Pinterest® Research · Pinfluence Discover
Where Should You Put Your Keyword on Pinterest®?
By Pinfluencing.com · Last updated
Put your keyword in the title and description. Nothing else comes close.
Out of everything we tested, this is the lever that most consistently holds up. Pins with the search keyword in their description ranked far better (an average position of 38.9 versus 49.0), and were nearly twice as likely to reach the top 10.
Putting the keyword in the title helps just as much, and having it in both is best of all. And unlike hashtags, this stays true for accounts of every follower size.
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Find Your Keywords FreeKey findings
- The description is the biggest single lever. Pins whose description contains the search keyword averaged position 38.9, against 49.0 without it. That is about 10 spots, and it roughly doubles the odds of reaching the top 10 (22.3% versus 11.4%).
- The title is nearly as strong. A keyword in the title was worth about 6 spots on its own (44.7 versus 51.1), and it lifted top-10 reach from 10.1% to 17.0%.
- Both together wins. Pins with the keyword in the title and the description landed at an average position of 37.3, reached the top 10 about 24.7% of the time, and made the top 50 in 70.0% of cases. That is the best pattern we tested.
- Alt text helps, but only when it is relevant. A keyword inside the alt text was worth about 6 spots (42.2 versus 48.2). Simply having alt text does nothing on its own; what matters is whether it contains the keyword.
- Board names are the wrong place to rank a pin. Keyword-matched board names ranked about 3 spots worse, not better (50.7 versus 47.7), and fewer than 1 in 100 pins even try it.
- This one survives the follower-size check. Unlike hashtags, the keyword lift held at a similar size inside every follower group, between 8 and 13 spots for title-and-description pins.
- Descriptions are an easy edge. Only about 38% of pins in search even have a description on file, so it is a high-value field many creators leave blank.
What this means for you
This is one of the highest-payoff habits on Pinterest®, and it is refreshingly simple. It is not the only thing that affects ranking, but it is the clearest lever you control. Write a clear, natural title and description that include the exact words people type when they search for a pin like yours.
If your pin is a slow cooker chicken recipe, the phrase ‘slow cooker chicken’ belongs in both the title and the description, written the way a real person would say it. You do not need to be clever, and you do not need to repeat it. You just need it there, in plain language.
It is just as useful to know where not to spend effort. For ranking a pin, board names are not a keyword tool (pins that matched their keyword in the board name actually ranked slightly worse), so renaming boards to chase pin rankings is wasted work. (A clear keyword in a board name can still help the board itself show up in search, but that is a separate strategy from ranking an individual pin.) Alt text is worth a little attention, but only as a place to describe the image in searchable terms, not a box to tick.
If you came here from our hashtag study, this is the lever to reach for instead. Hashtags did nothing for ranking. Putting the keyword in your title and description does.
Which field matters most?
We checked each field on its own, counting only pins where that field actually exists. So ‘missing’ here always means the field was present but did not contain the keyword, never that the field was blank.
| Keyword in… | With it | Without it | In top 10 (with it) |
|---|---|---|---|
| The description | 38.9 | 49.0 | 22.3% |
| The title | 44.7 | 51.1 | 17.0% |
| The alt text | 42.2 | 48.2 | 18.7% |
| The board name | 50.7 | 47.7 | 16.3% |
Description and title are the heavy hitters, each pulling pins up by roughly 6 to 10 positions and lifting their top-10 reach well above pins that miss. Alt text helps a useful amount when it is relevant.
The board name is the odd one out. It is the only field where a keyword match lines up with a slightly worse position, and it is matched so rarely (fewer than 1 in 100 pins) that it carries no useful signal either way.
One note on reading this table: each row uses a different set of pins, because each field has to exist for a pin to count toward it. So you cannot compare the raw group sizes across rows, only the with-versus-without gap inside each one.
What about combining them?
The fields stack. The more of the right places your keyword lands, the better a pin tends to rank, with the title and description doing the real work.
| Keyword location | Avg. position | In top 10 | In top 50 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Neither title nor description | 48.8 | 11.6% | 53.0% |
| Description only | 40.0 | 20.8% | 65.5% |
| Title only | 38.5 | 22.6% | 68.7% |
| Both title and description | 37.3 | 24.7% | 70.0% |
Pins with the keyword in both the title and the description rank best, and reach the top 10 more than twice as often as pins that have it in neither. Every step up this table (no match, to one field, to both) moves pins higher and lands more of them in the top 50.
Adding the board name into the mix did not improve any version of this, which is one more reason to leave board names out of your keyword plan.
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Show Me the KeywordsDoes this hold for accounts with few followers?
