t actually delete those. But you can archive them when they’re no longer being High search volume, and then on archive them when the search starts to come back up. And so that’s a really good way to keep those boards and keep your traffic flowing for that. And then if it’s just not serving you anymore, I actually don’t suggest deleting them. But yes, you can merge them if there’s two relevant topics, or just archive and wait and see if there’s a different change or things like that, that come up that you would go back to that board for.

Megan Porta  30:53

Okay, that’s super helpful. And then descriptions for boards. Do you have recommendations for how long those should be? What exactly should we be saying for a while it was like, you know, one sentence. And I feel like that’s changing a little bit. 

Laura Rike  31:07

Yeah, 100%. So your boards and everything you do with descriptions and pin descriptions, and everything like that can be searched. So I always say just like SEO, just like your blog post, optimize it, use as many characters as possible. Everything needs to be well thought out and conversational. So please don’t go in and just put the hyphen, keyword hyphen keyword, because that won’t help. They’ll consider that keyword stuffing just like Google. Hashtags are not searchable on descriptions. So just do away with them. They’re not going to do any good or help. They’ll just take up the character space. And then I try to put anywhere from five to seven different keywords within that paragraph that I have. Because I believe I think it’s like 500 characters. I’m not 

Megan Porta  31:22

Yes, it is, yup. 

Laura Rike  31:52

I was gonna say I haven’t done it in a minute. So I’m not sure.

Megan Porta  32:12

I’ve been focusing on those lately. So I happen to know that. 

Laura Rike  32:15

Okay, perfect. Yeah, so fill that up. I mean, I do five, at least keywords in there. And then just make it conversational while you’re putting them in there.

Megan Porta  32:26

Okay, I love this topic, because we didn’t used to have to think about keywords in Pinterest. But now you do have to think about keywords. Yeah. So what how are you deciding what keywords to put in those descriptions? Let’s say we’re talking about a pan of chicken enchiladas or something. How do you find what goes in there?

Laura Rike  32:44

Yeah, so there’s a couple of different ways. You can use the search at the top and type in your main keyword that you think people are searching for. And it’s going to pull up supporting keywords under that we call out the ABC search. So if I were even to do like chicken enchiladas right now, it will tell me, what do we got for we have: “chicken enchiladas easy”, “with white sauce”, we have it called “casserole”, “white chicken enchiladas” and “green chicken enchiladas”. So those are the top ones that I’m seeing. And I would start thinking about those. The other way to do it is when you click on chicken enchiladas, if you see those top pins, we teach something called pin hacking. And one of the things is to always fill in the gaps that other people might have. So that you make sure you are giving the full experience to your readers as much as possible. And so that might sound a little funny as a food blogger. But it really is important. If you forget something or if someone’s like, Hey, this is being told online and it works. However, this one trick tip made it turn out even better. Those are the gaps that are missing. So go through those top five pins and click through them and see what keywords they’re using in their description on their pin in their title, and then actually click and go through their, to their website as well. And look at that blog post and see what they have for the title on their blog and what they’re calling out as relevant recipes to that because you know, we always say like, Hey, this is really good. And here are some others that are similar. Make sure to write those down and then go back to your board and be like okay, can I do a homemade chicken enchiladas with my easy white chicken enchilada and put that in the full description, because now I have two different keywords that people might type in differently depending on where they’re at.

Megan Porta  35:05

Okay, this is a great strategy I’ve never thought of doing. We do this on Google often, like, what is your competition doing for a keyword go look over there. So it makes sense that this would carry over to Pinterest. But I’ve just never thought to do that. But I’m looking through the top chicken enchiladas pins as you talk, and I can see where you would be able to kind of find those gaps and fill in pretty easily. 

Laura Rike  35:29

Yeah, it’s pretty quick once you get the hang of it, too. And I mean, there’s tools out there like, you can use the keyword tool that Pinterest provides. And they’ll give you some extra keywords too, instead of using the search bar. So that’s another way. There is a tool that I partner with called Pin Inspector, they’re fairly new. However, they will also, when doing the keyword research, I show you the top pins for that keyword without you being on Pinterest. And then you can click through and open them up and do the gap research that way for pin hacking. So there’s a couple different ways to make it easy. Of course, my favorite is doing it right on the platform, so that you can see how the experience would be for the viewer. But there are a number of different ways to be able to kind of get in a groove with it so that you can do it quicker, faster, better once you’re used to it.

