I got this question via email today and thought it was probably a universal question:
Question: How could I utilize this for my local lawn mower repair business or my local taxi business?
Answer: Let’s break down the value of Pinterest to local businesses into two sections. First let’s discuss the SEO benefits, and 2nd let’s discuss the community engagement
Local Business SEO
I hate to break this down into two parts, but Pinterest pins can be found by searchers on Google. And they can help your website’s rankings improve.
Google returns Pinterest profiles and pins in search queries. That means if you include your city name(s) in the About Section of your profile and in your pin descriptions, they’ll show up in the local search results.
And the pins linking to your website will help improve the search ranking of your website. Get a few repins by Pinterest users and you’re likely to see a jump in your local rankings.
You can really reap huge SEO benefits if you first upload all your images to Flickr and your website. Then vary your pinning from one to the next, making sure that you also upload some images directly to Pinterest.
Also when you create your Google Pages profile and it asks you to upload photos or provide the url of photos, include some from your Pinterest page as well as your website.
Local Community Engagement
When Chilly Billy’s Ice Cream in Minneapolis decided to join Pinterest, they decided to do it for purely engagement purposes. They knew customers of their’s were on Pinterest and so they opted to be there as well.
The difficult part of Pinterest for local business owners will be seeing how to talk about themselves with images alone. Answering your question about a lawn mowing business, I think you could really dig deep into the creative side of yourself.
Social engagement comes in when you repin the images of others in your local area. When you “vote” on others photos by pressing the Like button, and when you comment on their photos creating engagement. Use Pinterest’s (poor) search tool to find others in your area.
Lawn Mowing Business on Pinterest
Lawn mowing is about beauty and curb appeal. I could see a great Pinterest board and blog with pictures of landscaping, great sidewalk designs, golf course grass, blog posts about improving curb appeal to sell your home, trim ideas, groundcover ideas, methods on killing weeds and grubs, preventing moles and other creatures. I think you’ve got a lot to work with. Pinning or writing anything that would enhance your status as a front lawn expert would be good for your business.
Taxi Business on Pinterest
And the taxi business is probably even easier. In a town like Nashville there probably aren’t a lot of taxi companies effectively competing for the top spot on Google. I would take pics of all the cool stuff in Nashville for that Pinterest board. Celebrities homes, cool architecture, iconic buildings, neat signs, back alley restaurants, tourist locations.
An entire Pinterest board dedicated to everything that makes Nashville awesome would be great. You could create boards for each of the small neighboring towns as well.
In both of those examples, make sure you use the names of the cites that you serve in the descriptions. And make sure to edit each pin so they link back to the appropriate local business site where they can get the contact information.
Got any examples or other ideas about promoting local businesses on Pinterest? We’d love to hear them. If you haven’t seen our “Making Money on Pinterest” video, please check it out. You’ll really get a thorough understanding of what Pinterest is all about.