Pinterest Rank Tracking: How to Know Where Your Pins Actually Show Up

A few years ago I rewrote the titles on 30 pins in one evening.

Proper phrases, carefully placed, the lot.

Then I spent the next 2 weeks refreshing my analytics like it owed me money (it didn’t).

Impressions went up a bit.

Then down a bit.

I had no idea if the rewrite had worked, because the one thing I wanted to know (where those pins now sat when somebody searched for them) is the one thing Pinterest won’t show you.

That gap is what rank tracking is for.

It’s not glamorous.

But it’s the difference between doing Pinterest SEO and just hoping about it.

Rankings on a grid work a bit differently

On Google, rank tracking is easy to picture.

Ten results in a list, you’re fourth, next week you’re second, lovely.

Pinterest is messier and I’d rather be upfront about that.

Results come as a grid, the grid is partly personalised to whoever’s searching, and positions shuffle a little every day even when nothing important has changed.

So on Pinterest a ranking is something humbler: roughly where a pin sits for one phrase, on one day, in a clean search.

You write that down, then do it again 7 days later, and again the week after.

One reading tells you very little.

Six of them tell you a lot.

Why impressions can’t tell you this

Impressions mash three different things together, and you really need them apart.

• Where you rank. The bit you can change, with your titles and descriptions and boards.
• How many people are searching. Seasonal, and out of your hands. A Christmas pin loses impressions in January however well it ranks.
• Everything that isn’t search. Home feed, related pins, followers. A pin can lose its search position and coast on those for 3 or 4 weeks before you notice anything.

So when impressions drop, you can’t tell which of the three moved.

When a ranking drops, you can.

Honestly, that’s the whole case for tracking position, and it’s why I’d take 10 tracked phrases over a prettier dashboard any day of the week.

What impressions really count goes into the first half of that properly.

Seven small skills hiding inside this one

Rank tracking sounds like one job.

It’s really about seven small ones, and I’m writing each of them up properly.

Here’s the map, so you can jump to whichever one is bugging you today.

• Where does my pin rank right now? The two-minute check by hand, and the one habit that quietly ruins most people’s checks.
• Which phrases should I track? Fewer than you’d think, picked for a different reason than you’d guess.
• Why does my position jump around every day? Most of it is noise, and there’s a simple rule for spotting the real moves.
• My pin dropped, so what happened? A calm diagnosis that separates your problem from Pinterest’s season.
• Does ranking first even matter? How a position turns into saves and clicks on a grid instead of a list.
• What are my competitors ranking for? Watching the phrases you share with them, without it turning into a hobby.
• Can I just use a spreadsheet? For a while, yes. The five columns I’d use, and the signs you’ve outgrown it.

Starting by hand, this afternoon

You don’t need a tool to start.

I’d actually suggest a week or two by hand first, because it teaches you what the numbers mean before anything summarises them for you.

1. Write down 5 phrases you want your pins found for. Real things people type, like “small bathroom storage ideas”, not “bathroom content”.
2. Open a private browser window, go to Pinterest and search the first phrase without logging in. Logged in, you’re mostly looking at your own taste reflected back at you.
3. Scroll the first few screens and note where your pin shows up: top 5, top 20, further down, or not at all. Put the date next to it.
4. Do the same for the other four. It takes about 10 minutes once you’ve done it twice.
5. Repeat on the same day next week, the same way. The second reading is where it starts being useful.

That’s it.

The method is the easy bit.

The hard bit is doing it the same way every time, and remembering to do it at all in week three when the novelty’s worn off.

Once you can see where you stand, Pinterest SEO, step by step covers what to actually change.

Reading the numbers without losing your mind

A few rules I wish someone had handed me before I started obsessing over positions.

• Look at weeks, not days. A pin that goes 6, 9, 5 and 7 over 4 days hasn’t moved. A pin that sits around 6 for 2 weeks and then around 18 for the next 2 weeks has.
• Small moves are weather. Shifts of 1 or 2 places happen constantly. I don’t look twice at anything under about 5.
• Compare like with like. Same phrase, same kind of search, same day of the week. Change how you check and you change the answer.
• Watch the whole top 20, not just your pin. If everybody moved, the search changed. If only you moved, you did.

That last rule saves the most heartache.

Pinterest reshuffles whole searches when the season turns or a trend lands, and if every pin in your top 20 slid at once, nothing’s wrong with yours.

Evergreen versus seasonal pins explains why some phrases do this every single year.

Where doing it by hand falls apart

Manual tracking is lovely for 5 phrases.

At 20 it’s a chore.

At 50 it just stops happening, which is the real reason most people give up on rank tracking altogether.

There’s a sneakier problem too.

By hand you only see your pin on the days you remember to look, so you never see the day it slipped, or which pin took its place.

That’s the part PinPinterest takes off your plate.

Save a phrase and it records where the top pins for it rank each time the phrase is crawled, so you build a short history instead of a lonely snapshot.

You get “#8 → #5” when something moved, “Holding #3” when it didn’t, and a plain note saying when it was last measured if the reading isn’t fresh (rather than a flat line pretending nothing changed).

One thing to know before you start, whatever you use.

The history begins the day you begin.

Nobody can show you where you ranked last spring if nobody wrote it down last spring, so start before you need it.

Once a week is plenty

I check on Monday mornings with my first coffee, and it takes about as long as the coffee does (so, not long).

Daily checking is where this turns from useful to stressful.

You see noise, you react to noise, and you start editing pins that were doing perfectly well.

Which, annoyingly, is one of the more reliable ways to make a ranking drop.

The exception is right after a change you want to measure.

If you’ve just rewritten a batch of titles, a quick look every few days for 14 days is fine, as long as you don’t touch anything until the 14 days are up.

How long Pinterest takes to work has a realistic timeline for that wait.

Your first five phrases

Pick 5 phrases right now and write down where you rank for them.

Not next month when you’ve got a system.

Today, on the back of an envelope if that’s what’s nearby.

I did exactly that with a sticky note stuck to the side of my monitor.

It stayed there for 6 months, covered in pencil marks.