Megan Porta  36:28

And for pin titles, do you use the same strategy? So let’s say you’re doing five unique static pins per URL? Do you pick a different title based on that same strategy with like just typing chicken enchiladas into the search bar? Or how do you determine your titles, I guess? 

Laura Rike  36:46

Yeah, 100%. Just same way, because the thing is, is I was reading I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s $100 million leads from I forget his name. Okay, the it’s such a quick, easy read, but it really talks about your audience, right. Even if this isn’t a funnel, where you’re trying to capture an email list, but you want people to go to your website, you still need to think about the way they consume the content. And so his point was, somebody who watches a blog or watches a video may want to read a blog versus watching a video versus, you know, reading a white paper there or so or listening to like our podcast episode, right. And so there are always different ways of finding things, consuming things, searching for things. And you want to make sure that for barely any extra work, you’re hitting on all those different types of people. So there could be someone that comes in here and goes, I don’t even know what an enchilada is. But I know what a chicken bake is with tortillas. And so then they go in and they search chicken bake. Or there could be someone in here that says, I’ve never used a white chicken sauce for white chicken enchiladas versus a red sauce, or things like that. And so they’re not going to know what to search for just because you have it on your blog, you need to make sure that you are grabbing the different words that that different audience is going to search for in your title, in your description, in your boards, all of that, so that you can get the most people for that one form of content. Because in that book, they also talked about how he did a webinar. Not everybody likes webinars. So he took the transcript of that webinar and made it into a PDF download. And he almost doubled his audience. You can do the same with your keywords. Right. So sour cream enchiladas. Maybe someone doesn’t like sour cream, but they know they want to focus on enchiladas. But you have a way to make it taste better. That’s that gap you want to fill. It’s just a different phrase that someone else is searching.

Megan Porta  39:13

This is like hot dish versus casserole, versus bake for I mean, you can fill in. So, if you’re calling it let’s say a chicken and rice bake on your blog, just thinking outside of that, how else might people view this recipe I love that is such a great perspective.

Laura Rike  39:31

Yeah. And you will see those bubbles when you’re doing a search on Pinterest as well right. And those are going to give you different ideas too. So even when you type in chicken enchiladas up on my screen, you can see chicken enchiladas and then you have Crockpot recipe or make an easy red sauce rotisserie. We have up here, casserole versus a rice casserole like there’s so many different ways that someone could be searching this enchilada recipe, but not know what you have it on. And so just taking the extra second or use my iPad and just write notes and write down all these words that I see. And then try to see how many times without being spammy, right? We’re not going to go up there and put seven different keywords on our title, like back to back to back, right? Like, it’s just going to take away from the gorgeous pictures that you guys all have. But you know, do it, do it in a respectful manner, so that you’re hitting the right person at the right time with the right words.

Megan Porta  40:38

Okay, I do have one more question for you about the pin, the static pins. Is there a size that you recommend? Should we experiment? Or is there kind of like a go to size for that? 

Megan Porta  40:51

Yeah, so they changed that recently, as well. One of the things that’s really cool is we’ve actually been experimenting with our sizing, because I want to say it was like, what, four years ago, five years ago, we used to have those long, long pins, right, yeah. And they kind of did away with that. And I’m starting to see that actually come back. So we’ve done a number of different sizes. Again, you can go gung ho crazy with us, right? Because you can do different titles and different sizes, and just go crazy. But one of the things that we’ve started noticing is that if you do the 1000×1500, which was the idea pin size, it actually can get cut off on mobile sometimes. And we’re not sure why that happens. But we have done a standard Pinterest pin size as 1000 by 1060. And we’ve seen really good things with that. And then we started actually testing and going longer. So we have gone anywhere from that seemed 1000 to 1200 mark is kind of the width we stay by. But then we’ve gone as long as 2100. And we focus on if they are longer, make sure you have more of a collage style. So like the top picture is different than the bottom, or maybe you have three pictures on there. But that’s really starting to take off for food bloggers as well. And we’ve noticed that again, it it really depends on the keyword that you use. So test that because we’ve done an A B test where say we were doing chicken enchiladas, and we did two exactly designed the same way pins, but different size ratio, same images, same keywords as the title, and one would do better than the other, then we would go back and we do you know chicken bake. And it would be totally different for the size.

