Let's say I have an outdoor adventures blog and I have a category about day hikes and I'm looking for our next blog post idea and pin to create.

(To watch me do this via video, check out this page)

In the keyword research tool, I enter in "day hike" and review the results (which are search suggestions directly from Pinterest):

At first, I choose "day hike lunch ideas" and click the See Top Pins button and notice all of the top pins are targeting this exact topic:

That's too much competition for right now, especially since many of those are newer pins.

I go back to my list and notice "day hike first aid kit" which has a popularity score and so I click the See Top Pins button.

This is a perfect topic for me to cover. None of these are targeting a "day hike" and they're all a year or two old.

It's important to know which of the 3 pin styles I'll need to create for this topic. If I choose the wrong pin style, the pin won't get much traction.

I'm on the Top Pins tool and viewing the results for day hike first aid kit. I first review the top 3-4 pins under the default sort. Then I sort by pin score and review the top pin.

All the top pins are TOBI pins (text on background image). So that's exactly the type of pin I'll create.

This is the top pin with the highest score that I'll be inspired by in terms of design and keyword annotations to be used in my pin description and blog post.

What's great about this pin is that it's a bad design in my opinion. The text is hard to read and a basic stock photo. I know I can do better with a better photo thanks to Ideogram and simpler fonts.

What's also great is that it's not targeting day hikes in the pin title and image. Great opportunity for me here.

Having the right keywords in the pin description, title and blog post text is critical for mix visibility with pins. The two best places to get these words are:

Keyword Annotations

These are the keywords Pinterest assigns to pins based on its analysis of the image, the pin title, the description, and the blog post. These keywords are only selected from their internal database of over 10 million interests.

I reviewed the keyword annotations for the top pin for the keyword I was targeting. Here are the ones I added to my keyword list:

Some of these overlap and can be reduced to one keyword phrase, such as "backpacking" + "backing for beginners"

Interests

Sometimes Pinterest doesn't properly extract and assign the right interests for a pin. This is where the PinClicks Interest Explorer tool helps.

The first search I performed was "day hike first aid kit" and it gave me zero results. Which isn't surprising.

So I broadened my search to just "first aid kit" and went through the list of results until I found this one:

So I clicked on it to do an interest search on this to see if there were any related ones and I found one more:

Perfect. I added "hiking first aid kit checklist" to my keyword list.

I won't bore you with the details on this, other than I made sure to include all the keywords from my list, which ended up being:

Here's the pin I ended up with:

I gave ChatGPT all the keywords from my list and the pin title and asked it to write a pin description and image alt text using all the keywords. I think it did a pretty good job!

I then pinned it to my boards titled "Day Hikes" and "First Aid Kits" which are short and simple and most importantly, match official Pinterest interest!