Pinterest Profile Optimisation: The Forty Minutes Nobody Spends
Pinterest ranks pins, boards and profiles. Almost everyone works on the first two and writes the third like a business card. Here is what each field actually does, in the order worth fixing them.
By Mia Bennett · Pinterest strategist
I went looking through this blog a few weeks ago and found something slightly embarrassing.
There are more than thirty posts here about pins.
Fourteen about boards.
And until today, not one about the profile — which is odd, because Pinterest ranks three things and I had written at length about two of them and left the third sitting there untouched like a spare room nobody goes in.
So I did what I should have done ages ago and went and looked at forty or so accounts in the niches I know best.
Real ones, not examples.
And the pattern was so consistent it was almost funny: people who had clearly spent months on their pins had spent about ninety seconds on their profile, most of it choosing the photo.
Display namesearchable · 65 chars
Bio / aboutsearchable · 160 chars
Board namessearchable · every board
Usernameyour URL · rarely searched
Profile photonot searchable at all
Bar length is how much search work the field does. Most people spend their afternoon on the bottom one.
Why the profile is worth any time at all
The honest objection first, because I had it too: pins get seen hundreds of thousands of times and a profile gets seen by a handful of people.
Why fuss over the page nobody visits?
Because of who those people are.
A pin is seen by someone scrolling.
A profile is seen by someone who stopped scrolling, tapped your name, and is now deciding whether you are worth following.
That is a completely different person in a completely different mood, and there are not many of them, which is exactly why you cannot afford to lose them.
The pin
Found in a feed
Seen once, scrolled past, occasionally saved.
The board
Found in search
Seen when someone wants a collection, not a single idea.
The profile
Arrived at on purpose
Seen by someone deciding whether to follow you. It is the only page they chose.
And there is a second thing, which took me longer to notice.
The profile is not only a landing page — parts of it are indexed.
Your display name is searched.
Your bio is searched.
Your board names are searched, all of them, every one.
When somebody types a phrase into Pinterest they get pins, boards and accounts back, and the accounts tab is a real place people go when they are looking for someone to follow rather than something to save.
If your display name is your first name, you have opted out of that entirely.
Not been beaten in it — opted out.
The five fields, honestly ranked
Here is what each one does, in descending order of how much it matters, which is very nearly the reverse of how much time people spend on them.
- Display name. Sixty-five characters, fully searchable, and on most accounts about five of them are used. This is the single biggest win available and it is one text field. What to actually put in it.
- Board names. Every board you own is a searchable page in its own right, and collectively they tell Pinterest what your account is about. Board names that actually rank covers the formula.
- Bio. A hundred and sixty characters, searchable, and the thing that decides whether a visitor follows you or leaves. What to put in yours.
- Board order. Not searchable at all, but it decides what a first-time visitor sees, and the top row gets most of the attention there is. Which boards go first.
- The photo and the cover. Not searchable. Pure first impression — which is not nothing, but it is not search. The profile picture question and the cover slot.
The one field that is not on this list
Your username — the @handle in your URL. It barely affects search, and changing it breaks every existing link to your profile. It matters most for not making a decision you regret, which is why it gets its own post rather than a line here.
The order to do this in
Order matters more than you would expect, because one of these is slow and the rest are fast, and people reliably start with the slow one.
1
Display name
10 min. The biggest single gain, and it is one text field.
2
Bio
10 min. Two sentences and a reason to click.
3
Board order
5 min. Drag the three that sell to the top row.
4
Cover + photo
10 min. Looks, not search. Do it last on purpose.
5
Username
Only if it is genuinely bad. It breaks old links.
6
Leave alone
Everything else. There is nothing else.
The reason photos come last is not that they do not matter.
It is that choosing a photo is the only step that can absorb an entire evening, and if you start there you will finish the evening with a lovely picture and the same display name you had at breakfast.
Do the text fields first.
They are the ones that get you found, they take twenty minutes between them, and then you can spend as long as you like on the picture with a clear conscience.
The mistake underneath all of this
Almost every bad profile I looked at was bad in the same specific way, and it is worth naming because once you see it you cannot unsee it.
They were written for people who already know who you are.
"Sarah" as a display name works beautifully if the reader is looking for Sarah.
"Lover of coffee and cosy corners" is a delightful thing to read about someone you have already met.
Both are written from the inside — from the position of someone who knows the account, addressed to nobody in particular.
The visitor is not that person.
The visitor arrived four seconds ago from a pin about rental-friendly shelving and has no idea who you are, what you do, or whether the next thing you post will be relevant to them.
Everything on the profile should be answering that, and nearly nothing on the average profile does.
This is the same failure as naming boards from the inside — the file-name problem, where a label that makes sense to the person who created it is meaningless to everyone else.
It just does more damage on a profile, because the profile is where the follow decision gets made.
What good looks like, concretely
Take an account I helped with last spring — small-space and rental decorating, about 4,000 monthly viewers at the time, which is to say not big.
Before: display name "Ellie".
Bio: "Home lover 🏡 sharing bits and bobs."
Boards in the order they were created, which meant the top row was a recipes board she had made in 2019 and a board literally called "Stuff".
Photo was lovely.
Everything else was a shrug.
After, and this took under an hour: display name "Ellie · Small Space & Rental Decor Ideas".
Bio naming renters specifically, with one line about what she posts and one about where to start.
Top row reordered to the three boards that matched what she wanted to be known for.
Recipes board archived, "Stuff" renamed.
The follower rate on profile visits roughly doubled over the following two months.
Not the traffic — the conversion of visits into follows, which is the thing a profile is actually for.
The pins were identical.
She did not publish anything different.
She just stopped making every visitor guess.
The part that is genuinely hard
None of the above tells you which words to use, and that is the bit that decides whether any of it works.
"Small space decor" or "small apartment decor" or "tiny home decorating" — three names for what is basically one subject, and people search them at wildly different rates.
Choosing between them by ear is guessing, and it is a guess you then live inside for years, because a display name is not a thing you rewrite monthly.
That is precisely what PinPinterest is for: it will tell you which of those phrases people are actually typing and which ones already have a wall of established accounts in front of them, in about the time it takes to make a coffee.
It is a much better use of ten minutes than another evening on the photo.
If you want to see whether your corner of Pinterest is well covered before you commit, the niches we track is the place to look first.
Find the phrase people actually search before you put it in your name
If you only do one thing
Open your profile, look at your display name, and ask whether a stranger could tell from it what they would get by following you.
If the answer is no — and for most accounts it is no — that one field is the whole afternoon.
Everything else here is a bonus.
And if your profile is not appearing when you search for it at all, that is usually this same problem wearing a scarier hat: why your profile does not come up in search walks through the five causes, and only one of them is anything to worry about.
Ellie, for the record, still has the recipes board.
It is archived rather than deleted, because the pins on it are still perfectly good and there was never any reason to throw them away — the same argument the archive-versus-delete comparison makes at length.
It is just no longer the first thing anybody sees.
#pinterest profile#profile seo#pinterest seo#display name
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