Where Does My Pin Rank? How to Check Your Pinterest Position for Any Keyword

Somebody emailed me last Tuesday with a question I get in some form almost every week: “How do I actually see where my pin ranks?”

Fair question.

Annoying answer.

Pinterest doesn’t tell you.

There’s no position column in your analytics, no report, no little number next to the pin.

So you have to go and look.

And the way most people look gives them an answer that’s flattering and cheerful and pretty much wrong.

Here’s how I do it.

It takes about 2 minutes a phrase once you’ve got the hang of it, and it gives you a reading you can compare with next week’s, which is what makes it worth doing at all.

Logging in ruins most rank checks

Before anything else, please don’t check your rankings while you’re logged in to your own account.

It’s the biggest reason people think they rank far better than they do.

Pinterest personalises search.

Logged in, your results are shaped by what you’ve saved, what you’ve searched and the accounts you engage with.

And nobody engages with your account more than you do.

You spent Sunday afternoon making those pins and saving them to boards, so of course Pinterest thinks you’d like to see them (it’s not wrong, to be fair).

A stranger searching the same phrase has none of that history.

Their grid can look quite different, and theirs is the one that matters, because they’re the person you’re trying to reach.

Step by step, properly

One: search the exact phrase

Type the words people actually use, in the order they use them.

“Small bathroom storage ideas” and “bathroom storage for small spaces” are different searches with different grids, and checking one tells you surprisingly little about the other.

Not sure which version people type?

Start typing in the search bar and watch what Pinterest suggests.

Autocomplete and guided search is a little goldmine for this.

Two: give the grid a few seconds

The grid loads in waves.

The first screen isn’t always the final order, especially on slow Wi-Fi, so scroll down 2 or 3 screens and back up before you count.

Sounds fussy.

Takes about 5 seconds.

Three: count by where each pin starts

This is the fiddly bit.

A grid has no obvious first and second, because every tile is a different height.

I count by where each pin begins.

Work down the page, and whichever tile starts highest comes next, going left to right when two start level.

It isn’t perfect.

It doesn’t need to be, because you’re going to write down a band rather than an exact number.

Four: write down the band

Top 5.

Somewhere from 6 to 20.

Further down.

Not found.

That’s all you need.

I know it’s tempting to write “position 7” because it feels precise.

But on a grid, seventh on Monday and ninth on Tuesday are the same result, and exact numbers just give you something to fret about that isn’t real.

The bands are explained properly in the rank tracking guide.

Five: note four things

• The phrase, exactly as you typed it.
• The band, not the exact number.
• The date, because a reading without one is useless 30 days later.
• The device, because a phone and a laptop put pins in different places.

Phone or laptop?

Check on whichever one your audience mostly uses, then stick with it.

Most Pinterest browsing happens on phones, and a phone shows 2 columns instead of 5 or 6.

So a pin that sits comfortably on the first laptop screen can be 3 or 4 thumb-scrolls down on a phone.

Neither reading is wrong.

But mix them up in one notebook and your pin will look like it’s bouncing all over the place when it hasn’t moved at all.

If your pin is nowhere

Deep breath (I’ve been there).

There are three boring explanations and one interesting one.

• It’s too new. Fresh pins often take 2 weeks or so before Pinterest works out which searches they belong in. Check again in a fortnight before you decide anything.
• It’s matched to a slightly different phrase. Pinterest may have read your pin as being about something a bit different from what you meant. Try 2 or 3 close variations.
• It’s further down than you scrolled. Ranking fortieth is still ranking. It just isn’t doing much for you yet.
• It was never really about that phrase. The interesting one. If the title, the description and the board don’t clearly say the phrase, Pinterest has no reason to show the pin for it. Very fixable, and pin descriptions that rank is where I’d start.

If it used to rank and has now vanished completely, that’s a different problem with its own checklist, and pins that disappeared from search is the one you want.

Limits of checking by hand

Everything above works, and I still do it myself for brand-new phrases.

But it has three weaknesses you should know about before you lean on it.

1. You only see the days you look. A pin can slip on Wednesday and recover by Friday and you’d never know, which matters a lot when you’re trying to work out whether an edit helped.
2. It doesn’t scale. Five phrases is a pleasant 10 minutes. Thirty phrases is most of a morning, every week, forever.
3. You only ever watch your own pin. The explanation usually lives in the rest of the top 20 (a new pin that arrived, an old favourite that dropped out) and nobody writes down 20 positions by hand.

That third one is where PinPinterest earns its keep.

Save a phrase and it records where the top pins for it rank each time the phrase is crawled, so you see your pin and its neighbours move together.

You get a “#8 → #5” style label when something changes, and a plain “measured” date when a reading isn’t fresh.

The history starts the day you save the phrase, so the sooner the important ones go in, the more useful it gets.

My Monday routine

Here’s the version I suggest to anyone who isn’t ready for a tool yet.

1. Pick your 5 most important phrases and write them on a sticky note.
2. Every Monday, open a private window on the same device and check all five.
3. Write the band and the date on one line per phrase. A notes app is fine.
4. Once a month, read down the lines and look for anything that changed band and stayed changed for 2 weeks.

The weekly checks are just data.

The monthly read is where they turn into a decision.

If you want to be picky about which five phrases get the sticky note, which phrases deserve a spot has the thinking behind choosing them.

I started mine on a Monday in March with a biro and the back of a gas bill.

Not elegant.

But by June I could see exactly which of my title rewrites had worked, and which ones I’d wasted an evening on.