Pinterest Boards: How Many Boards Should I Create?

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Whether you’re a blogger or an e-commerce business, having the right Pinterest boards strategy is essential to your growth on Pinterest.

However, when you’re just getting started with marketing on Pinterest the addition of boards to your account can be confusing, and sometimes overwhelming – especially if your not familiar with the platform already.

You might ask yourself…

I come across questions like these often and I get it! Pinterest is its own beast and it takes time to learn all its nuances. This is why I’m sharing my thoughts on whether or not the number of boards matters and how to move forward intentionally. Let’s go!

What Are Pinterest Boards?

Before we can jump into how many boards you should create, we first need to understand what they are.

According to Pinterest, boards are “where you save, collect, and organize your pins”.

Think of Pinterest boards like a filing system. With a filing system, you want to keep your information organized and easy to recollect when you need it, so you create files to sort and label them.

Pinterest boards use the same idea.

On your Pinterest profile you create titled boards to house content about a specific topic (or keyword – more on that later).

How Do Pinterest Boards Work For My Business?

The magic of Pinterest boards is their impact on your Pinterest business account’s SEO (a.k.a. search engine optimization or Pinterest SEO).

Pinterest uses the board title and board description to help them understand how to categorize and index your pin into their search engine. This understanding is important because it helps your pins appear in the right search results.

For example, if you have a crochet blog that has several crochet patterns for summer tops you want to take into consideration what you name your boards to help Pinterest better understand your content (you create crochet patterns) AND who to show them to in search results (people looking for crochet patterns for summer).

How Many Pinterest Boards Should You Have?

So we know our Pinterest account is made up of boards for topics that help our SEO on the platform – but is there a golden number of boards you should create?

I come across this question often, “how many Pinterest boards should I have” or “how many Pinterest boards should I start with”.

Unfortunately, the answer is …. it depends on your business or content, as well as how old your Pinterest account is.

If you’re starting with a brand new business Pinterest account, 10 Pinterest boards is a good place to start (and is what I do when setting up Pinterest accounts for my clients). Too many boards can be overwhelming when you’re just getting start with Pinterest marketing. You want to be intentional about the boards you create and make sure they are hyper-relevant to the content or products you will be adding to your account. You then focus on pinning your content or products for those targeted keywords and creating new content for them as well. Once you are ranking for these keywords, or your content topics have grown, then you can begin to build out your boards, however, it’s not necessary when you are starting from zero.

On the other hand, if you already have a few dozen boards on your account and have been growing your account all year, I recommend creating more with the goal of increasing your keyword-targeting and SEO. This could look like identifying more supportive keywords you can create a board for or upcoming trending keywords you have content for!

Is It Better To Have More Boards On Pinterest?

Pinterest has a limit of 2,000 boards (including secret and group boards) on any account.

In my years, as a Pinterest Manager, I have never come across a Pinterest user with that many boards! I don’t know even how that’s manageable.

However, with that said, more boards mean more opportunities to target different keywords. So in that sense, it is better to have more boards if you have the content and growth to support it. However, your boards have to be related or relevant to what you’re selling or blogging – that’s the key.

As noted earlier, you don’t need too many boards on Pinterest to succeed, especially when you first get started.

Also, there is a point at which more boards can actually hurt your growth.

Let me explain…

How many is too many?

If we backtrack to why we create Pinterest boards for our business…to let Pinterest know what our account is about and what keywords we want to rank for…then creating an excessive amount of irrelevant boards can detract from the message we’re trying to give them.

Are you wondering if you have too many boards? Ask yourself these questions:

• Are my Pinterest boards related to my content or product?
• Do I have enough content to justify having the board?
• Are the pins in my board driving traffic to my website? Or do I need to archive it?

How To Plan Your Boards

Now that you understand what a Pinterest board is, how they can help your Pinterest business account, and how many boards you need to create, we can quickly look at how to plan and create your boards.

How To Plan Your Boards

Planning your Pinterest boards is a simple process once you understand how to research keywords on Pinterest

Organize Your Topics In A Spreadsheet: Open a Google spreadsheet. In the top column add the main topics of your blog or products

Research Keywords: On your Pinterest home page, start typing in the search bar to discover suggested keyword phrases that are related to your main topics. These are search terms pinners are using, which makes them perfect for board SEO.

To make keyword research more efficient you can also use software like Pin Inspector [Affiliate Link].

Add Your Keywords Under Your Topics: As you discover keywords related to your topics, add them underneath for later.

How To Create Your Boards

Once you’ve identified the topics and keywords you want to target on your account, you can start creating and optimizing your boards.

Navigate To Your Saved Tab: In your Pinterest account, navigate to your profile and the “saved” tab.

Hit The Plus Button: Select the plus icon to open the menu and select “board”

Add Your Title: Using the keywords you researched earlier, add your Pinterest board title into the text field and hit submit. Let’s do this for crochet patterns.

Add Your Description: To add your description, select the three dots and “edit board”. Once inside you can then edit the “Description” and add other related keywords to that topic.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need 100 boards to get your pins seen on Pinterest. Keeping in mind that the purpose of boards for Pinterest business accounts is search engine optimization, the number of boards is less important and keyword targeting is more important. It’s not uncommon for a new account to focus on 10 specific boards as they build up the account and increase later as their keyword targeting strategy and content bank grows. Using this simplified board planning strategy you can plan and create boards that help your business rank in search results.

Feeling overwhelmed? I offer an Account Setup and Optimization service that can help.