{"id":14053,"date":"2026-10-21T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tailwindapp.com\/blog\/?p=14053"},"modified":"2026-10-21T05:31:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T11:31:35","slug":"pinterest-keyword-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tailwindapp.com\/blog\/pinterest-keyword-research","title":{"rendered":"How to Do Pinterest Keyword Research (With Real Search Data)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Most Pinterest Keyword Research Dies in a Spreadsheet<\/h2>\n

You know the shape of it. You spend an afternoon hunting for keywords. You end up with a tidy list of forty terms. You feel productive. Then the list goes into a spreadsheet, and three weeks later you’re writing a Pin description from memory anyway \u2014 because the list never told you which keyword belonged to which page.<\/p>\n

The finding step gets all the attention. It’s the smaller half of the job.<\/p>\n

Research is finished when every keyword you chose is attached to the specific page it’s supposed to rank, and is flowing into the Pins you make for that page.<\/strong> Until then you have a list, not a strategy. This piece covers the whole loop.<\/p>\n

Step 1: Decide What You’re Researching For<\/em><\/h2>\n

Start with pages, not keywords. Open a document and list the pages you actually want traffic to \u2014 your five or ten best posts, your key product or service pages, the things you’d be glad to have found.<\/p>\n

This sounds like a throat-clearing step and it isn’t. It’s what stops you from collecting interesting keywords with nowhere to send them, which is the single most common way this work gets wasted. Every keyword you keep needs a page waiting for it. (If those are product pages, Step 4’s shopping-intent filter matters most for you.)<\/p>\n

It also helps to know what this work actually buys you. Keywords are how Pinterest indexes a Pin; indexing is what makes it eligible to be discovered in search; discovery is what produces impressions \u2014 and only then can anyone save it or click through. Get the keyword wrong and you’ve capped every number downstream of it. (The full mechanism is here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Step 2: Understand What You’re Searching Against<\/h2>\n

Before you look anything up, one mental model saves a lot of confusion later.<\/p>\n

Pinterest’s interest graph is a semantic model of demand<\/strong> \u2014 it organizes what people look for into related terms and clusters. It isn’t a transcript of every phrase ever typed. So when a phrasing comes back with no meaningful volume, the useful reading is not “nobody wants this.” It’s “this particular phrasing isn’t one of the terms demand is organized under”<\/strong> \u2014 and the demand is nearly always sitting under a closely related term.<\/p>\n

That’s why the instruction below is always look at the related terms<\/em>, never keep trying variations of your phrasing until one works<\/em>. (The full explanation of what a zero actually means is here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Step 3: Look It Up \u2014 and Know What Each Method Can and Can’t See<\/h2>\n

There are only a few honest ways to arrive at a Pinterest keyword.<\/p>\n

The Pinterest search bar.<\/strong> Type a topic and read the suggestions. It’s free, it’s genuinely Pinterest, and it’s what most Pinterest courses<\/a> teach. If Pinterest is still an experiment for you, it’s a legitimate place to start.<\/p>\n

Two things to know before you build a habit on it. The first is the one that stops people: it is enormously time-consuming.<\/strong> An afternoon of typing and note-taking per topic, then the same again for the next topic, and the next, indefinitely. The second is quieter and more expensive: the suggestion set is small, so the highest-value terms frequently never appear in it at all<\/strong>, no matter how patiently you hunt.<\/p>\n

Here’s what that costs, concretely. Research “couch” by hand and you will never discover that the synonym “sofa” carries roughly 1.4M monthly Pinterest searches<\/strong> \u2014 or that “grey couch living room” carries 122K+<\/strong> while the intuitive phrasing “couches living room” registers no meaningful volume at all (Tailwind Keyword Research data, July 2026; volumes move, so check current numbers in the tool). In our data, most of the interesting, higher-volume, more granular terms don’t surface in those suggestions. Which means the method most courses recommend systematically misses the biggest opportunities, and you have no way of knowing what you missed.<\/p>\n

