What Every Business MUST Do to Prepare for Pinterest's Guided Search

What Every Business MUST Do to Prepare for Pinterest's Guided Search

What Every Business MUST Do to Prepare for Pinterest's Guided Search

What is Pinterest Guided Search?

Pinterest Guided Search was rolled out to the site in April 2014 (mobile app first, desktop soon after) as a way to shake-up how search engines work. Pinterest says Guided Search is "made for exploring, whether you know exactly what you want, or you’re just starting to look around. "  By offering broad suggestions as you search - and letting you add your own into the mix - the hope is that users will find what they are looking for more easily, whether that thing was in their mind from the beginning or whether suggestions inspired them to a choice along the way.

How does Pinterest Guided Search work?

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

Say your initial Pinterest search was for one of the things above. In this case, I chose Mens Style.

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

Upon the results being returned, Pinterest automatically suggests relevant suggestions to help me narrow my search down, e.g. clothes for Summer or Fall.

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

Pinterest's Guided Search Example

By tapping the "+" button, you are able to add in your own suggestions to help narrow your search results down as you wish, e.g. "blue" to filter the clothes by colour.

What does Pinterest Guided Search mean for my business?

First off, Pinterest has said that Guided Search will not affect search rankings, so your current pins are unaffected. However, what its introduction does do is give brands an even bigger incentive to make sure that their pins' descriptions are optimised for SEO. This means including specific, relevant keywords to help highlight the most distinctive elements of your pins in order to give them the best chance of being discovered.

Conclusion

Will the introduction of Guided Search spark a change in the way you publish content on Pinterest? Do you welcome the new feature? Let me know in the comments below!

Pinterest New Design Updates: Search, @Mentions, And More

 
new-pinterest-updates-april-2013.jpg

Pinterest has rolled out a few tweaks and changes to the new look website it introduced a couple of months ago, including several re-introduced features following user demand. Here's an overview of what's new and what's changed: 

'Pinned By' Is Back

pinned-by.PNG

 'Pinned By', the feature that allows users to see who originally pinned an image is back. It's a great way of discovering new people to follow, and to credit them for content.

@Mentions Return

pinterest-mentions-comments.png

Another good way to find people to follow, and to tag them in posts was the @mention feature used in comments. You can see it in action in the image above. Also back, says Pinterest, is the ability to find friends from Twitter and Facebook that are already using the site.

Auto-Suggest Search

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To help Pinterest users find pins and boards that they are interested in, the site's search function now supports an auto-suggest feature. Start typing a keyword or phrase in and a drop-down will appear with plenty of search terms or board suggestions.

Over to You

Are you in favour of the new features on Pinterest? Let me know in the comments below! 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Macarthy is the author of the #1 Amazon Bestseller, 500 Social Media Marketing Tips.

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