This is the fifth post in our 10-part series about Pinterest Marketing, and today we’re looking at how to keep your Pinterest boards organized and relevant in order to attract readers and increase engagement. If you are using Pinterest as a marketing tool, you really want to look on it as an extension of your website, and just like you wouldn’t want your website to look messy, or contain irrelevant content, you don’t want your public Pinterest account to be messy or irrelevant either.

While it’s important that your individual Pins are user-friendly and easily searchable, you also want to spend some time naming, organizing and populating your boards in ways that make them inviting to users. Finding a perfect Pinterest board full of high-quality Pins on a tightly focussed topic can mean users quickly get sucked in and start consuming large chunks of your content quite quickly.

Messy boards full of irrelevant or low-quality Pins are simply not worth wading through. Your followers will look elsewhere, and your outstanding content will go unseen. Follow the suggestions below to discover ways to improve your Pinterest boards, keep them organized and encourage maximum engagement.

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Stay Relevant

When just starting out, you may think it’s best to follow Pinterest’s suggested topics for your boards, like “books”, “fashion” or “places”. This really isn’t necessary if these things aren’t relevant to your brand or of interest to your audience.

Instead, choose themes related to your niche in order to make it clear what your business is known for. In addition, focus on evergreen subjects over holiday or seasonal ones. You’ll want to put the most effort into the areas that will stand the test of time. Ramp up seasonal boards in the month prior to any given holiday.

Remember to keep board names and descriptions highly relevant too. As we’ve discussed in previous posts in this series, Pinterest is a search engine, so make sure your board names and descriptions are things that Pinterest users will be searching for.

Categorize Strategically

Start with general boards. Come up with a list of possible broad categories related to your brand. Then choose the most relevant. After that, you’ll want to start adding more specific boards that will appeal to small groups of your potential customers. For example, a high-end beauty salon would want to first focus on the types of services they offer by creating a board for each. These could include “hairstyles”, “hair color”, “manicures” and “facials”. Niche boards might be things like “kids’ cuts”, “hair trends”, “styles for long hair”, “ideas for short nails”, and “anti-aging facials”.

In order to use terms that more people are searching for, take some time to check out your Pinterest analytics to see which terms are leading users to you if you already have some Pinterest boards, or simply type some brand-related queries into the Pinterest search bar and take note of which terms are generated.

Clean and Organize Regularly

Once you start pinning, you’ll soon see how your boards can begin to take on lives of their own. They can become messy, overflowing and outdated, which makes it pretty difficult for your users to find your best stuff. It’s a good idea to do a Pinterest cleanup at least a couple times a year, if not quarterly.

First, look over your boards to see if your categories still represent you well. If one or two don’t, you can eliminate them. Simply start a more relevant board, move the pins you’d like to keep from the outdated boards to the appropriate new ones, then delete the old boards. Remember you can always hide boards that are interesting to you, but not really relevant to your brand.

Next, take note of which boards are overrun with Pins compared to the others. See if you can narrow that category down even further. Chances are, you can. Create a new, more specific board and move the pins as needed. Another option, is to simply delete the pins that seem outdated or not as eye-catching. You’ll be left with a much more appealing board with content that shines.

Keep these tips in mind when setting up new boards or assessing your current ones. Organized, up-to-date and relevant Pinterest boards are essential to facilitating user engagement. Staying on top of things makes the process easier, and it can be a fun exercise in creativity.

Want to learn more about using Pinterest to promote your business, brand or blog? I learned everything I needed to know about Pinterest from the self-paced online course, Pindepth Advanced. It includes four hours of video training, actionable workbooks, a private Facebook group, and a ton of bonuses (including two bonus courses, Content That Converts and The Subscriber Rush). Plus, you get lifetime access. Every time Pinterest rolls out new stuff, more information is added to the course, so you’re constantly updated. Check out the details here.

I’ve love for you to connect with me on Pinterest. And just click here if you’d like to get a free printable workbook and other goodies to help you run your online biz, along with updates on the other posts in the series.