This post is going to be short and simple as the must read tip is this.... Text Overlay on your image! Yes, simply having a text overlay with keywords WILL increase your traffic from Pinterest.
Don't go anywhere yet though... I'll talk about another crucial part of text overlay and this is HUGE mistake I see many pinners do.
WHY TEXT OVERLAY MATTERS
Pinterest "reads" both the image and any text the image has. As it is search engine, the better they can figure out what your image is about, better your results.
This goes both for blogger, content creators AND ecommerce stores!
You have few places to add your keyword:
- pin title
- pin description
- image file name
- text overlay
If you use the first 3 you probably get good results but why stop there when can do better!
For bloggers, podcasters or any other type of content creators text overlay could simply be your blog post title / podcast episode title. Do use the keywords you want to rank for in your title and text overlay!
For e-commerce stores the text overlays could be about the benefit of the product + keywords. I've tested variety of overlays and combination of bright color and highlighting benefits works the best.
You can also capture different kind of audience (refer to your customer journey map) depending on the actual text on the text overlay so this can be a total game changer for many pinners.
If you are a product based business you might be wondering why should you add text overlay and what an earth it could my overlay be, read on and see examples.
TEXT OVERLAY LOOK
I did mention that overlay is good but not in all cases! Choose your FONTS carefully!
Reason for this is that all those pretty curly scripts fonts are often not legible. And I don't just mean the person browsing but Pinterest bot!
If neither can't ready what you pins is about, pinner will just keep scrolling and Pinterest won't rank you for that pin.
Couple of examples above... I did not feel ok to actually give you a real life example of a bad pin and put someone to shame.... I'm sure you get the point with above example.
My heart sinks every time I see squiggly fonts (aka handwriting style) being used as these pinners are probably missing great deal of traffic because of a simple font choice. These fonts are particularly common with bloggers...
I totally get why one would want to use this type of font to give variety on the pin look, but when it is matter of a millisecond to make someone stop scrolling, a title that can't be read with a glance will not achieve the thumb stop... Handwriting style fonts are hard to read at a glance.
I don't mean to put bad name to all handwriting style fonts. Not all of them are bad - yours might be ok! If you have used these types of fonts i highly recommend you to test pins with other types of fonts.
Here are couple of text overlay examples for product based businesses:
Two have used their keywords on the overlay and one even call to action. Fourth example actually has quite a bit of text which can be a good thing or not... I assume Schwepper has tested the look and it works.
This does goes to show that you gotta test what works for your audience.
HOW TO ADD TEXT OVERLAY THE EASY WAY
You have numerous options with apps to use. I've used Canva for years but recently also started using Easil <- highly recommend you to check it out! I love their GIF option - I've made awesome looking product GIFs with Easil.
No matter which one you are using, you can easily add text overlay with multiple different apps. Or hire a VA to do it for you.
Don't forget to use your keywords on the text!
