Pinterest doesn’t have a keyword research tool but it does have a handy feature that can help you with content research, planning your content calendar, and deciding what to pin and when. Let’s look at how to use the Pinterest Trends tool to help with content research and more.
What is the Pinterest Trends tool?
Pinterest Trends is a feature within Pinterest designed to help you understand what is working and when on the platform. It can be used alongside other tools such as their monthly and seasonal updates to help decide when you should publish content or how to handle seasonal topics.
Most all accounts have access to it and to find it, select the Analytics drop-down menu within your Pinterest profile. At the bottom there’s the ‘Trends’ option – select this for the tool to open.
Researching a topic
Trends will default to either your location if available or to the US. You can change this if you want to research a topic for somewhere else. For example, someone in the UK might want to see when Mother’s Day content is popular in the UK and then compare this to the US as they are at different times.
Below the search bar, there’s a load of current popular topics. These aren’t based on your account but on Pinterest as a whole so some may be irrelevant to you. If you do want to know more about them, select one to open the trends search.
Otherwise, pop the search term you want into the search bar and hit to search.
Using the information
As long as the term is in the keyword database, you’ll open up a screen with a graph on it. The graph always starts from your current date so the information will seem to move as you go through the year.
The idea is that the highest peak is when the topic is most popular. It shows a number of dates across the bottom bar for guidance and if you hover over a certain part of the graph, it will show you the exact information for that date.
Underneath the graph is related terms that you can use to compare the trends. Under this is another section that includes popular pins for that search. You can click any of these to see them in more detail. Sometimes this search will even include some keyword coloured blocks to indicate terms associated with it.
Comparing terms
The other great feature of Trends is being able to compare up to four keywords at a time. You can choose from related terms under the graph or search for something. Each graph will have its own colour and the one with the most searches will be the one with the highest spike.
So if you wanted to see when spring dresses were popular and when the trend switched to talking about summer dresses, you could add both terms and see when the graph showed one died off and the other picked up.
Using Trends for content research
As well as finding out when you should publish content to get the maximum exposure on Pinterest, Trends helps you find ideas for long-tail keywords you might not have considered. The suggested terms underneath will often include related or long-term keywords. The more you explore, the more you find.
A handy free tool
Trends is a handy free tool now included on most Pinterest accounts. It is helpful for seasonal content, for occasions and events, and also to get ideas for content topics that are a little more specific and therefore likely to rank for a newer account. Don’t forget to compare with other parts of the world too for a fuller picture.