How to Optimize your Pinterest Board Name

A Pinterest board name can be up to 100 characters long. But be careful about using all that. I’ll tell you why, but first, let’s go through how to create a well optimized board name.

Forget Cutesy or Creative!

Let’s start with those cute or creative board names. You know the ones I’m talking about. The boards that you really want to name “Food for Thought” or “Mr Clean”. Sounds fun but it only makes sense to you and will perform very poorly in search.

Better board names would be to use strong targeted keywords that perform well in search, and avoid unnecessary words.

• “Food for Thought” could be better renamed as “Best Recipes”.
• “Mr Clean” could be better renamed as “Home Cleaning Ideas”.

Keep board names short!

Board names allow up to 100 characters in them. But that doesn’t mean you should use them all.

In fact, I don’t recommend board names to go over 25 characters. Why? Look at this image of a board:

The board name gets cut off.

Here’s another image - of a pin this time:

When looking at a list of pins, the board name listed gets cut off. This makes for a poor user experience as they cannot read the entirety of your board name.

Aim for less than 25 characters, targeting your keyword only and you should avoid this issue.

Create Multiple Boards for the same topic

Since our board names are short, you should create multiple board names, with variations of your keywords based on how people are searching on them.

For example, we have boards named

• “Driving Pinterest Traffic”
• “Increasing Blog Traffic”
• “Pinterest Strategy”
• “Increase Engagement”

These are all boards that are similar in nature, but we varied the keywords we were targeting.

This will help you rank in search for all of those different terms that users search on.

Fill out your Board Descriptions

Since our board names are heavily targeted to a single keyword, use your Board Description to fill out the details about the board. Here you have up to 500 characters to work with. Use them. But keep it targeted to humans. In other words it should be human readable. So it should still be complete sentences, but target your various related keywords in there. This helps tie these boards together to give you a well rounded collection.

Keep your board on topic!

Now that you have named your board and described it, make sure you only pin relevant content to that board. Whenever you pin something to the board, it strengthens the related keywords to that pin. If you send a pin about “wedding rings” to a board named “Pinterest Tips”, it sends a seriously confusing signal to Pinterest since the terms aren’t really related. Also it gives your readers a confusing experience and they are unlikely to engage with it or the rest of the pins in your board/account as a result.

So stay on topic with your boards.

Bonus: Create Board Covers

Did you know you can assign one of your pins on the board as the board cover! This is pretty cool as it gives you a way to feature one of the pins.

The way most bloggers utilize this feature is they make a graphic in Canva or Photoshop or other graphic tool of their choice, with their board name featured on it. You can then pin that image to your board. For the URL, set it to the url of the board.

Once the pin is submitted, you can click on the EDIT pencil icon to edit your board, and select CHANGE COVER. Select the pin image you just uploaded, and it will be set as your cover.

If you do this for all of your boards, it will give your profile a more professional and cleaner look, potentially inviting more followers.

Experience is mixed on how truly effective this is, so I don’t recommend spending too much time making board covers. There’s more impactful optimizations to make first to boost your Pinterest reach.

Advanced Techniques

If you have got this far, awesome! You are well on your way to Pinterest stardom. Next I want to take you through some amazing techniques I recently learned to take your boards to the next level.

Read my post on how to create keyword rich board names to get more repins and explode your Pinterest reach.