How to Find Your Competitors’ Best Pinterest Keywords

Here’s a shortcut I wish I’d used sooner: you don’t have to guess which keywords work when your competitors have already run the experiment.

Reverse-engineering the accounts winning in your niche is the fastest keyword research there is.

This pairs with normal keyword research — think of it as “research, but starting from proven winners.”

1. Find who’s actually winning (not just who’s big)

Search your main keywords and note which accounts keep showing up at the top.

Those are your real competitors on Pinterest — not necessarily the biggest brands, but the ones Pinterest trusts for your searches.

2. Read their top pins like a menu

Open their best-performing pins and study the pattern: the exact phrases in titles, the words baked into the images, the board they live on, the annotations Pinterest attaches.

That’s their keyword strategy, laid bare.

3. Steal the angle, not the pin

Don’t copy — do it better.

Take the winning keyword, then make a fresher design and a clearer promise.

Combine it with pin descriptions that rank and you can leapfrog a lazier competitor.

4. Track them over time

Follow the top accounts so you’re alerted when they publish something that pops, and watch which of their pins climb.

Doing this manually is painful; account intelligence in PinPinterest shows a competitor’s top pins, keywords and momentum in one view — their playbook becomes yours.

5. Turn what you find into a plan

1. List the 5–10 accounts that rank most often for your main topics.
2. For each, note their three or four most-saved recent pins and the phrase each one targets.
3. Group those phrases into themes and check the demand for each.
4. Pick the themes where your content can be clearly better, and plan fresh pins or new pages for them.
5. Check the same accounts again every month to see what is new.

What not to copy

Studying competitors is research.

Copying them is a problem.

Do not reuse their images, their headlines word for word or their pin designs, and do not pass their pins off as your own.

Besides being unfair, it is bad strategy: a near-copy competes with the original and gives Pinterest no reason to prefer it.

Take the topic and the insight, then make it yours.

Signs a competitor’s keyword is worth chasing

• Several of their pins target the same theme, so they keep investing in it.
• Their pins for it are recent and still collecting saves.
• The top results for the phrase are a mix of accounts, not one dominant brand.
• You can make a genuinely more useful or better-designed pin for it.

A simple competitor tracking sheet

• Account: the competitor’s name and profile link.
• Top pins this month: links to their three or four most-saved recent pins.
• Target phrase: the search each of those pins seems built for.
• Gap: a closely related phrase they have not covered.
• Your action: the pin or page you will make, and when.

Ten minutes a week with a sheet like this turns casual scrolling into a steady supply of proven keyword ideas.

This is also the backbone of selling — see Pinterest for Etsy sellers and affiliate marketing.