Asking a general-purpose AI.<\/strong> This is the tempting shortcut, and it’s the worst option on the list for this specific job. ChatGPT is not a good tool for choosing Pinterest keywords: it guesses confidently from how often words co-occur in its training data \u2014 which is open-web text, not Pinterest search data \u2014 so its answers are nearly always incorrect or incomplete for Pinterest specifically. It fails especially badly on newer trends, since training data often runs a couple of years behind. And the failure mode isn’t obviously-bad keywords, which you’d catch. It’s confident<\/em> ones, which you won’t.<\/p>\n

Where AI genuinely earns its place: brainstorming content angles, organizing a list you’ve already validated, summarizing research, and drafting the copy once the targets are chosen. Draft with AI. Decide with data. (We compared every option, including ourselves, here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Real Pinterest search data.<\/strong> Actual volumes, trending status, related keywords and clusters, and a shopping-intent score \u2014 through approved partner access to Pinterest’s own search data. This is what Keyword Research<\/a> is; a median search returns in about 32 seconds<\/strong> (Tailwind company data, measured June 2026), and there’s a limited one-time free preview if you want to see the difference before deciding anything.<\/p>\n

One habit worth building regardless of what you use: Pinterest publishes an official list of approved partners<\/a>. Before you connect any tool to your Pinterest account, check that it’s on that list \u2014 and don’t use tools that aren’t. Tools that harvest Pinterest’s interface without approval are collecting data in a way Pinterest’s terms don’t permit, and many aren’t straight with you about where their numbers come from.<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/p>\n

Step 4: Judge Each Keyword on Three Things, Not One<\/h2>\n

Volume is the number everyone looks at and the least useful on its own. Run each candidate through three questions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Question<\/th>\nWhat you’re looking at<\/th>\nWhy it decides<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Is there demand?<\/strong><\/td>\nMonthly Pinterest search volume<\/td>\nA term nobody searches can’t send you anyone, however perfectly you’ve optimized for it<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Is it the right kind<\/em> of demand?<\/strong><\/td>\nThe shopping-intent score<\/td>\nHigh shopping intent means the results page fills with product listings; low means articles and ideas. Point a blog post at a product-listing search and you’ve entered a race your page can’t win<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Can I realistically compete?<\/strong><\/td>\nHow specific the term is, against your account’s standing<\/td>\n“Home decor” is not a target. “Grey couch living room” is<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

That middle row is the one most people have never had access to. Pinterest doesn’t publish shopping intent \u2014 it appears in Keyword Research as a shopping-cart icon on every keyword, darker for higher intent, and you can filter your whole list by it. It’s usually the fastest way to cut a list of forty candidates to the twelve that could actually work for the pages you’re promoting. (Shopping searches and idea searches reward different kinds of pages, so match the filter to what you’re promoting.)<\/p>\n

Keyword Research also surfaces a single Resonance Score<\/strong> per keyword, so you can compare candidates on one number rather than juggling several. <\/p>\n

A note on your own judgment.<\/strong> No tool decides for you. Real data makes the decision possible; it doesn’t make it. Whether “sofa,” “living room sectional,” or “grey couch living room” is right depends on what your page is actually about \u2014 and that’s yours to know.<\/p>\n

Step 5: Go Sideways Before You Go Deeper<\/h2>\n

The single highest-yield move in Pinterest keyword research is the one people skip: after you look up your obvious term, look at its related keywords and clusters<\/strong> before you look up your next obvious term.<\/p>\n

This is where the synonym you’d never have typed lives. It’s where the more specific phrasing with more volume than the head term lives. And it’s the only reliable way to find out where demand actually sits when your first guess comes back thin.<\/p>\n

A practical rule: for every term you look up deliberately, expect to keep at least one you didn’t go looking for.<\/p>\n

Step 6: Save Them \u2014 and Attach Them to Pages<\/h2>\n

Here’s where research stops being a list.<\/p>\n

Save the keywords you’re keeping, then attach each one to the specific page you want it to rank for<\/strong>. This is a real step in Keyword Research, not a metaphor for a spreadsheet column, and it’s what converts the research into something the rest of your workflow can use:<\/p>\n