The Beginners Guide to Creating Awesome Pinterest Boards

I previously talked about the importance of creating pins that are user-friendly and easily searchable. But you should also focus on creating and optimizing your Pinterest Boards so that your content will rank in search and be found on Pinterest. You’ll want to take into account how to optimize and organize your boards so that other users will want to follow them and share your pins. To get started, implement my simple tips for creating awesome Pinterest boards that will get maximum engagement!

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What are Pinterest Boards and How Do I Use Them?

If you’re a beginner and new to Pinterest, you may be wondering, “What exactly is a Pinterest Board and what is it used for anyway?”

Boards are where you can collect, save, and organize similar ideas in one place. Think of a Pinterest Board like a file folder. Instead of saving all the ideas to your computer or phone, or printing them out, you can same them as a collection on Pinterest. Your boards are places where you collect and save ideas you find on Pinterest.

Say you’re working on a party theme for Thanksgiving and you’re searching for healthy Thanksgiving recipes. You can create a new Thanksgiving-themed recipe board. This would then be your collection of recipes like healthy ways to cook a turkey, healthier side dishes, light sauces, and reduced-fat desserts.

Similarly, you could create a board for Thanksgiving decorations. On this board, you could save centerpieces, placemats, table runners, flowers, and cornucopia ideas.

Boards help you create an organized space where you can easily find all your ideas in one place.

How to Create a Pinterest Board

All Pinterest Boards have data fields that you can, and should, customize. This helps Pinterest learn what your board is all about. You can either fill the data in when you create a new board or edit data for an existing board. Creating a board and adding in your unique data fields is simple to do on Pinterest.

First, go to the “Boards” section of your profile and select the red plus sign where it says “Create Board”. Then you will have the opportunity to continue filling in all the data fields mentioned below. Don’t worry about getting it perfect, you can always change the information at any time.

Components of a Pinterest Board

When you first create a new board, you will have to populate two fields immediately:

Name

This is the Pinterest board name displayed on Pinterest for this particular board. It should contain keywords that users are searching for on Pinterest.

Visibility

Here you can decide if you want your board to be public and visible to other users (which is the default). If you don’t want it to be public, check the box to make it a Secret Pinterest Board. Secret Boards are only visible to the board owner and anyone they invite to the board.

After you create a board, click on the pencil icon to edit your board further. Here you’ll fill out additional fields to optimize your boards further.

Description

You want to have a keyword-rich board description that includes long-tail keywords that weren’t used in your Pinterest board name. You can find keyword ideas by using the Pinterest search bar.

So for this example, I typed “Pinterest Tips” into the search bar. Pinterest starts to show more ideas based on what people are actually searching for.

If I select “Pinterest Tips for Business” from the drop-down menu, I then see more keyword ideas below the search bar. These keywords are listed in order of popularity. I will want to incorporate the long-tail keywords of “How to Use Pinterest for Business” and “Pinterest Tips for Entrepreneurs” within my description.

Category

From the drop-down menu, choose the best category that corresponds to your board’s topic. If you’re not sure what category to use, keep reading because I’ll go into more detail about that below.

Note: If you’re on mobile, you may see “Topic” instead of “Category”.

Cover

You can choose to make one of your pins the board’s cover or you can upload a branded picture for your board cover. You can read more about branding your boards as I discussed in Easy Ways to Improve Your Pinterest Profile.

Note: You will only see this option on the desktop version of Pinterest after you have added a pin to your board. If you don’t choose an image for your board cover, you will see a grid of your latest pins that will act as your board cover. Below you can see on the left is a board with no specific cover chosen. On the right, the board has a distinct board cover.

Personalization

This option allows you to choose whether you want Pinterest to personalize your home feed by including pins that are inspired by pins on your board.

Collaborators

This is where you can choose to invite others to collaborate and add ideas to your existing board. If you do this, your board becomes a Group Board.

After you’re done customizing and optimizing your board, you can save it and start pinning

Keep Your Boards on Topic for Your Brand

So what kind of boards should you create to keep your brand on topic? Start by creating general boards. Come up with a list of broad categories related to your brand. Keep in mind that these topics should also be relevant to the type of content you will be creating and pinning. These boards will appeal to larger masses of people.

After you create general boards, you can start narrowing your topics down even further to create niche-specific boards. These are the boards that will appeal to smaller groups of your ideal clients.