Yes, and this is the part that sets keyword placement apart from the rest of our research. We compared accounts of similar follower size, so a large account’s natural ranking advantage could not be the explanation. The lift showed up everywhere.
| Account size | Keyword in neither | Keyword in title + description | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1,000 followers | 48.8 | 37.2 | 11.6 spots better |
| 1,000 to 10,000 | 49.4 | 36.3 | 13.1 spots better |
| Over 10,000 | 48.4 | 38.7 | 9.6 spots better |
The lift from putting the keyword in your title and description is large in every group, including the smallest accounts, where it is worth nearly 12 positions.
This is not an advantage only large accounts get to enjoy. A brand-new account that nails its title and description is playing the same game as everyone else. That is exactly the test hashtags and plain alt text both failed, where the apparent benefit evaporated the moment we held follower size still. Here it does not.
Does it help you win the top results?
Yes, and the advantage grows the closer you look at the very top. Even among pins that already rank well, the keyword-matched ones sit higher.
| Search window | Keyword in title or description | Neither |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10 | 5.04 | 5.42 |
| Top 25 | 11.10 | 12.69 |
| Top 50 | 20.28 | 24.64 |
Inside the top 50, keyword-matched pins sit between three and five spots higher, with the typical such pin at position 18 against 24 for the rest. That pattern repeats in every follower group, including the smallest.
This is the opposite of what we found with hashtags, where any apparent edge among top-ranked pins came entirely from accounts we could not size and vanished under a fair comparison. Here the gap is real, similar across follower sizes, and it holds up.
How we did this
This study uses the Pinfluencing.com research index, which organizes public information from Pinterest® search results.
We used data we indexed across late May and early June 2026, ending with a snapshot on June 12. It covers 127,738,297 pin appearances, drawn from about 1.3 million searches across 55,998,390 unique pins. Each row records where a pin ranked for a given search, where 1 is the top.
- What “contains the keyword” means. A field counts as containing the keyword if every word of the search appears in that field as a whole word. Order does not matter, so a title like “easy chicken dinner recipes” matches the search “chicken dinner.” We lowercase everything and ignore punctuation first.
- We only count a field when it exists. If a pin has no description, it sits out of the description comparison rather than counting as a miss. So each field has its own set of pins, and the counts are not comparable across fields.
- Plain word matching. We match whole words, so ‘recipe’ and ‘recipes’ are not treated as the same. That is deliberately strict, so if anything it undercounts matches rather than inflating them.
- Regular results only, the default logged-out view, roughly the first 100 results per search.
- Follower-size comparisons use only pins with a real follower count, about 18.5 million pins.
- This shows a connection, not a cause. Pinterest may simply surface keyword-matching pins, or well-labeled pins may be stronger in other ways too. We can say the two move together, not that one causes the other. This looks at search position only, not saves or clicks.
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Try Pinfluence Discover FreeFrequently asked questions
Where should I put my keyword on a Pinterest pin?
In the title and the description. Pins with the keyword in both averaged position 37.3 and reached the top 10 about 24.7% of the time, the best pattern we found. The description on its own is worth about 10 positions, and the title on its own about 6.
Title or description, which matters more?
They are close, and the right move is to use both. On its own the description was the single strongest field in our data, with the title just behind it, and combining them beat either one alone.
Do keywords in Pinterest board names help ranking?
Not for ranking a pin. Keyword-matched board names ranked about 3 spots worse, not better, and that held in every follower group, and very few pins even try. One nuance: a solid keyword in a board name can still help the board itself rank in search, which is a separate strategy from ranking an individual pin. For pin ranking, the keyword belongs in the title and description.
Does this work for accounts with few followers?
Yes. The lift held for accounts under 1,000 followers just as clearly as for large ones, where it was worth nearly 12 positions. It is not an advantage reserved for big accounts.
Do I need the exact phrase, in order?
No. Our matching only required each word of the search to appear somewhere in the field, in any order. A naturally written title that happens to include all the words still counts, so you do not have to force an awkward exact phrase.
How is this different from hashtags?
Hashtags looked helpful in the raw numbers but added nothing once we compared similar accounts. Keyword placement is the reverse: the lift is large and it survives that same fair comparison in every follower group, which is why we treat it as the real lever and hashtags as a myth.
About the data and Pinfluence Discover
Every number here comes from the Pinfluencing.com research index of public Pinterest® search results, indexed across late May and early June 2026 (snapshot dated June 12).
Pinfluence Discover helps you find the exact phrases people search for in your niche, so you can write the right keyword into your title and description instead of guessing. The free plan includes daily keyword searches, no credit card needed.
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