Megan Porta  42:59

Experiment, right? There’s so many different variables, too, as we’re talking, it’s like, yeah, you can experiment with the photo you use and the font and the size and the title and the description. So you really could kind of go nuts and see it as a creative project or a creative experiment as well. I mean, it could be fun.

Laura Rike  43:18

Yeah. And we are enjoying it. I mean, really, honestly, have fun with it. Because it can be a ton of fun to do it that way. Don’t look at it as frustrating, because especially like now with all the technology that we have at our fingertips, like Canva can resize in a click of a button. You know, PicMonkey has different templates for us, like there’s a ton of different ways to be able to use these creative tools. So don’t be afraid of it. Just try it. And the biggest thing is, if you are testing though, do apples to apples, you will not get in trouble on Pinterest if you pin the same thing once back to back as a test. And I want you to do that but only change one thing. So if you change it from chicken enchiladas, to chicken bake, that’s all you change. Everything else needs to stay the same. So if you want to test sizes, only change the size but leave the design the exact same.

Megan Porta  44:22

Hmm. Okay, that’s really good food for thought. And then I know there’s something Laura called Design relevancy score. Can you talk through what that is?

Laura Rike  44:31

Yeah, of course. So this is something that’s new to me. And we’re still kind of diving in and investigating it. But when I was on a phone call with my direct agency rep, we were talking about why some of the template designs that I have, were all of a sudden just tanking that have done really, really well in the past. And he brought up to me what they call on the back end is a relevancy score. And it’s based on the design that you have. So we all know as Pinterest users, that you have to be careful with your images, because they can be visually searched. And so you want to make sure that you’re not using stock photos, I mean, food bloggers, you don’t generally do that, anyway, however, he took it one step further. And he said, if you’re using the same exact font, in the same exact layout, they are going to consider that highly relevant to the previous pin that you did. And if that continues to happen back to back to back, you’re going to start to get pushed down in the algorithm, because they think as a computer, that you are posting the same thing. Now you’re going to have a little bit of change because of your images, right. But they say that you should have some difference in your pin designs, so that you don’t show up as extremely relevant pin to pin to pin to pin, because they’re all different topics. So you want a good relevancy score for your keywords, and what you’re trying to link back to, and the match from your pin to your website. But you want a low relevancy score, in terms of your designs, because you don’t want them to think that you’re posting the same thing over and over and over again.

Megan Porta  46:34

Oh, gosh, I’m in so much trouble with this. I feel like we all do this a little bit, because it’s easy, we can create a template in Canva. And just kind of, you know, rinse, repeat, like do the same thing over and over and over and over times a million, so oh…

Laura Rike  46:49

And you can, there are still ways around it. I mean, I would definitely go through and the biggest thing is, if you’re using the same font, every single time, switch it up there quick little things that you can do to switch it up. Like I always tell people have two fonts, have three fonts, don’t go more than maybe three. But you know, use one or two fonts in the same design. And then the next design, just use one of those fonts and kind of make those small tweaks and changes. The other thing that’s really good to do, especially for food bloggers, is change the color based on what’s in your image. Right? So yeah, make it pop a little bit more. Because if you have a dish, like let’s go back to the enchiladas, right, and there’s reds and browns, and oranges, and whites, and yellows, and things like that in there, go ahead and pull out one of those reds and use that for your text color. Because that’s going to draw the eye to that image and make it stand out and pop a little bit better.