For example, a food blogger would first focus on the types of recipes they publish by creating a board for each. They could create general boards with broad topics, like:

• Dinner Recipes
• Lunch Ideas
• Breakfast and Brunch
• Desserts

While their niche-specific boards might include more specific topics like:

• Healthy Dinner Recipes for Weight Loss
• Easy Lunch Ideas for Busy Women
• Low Carb Breakfast Recipes
• Keto-Friendly Dessert Recipes

You want to name your boards using keywords that people will actually find. Resist the urge to use cute Pinterest board names like “Yummy Eats” or “Yummy for my Tummy”. Because those are not terms people usually search for, your content won’t appear in the search feed very much.

To find terms that more people ARE searching for, try the following research ideas:

• If you already have some established Pinterest boards, review your Pinterest analytics to see which terms are leading users to you. 
• Use the Pinterest search bar and take note of which terms are generated after you type in your related keywords

How to Use Pinterest Board Categories

As I mentioned above, it can be hard to decide which Pinterest Board Category you should use for your boards. So I wanted to dig a little deeper into the topic to help you understand them.

Do yourself a favor and spend a little time looking at the specific categories you’re considering. This way you can get a feel for what kind of content is popular for each category.

To do this, look at all the main Pinterest Categories available. Here is a screenshot of what you will see:

From there, you can click into any of the categories and you will get much more detailed information, like:

• A summary of what the category is about
• How many people are following that specific category
• Featured Pins
• Topics Related to your Category
• More Pin Ideas Related to Your Category

After looking around, decide if your pins and topics would fit in with the related content. If so, you can feel confident using that category for your board.

For example, I write about Pinterest tips, social media management, and blogging resources. When I first started creating my Pinterest boards, I was using the Education Category. It seemed logical since I was teaching people something. But when I dug deeper and looked at the popular content under Education, I realized most of it is about school resources, teacher’s lesson plans, and classroom ideas.

After researching the categories more, I decided to change most of my board categories to Technology because it’s more fitting for my pins and topics.

Topics Related to Your Category

Another great way to use the information found under each Pinterest Category is to get ideas for more niche boards to create. Spend a little more time looking at the “Topics Related to Your Category”.

For example, if you’re a Health Coach, you’ll want to look at the Health and Fitness Category. Here you see topics like Healthy Recipes, Workout plans, Nutrition, Yoga, and Pilates. If you blog about any of these general topics, go ahead and create general boards for them.

Next, you want to think about creating even more boards that are specific to your niche. If you click on the Healthy Recipes topic, you find more specific topics like Clean Eating Diet, Clean Eating Meals, Meat Recipes, Healthy Vegetable Soups, Cooking Tips, Easy Recipes, and much more. Any of these topics can be used for your next niche board.

Tip: A rule of thumb that I follow – if you already have 5 pins about the topic that you can pin to a new board, you should create that niche-specific board. Or if you plan to write more about the topic in the near future, you can create a new board for it. If you don’t have enough content for a topic you don’t need a new board at this time.

Perform Board Audits

It’s a good idea to do a Pinterest board audit at least once a year, if not once a quarter. Make sure all your boards have optimized board names, board descriptions, and categories.

Assess your boards to see if your categories still represent you and your brand. If they don’t, you can simply archive those boards. I recommend archiving boards instead of deleting them. You can always unarchive a board if it becomes relevant for you again. If you delete it, that board, its pins, and all the board followers are gone for good.

Next, take note of which boards you pin to the most and see if you can narrow that category down even further. If so, you can create even more niche-specific boards and move related pins to the boards as needed.

Feature Your Boards

If you have boards that you want to draw more attention to, set them up as featured boards in your Pinterest business account settings. Go to Edit Settings > Edit Profile > Edit Featured Boards (at the bottom of the page). You can choose up to 5 boards to feature on your profile page.

You also have the opportunity to showcase a Pinterest board in the top banner on your profile page. If you want to show off a particular board here, click on the pencil at the top right corner and choose your board to feature. The pins from the chosen board will be displayed in a tiled pattern across the top of your profile.

Watch Your Pinterest Board Engagement Grow!

So there you have it, my top tips, ideas, and recommendations for creating awesome Pinterest boards that your audience will love. Creating and optimizing your Pinterest boards, staying on topic for your brand, strategically categorizing your boards, performing board audits, and featuring your boards are all essential for improving engagement and creating a better user experience. Keep these tips in mind when creating boards and you will not only improve engagement but create raving fans in the process! Keep reading for more tips on how to Optimize Your Pinterest Account.

Want help setting up your Pinterest Business account for maximum engagement? I can help you with that! I offer a one-time Pinterest Business Account setup for those who either need a brand new business account or want to convert a personal account to a business account. I also can perform Pinterest Account Audit and Cleanup Services for your existing Pinterest account where I will recommend ways we can improve your account to get more engagement. Click the button below and then let’s chat about how I can help improve your Pinterest account!