How to Track Your Competitors’ Pinterest Rankings (Without It Becoming a Hobby)

I think competitor-watching is one of the most useful things you can do on Pinterest.

It’s also one of the easiest to turn into an unhealthy little hobby.

The useful version is quiet and a bit boring.

You watch where a few specific accounts rank for the phrases you share with them, and you notice when something changes.

The unhealthy version involves scrolling their profile at midnight and feeling bad about their follower count.

I’ve done both (the second one more than I’d like).

Only one of them ever helped.

So this is the useful version, set up so it takes about 10 minutes a week and tells you when to act.

Phrases first, accounts second

The mistake almost everyone makes is starting with a list of accounts they want to keep an eye on.

That gives you a list of people you have feelings about, which isn’t the same as a list of people you compete with.

Start with your tracking list instead, meaning the phrases you already care about.

Search each one the clean way, note which accounts keep turning up near the top, and the ones that show up across several of your phrases are your real competitors.

Who your Pinterest competitors actually are walks through that tally properly, and it’s usually full of surprises.

No tracking list yet?

Then which phrases to track comes first.

Competitor tracking is only ever as good as the phrases underneath it.

Three things to write down

For each shared phrase, once a week, note three things.

1. Your band. Top 5, 6 to 20, further down, or not found.
2. Each competitor’s band. The same bands, for the 2 or 3 accounts that matter on that phrase.
3. Anybody new. Any account in the top 20 that wasn’t there last time. This column turns out to be the most interesting one by miles.

That’s it.

Resist recording their follower counts, how often they post or how many pins they made this month.

None of that changes what you should do, and all of it is an invitation to compare yourself unhelpfully.

I keep mine in a notebook with three columns ruled in biro, and honestly it looks like a school exercise book.

It does the job.

Each kind of movement, decoded

Here’s where it gets useful.

Different movements mean different things, and each one suggests a different move on your side.

They drop out of the top 5

This is the one to act on.

A spot has opened on a phrase you both want, and whoever publishes a strong, fresh answer next has a good chance of taking it.

Before you assume they did something wrong, check whether everyone shuffled, because rankings wobble for all sorts of reasons.

If it’s just them and it’s held for 7 days, go.

A new account appears

Someone else has found the phrase.

Look at the pin that got them there rather than their whole profile.

What does it promise, how specific is it, what format is it?

Screenshot it for your notebook while you’re there.

New arrivals are often small accounts doing one thing really well (my favourite kind, if I’m honest), which makes them far more useful to study than the giant everyone already knows about.

Everyone shuffles at once

That’s the search changing, usually with the season.

It isn’t your competitors doing anything clever.

Note the date in your notebook and do nothing.

But next year you’ll be very glad you wrote it down.

Someone climbs past you

Their pin is earning more attention than yours for that phrase.

Compare the two honestly, side by side, the way a searcher would see them.

Most of the time the difference is the image or the promise rather than any SEO trick, so the answer is a fresher pin of your own and not an edit to the old one.

What to do when your pin drops has the calm version of that process.

Holding first for months

Entrenched and evergreen.

You can go after it, but it’s usually a slow, expensive fight.

The smarter move is often a narrower phrase right next to it that they don’t cover nearly as well, and content gap analysis is exactly the tool for finding those.

I spent 2 months chasing one of these once and got nowhere, while the narrower phrase right beside it came good in about 3 weeks.

How often to look

This is the part that keeps it useful instead of stressful.

Weekly, glance at your shared phrases and note anything that changed band.

Monthly, read the “anybody new” column and have a proper look at any newcomers.

Every 3 months, rebuild your competitor list from scratch, because the accounts that matter drift over time, and a list you only ever edit quietly fills up with people who stopped being relevant.

What I wouldn’t do is check daily.

Daily competitor-watching produces a lot of feelings and almost no decisions.

If you catch yourself looking at a competitor more often than your own analytics, that’s your sign to step back for a week or two.

I set a phone reminder for 9am on Mondays so I don’t drift into checking whenever I’m bored.

Doing it without a monster spreadsheet

Tracking 3 competitors across 15 phrases by hand is 45 lookups a week, plus writing them all down (even in a tidy spreadsheet).

At about 2 minutes a lookup that’s 90 minutes, every single week.

It works for a month or two and then quietly stops.

The nice thing about PinPinterest here is that competitor tracking falls out of rank tracking for free.

When you save a phrase, it records where the top pins for it rank every time the phrase is crawled (all of them, not only yours), so the accounts you compete with are already in the history and you can see who moved without running a single extra search.

If one account keeps turning up, you can look it up to see its top pins and boards, and follow it to hear when it publishes something that starts taking off.

Where I’d start this week

Take the phrases you already track and search 3 of them on Monday morning, coffee in hand.

Write down every account in the top 20 that shows up more than once.

It takes about 15 minutes, less if the kettle’s slow.

The rank tracking guide has the rest of the system if you want it.

That short list is your competitor list.

Mine had two names on it I’d never heard of, and not one of the three big accounts I’d spent a year quietly worrying about.