Megan Porta  47:53

I love this recommendation. I think a lot of food bloggers tend to think that they need to go with their brand colors, which I think that’s a good place to start. But I always I like what you’re saying like, yeah, if an image has red or a pop of purple or whatever, it’s so good to see that carried, that design element, carried through the pin. So you can you do have permission to change the color away from your brand colors.

Laura Rike  48:21

100% you absolutely can. And I have food bloggers in our agency that will still have their branding on there, too. It’s not this or that. I mean, see what works best for you, again, do your tests. But like even when you do that pin hacking that we were talking about a little bit ago, if you looked up and just looked at chicken enchiladas, like even looking at that kind of stuff, you can see all the different designs that are out there for chicken enchiladas, right. And if you look, I guarantee you the ones you are drawn to are the ones that kind of pull out that pop of color, like the one I’m staring at, it’s using black and white for it’s font, but the black is close to the red in the sauce. The second one that popped out to me has mostly black for a font, but then it talks about green and they are green chicken enchiladas and they’ve got the parsley on top and the green stands out to me because of the green parsley in the pictures and it just makes that picture look even more enticing.

Megan Porta  49:31

This is so good. Thank you so much for all of this, Laura.

Laura Rike  49:34

Yeah, absolutely.

Megan Porta  49:36

Is there anything that we haven’t mentioned that you just want to mention quick before we start saying goodbye?

Laura Rike  49:40

Yeah, I would say the biggest thing is just really making sure that you structure this in a way that you can stay consistent with it. Right like anything you do on your blog, you’re consistent with your blog posts. Don’t be overwhelmed by all the information and just do what works for you right now. And then start slowly adding in one piece. So if you know that you aren’t doing the colors the way you want, because you’re focused highly and heavily on your branding, make that one change. Do that for a couple of weeks, get into the groove of that, and then make the next change. Don’t try to go gung ho with five different changes, because that’s when people start to get a little frustrated or burnt out. And then they blame it on the strategy.

Megan Porta  50:30

Or Pinterest. 

Laura Rike  50:31

Or Pinterest. Yes. Versus giving their selves a break and knowing what you can and can’t handle.

Megan Porta  50:38

Great advice. Some of this is really novel too, and things that are not in the food blogging Pinterest rumor mill. So we really appreciate all of this that you brought to the table today. So yeah, just thank you for joining me. And then do you have a favorite quote, or words of inspiration to leave us with Laura?

Laura Rike  50:54

I do. So one of my favorite quotes is a perseverance, quote, I actually just was honored to be able to be with a group of women. And I wrote a chapter in a book called Business on Purpose, Volume Two, I focused on my high school years is where the story started. And it really taught me a lot back then. So my favorite quote, there’s a number of different ones in the Bible. But my favorite one is James 112, which is, “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial, because having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love Him.” And so to me, that just kind of means like, if you continue on, just like we were talking about, if you’re overwhelmed, because you’re trying to do all these changes, just keep going. Because if you go through that hard point, there’s always going to be a happy, a light, a good point at the end of that. And if you don’t keep going and persevering through that, you’re never going to be able to experience that joy.

Megan Porta  52:06

Oh my gosh, I love this such a great way to end. There’s so much power in perseverance, right? Yes. I’m so glad you mentioned that we’ll put together show notes for you, Laura. If anyone wants to go peek at those you can head to eatblogtalk.com/laurarike, R-I-K-E. Tell everyone where they can find you, Laura and if you have any, you know, freebies or anything relating to Pinterest or anything else that would be beneficial. Yeah, absolutely.

Laura Rike  52:35

So right now you can head over to laurarike.com/podcast. I have a specific link for you guys listening to this podcast episode. Just to say thank you for tuning in. And it’s got different trainings on there and consumables. We have a couple of downloads, I have a keyword swipe file so there’s just a bunch of goodies on that page for you guys.

Megan Porta  53:01

Awesome. Well thank you again, Laura, for joining us and thank you for listening today food bloggers I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro  53:10

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat BlogTalk. Don’t forget to head to forum.eatblogtalk.com to join our free discussion forum and connect with and learn from like minded peers. I will see you next time.