Pinterest for food bloggers: a strategy for real recipe traffic

Why Pinterest is made for food bloggers

People don't just look at recipes on Pinterest. They save them to boards called "Dinner ideas" or "Thanksgiving sides", and they come back when it's time to cook. That's why food is one of the biggest categories on the platform, and why many recipe sites get a large share of their traffic from it.

A good recipe pin also lasts. Someone searching "easy chicken thigh recipes" next March can find the pin you made today. Google traffic can take a year to build for a new post. Pinterest can start sending visitors within weeks.

Step 1: Get recipe rich pins working

Rich pins for recipes show the title, ingredients and cook time right on the pin. They look more trustworthy and they get saved more.

You don't apply for them anymore. Pinterest reads the recipe data your recipe card plugin adds to the page. If you use a popular recipe plugin, it's probably already there. To check: make a pin from one of your recipe posts and open it. If you see the recipe's ingredients or details on the pin, you're set. Also claim your website in Pinterest settings, so every pin from your blog carries your name. Our business account guide covers both.

Step 2: Design recipe pins people stop for

In a feed full of food, the pins that win are clear, close and appetizing. A few things that consistently work:

• Tall pins, 2:3 (1000 by 1500 pixels). Long pins with two photos, like ingredients on top and the finished dish below, also do well.
• Close-up, well-lit shots of the finished dish. If it looks good small, on a phone, it's a good pin photo.
• A short text overlay that says what it is and why: "Easy one-pan lemon chicken", "5-ingredient banana bread".
• Big, readable fonts. Script fonts that are hard to read on a phone cost you clicks.
• The same few colors and fonts on every pin, so people start to recognize your blog.

Pick your best two or three photos from each post and make one pin from each. Our free Pinterest pin maker does this in the right size, no signup.

Step 3: Write recipe titles people actually search for

Your blog post title might be "Grandma's Sunday Chicken". That's lovely, but nobody searches it. On Pinterest, lead with what the dish is and the thing that makes it appealing: easy, quick, healthy, one-pan, five ingredients, make-ahead.

In the description, write two or three sentences: what it is, why it's good, and when to make it. Use the main keyword once and a related one if it fits naturally. Our Pinterest keywords guide shows how to find the right phrases, and the free description generator writes them from your recipe link.

Step 4: Set up boards around how people cook

Organize boards the way readers think about meals, not the way your blog categories are set up. Good food boards are things like "Easy weeknight dinners", "Healthy chicken recipes", "Christmas cookies", "Slow cooker recipes" and "Easy desserts". Ten to fifteen focused boards are plenty to start.

Put each pin on its most fitting board first. A one-pan chicken recipe goes to "Easy chicken dinners" before "Weeknight dinners".

Step 5: Pin seasonal recipes early

This is where food bloggers win or lose on Pinterest. People save holiday recipes weeks before they cook them. If your pumpkin bread pin goes up on October 25th, you've missed most of the saving.

Each year, make fresh pins for last year's seasonal recipes. They don't need new posts, just new pins. Our Pinterest content calendar has start dates for every big food moment.

Step 6: Post steadily, from your whole archive

Most food blogs have dozens or hundreds of recipes that never got a second pin. That's your biggest opportunity. Every older recipe can get fresh pins with new photos and new titles, and Pinterest treats them as new.

Aim for a few fresh pins a day, mixing new posts with older ones, and leave at least a week between pins for the same recipe. If you want numbers for your size, see how many pins to post a day.

This is also the part most food bloggers quietly drop after a month, because making pins for a 300-recipe archive is a lot of work. That's the exact problem Pinsevo was built for: it reads your recipes, makes the pins, writes the titles and posts them on a steady schedule, after you approve them.

Example: one recipe, five fresh pins

Here's how one post, a lemon chicken recipe, can become five different pins over two months, each aimed at a slightly different search:

Same recipe, same link, five chances to be found. Post them a week or more apart.

Recipe pin mistakes we see all the time

• Pinning only once, the day the recipe goes live, and never again.
• Using the blog post title as the pin title, when nobody searches for it.
• Dark, moody photos that look great on a laptop and muddy on a phone.
• Linking to the home page or a category page instead of the recipe.
• Starting Christmas pins in December, when most of the saving already happened.
• Tiny, curly fonts on the image that nobody can read at a glance.

What to measure

Ignore followers. Watch outbound clicks in Pinterest analytics and Pinterest visits in your site analytics. Once a month, look at which recipes get the most clicks from Pinterest, and make more fresh pins for those. Recipes that do well on Pinterest are also good clues for what to cook and write next.