Pinterest has no keyword difficulty score.
No DA requirement. No competition rating. No metric that tells you this keyword is too crowded for a new account to rank for.
Every guide that covers Pinterest keyword research talks about finding the right keywords. Almost none of them explain how to evaluate whether a keyword is actually winnable for a blog that is three months old with no followers and no domain history.
That evaluation is the entire skill. And it does not require a single paid tool.
This is how I do it.
Why Pinterest Keyword Research Is Not Like Google Keyword Research
On Google, you use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to find keywords with high search volume and low keyword difficulty. The difficulty score accounts for backlinks, domain authority, content depth, and a dozen other ranking signals. You can make a reasonably informed decision about whether a keyword is worth targeting before you write a word.
Pinterest has none of that infrastructure. There is no keyword difficulty score. There is no domain authority metric that feeds into pin distribution. A fresh account pinning into a competitive keyword has a legitimate shot at appearing in those search results within days, in a way that a new blog targeting a competitive Google keyword simply does not.
That changes how you approach research entirely.
On Pinterest, low competition is not measured by a score. It is measured by what you see when you run the search yourself. The search results page is your keyword research tool. Learning to read it correctly is the skill that most Pinterest guides skip entirely.
The Four Places Pinterest Pulls Keywords From
Before researching keywords, it helps to know where Pinterest actually reads them from, because you need to place them in all four locations.
Pin title. The most prominent text signal on a pin. Pinterest weights this heavily for search matching. Whatever keyword you are targeting should appear in the title naturally.
Pin description. The secondary signal. As I covered in the descriptions post, Pinterest reads this primarily as an algorithm signal rather than displaying it to users consistently. It gives the algorithm semantic context around the title keyword. The full breakdown of how descriptions work is here.
Board title and description. Pinterest uses the board a pin is saved to as a contextual signal for the pin itself. A pin saved to a board called "Veggie Garden" gets an additional gardening context signal on top of whatever keywords are in the pin's own title and description. This is why board naming matters more than most people treat it.
Profile bio. A lower-weighted signal but still read by the algorithm for topical categorization of your account overall. The profile bio setup is covered in the account setup guide.
All four locations need to contain relevant keywords. Not the same keyword repeated four times. Related terms that build a coherent topical picture across your account.
Step One: Start at the Pinterest Search Bar
Open Pinterest and type your topic into the search bar. Stop before pressing enter.
Pinterest will show you an autocomplete dropdown. These suggestions are generated from actual user search behavior on the platform. Every suggestion in that dropdown is a real search query that real users are typing. They are also, by definition, keywords with confirmed demand.
For my gardening blog, typing "veggie garden" shows suggestions like:
- veggie garden layout
- veggie garden raised beds
- veggie garden ideas small space
- veggie garden for beginners
- veggie garden planner
- veggie garden container
Each of those is a specific keyword with a specific searcher behind it. The person searching "veggie garden for beginners" is different from the person searching "veggie garden raised beds." They have different experience levels, different setups, and different content needs. Each one maps to a different article on my blog and a different pin targeting a different audience.
Write down every autocomplete suggestion that is relevant to your content. These are your seed keywords. You are not choosing between them yet. You are building the raw list first.
Step Two: Press Enter and Read the Results Page
This is the step that separates useful Pinterest keyword research from the generic advice most posts give you.
After you have your autocomplete suggestions, press enter on one of them and look at the search results page that loads. You are not looking for inspiration. You are conducting a competition analysis.
What to look at:
How many of the top pins are from large, established accounts? Scroll through the first twenty results. Look at the profile names and follower counts attached to those pins. If the first twenty results are dominated by accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of monthly viewers, that keyword has established players. You can still rank there with consistent pinning, but it will take longer.
How recent are the top-performing pins? Pinterest shows a mix of new and older pins in results. If the top results are pins from three and four years ago that are still ranking, it means the algorithm has not found better, fresher content to replace them. That is a gap. A well-optimized fresh pin has a real chance of displacing an old one that the algorithm is serving only because nothing better exists.
How specific is the visual content? If you search a keyword and the results show generic stock photos with vague text overlays, the content quality is low. Low quality content from established accounts is still beatable by high quality content from a new account. Pinterest rewards pins that generate saves and outbound clicks. If the existing results are not doing that, your pin can rank above them.
What you are looking for overall: A keyword where the top results are not dominated exclusively by massive accounts, where some of the ranking pins are old and potentially stale, and where the visual quality of the results is uneven. That combination means the keyword has demand but the supply of great content covering it is not airtight.
That is a low-competition keyword on Pinterest. Not a score. A pattern you read in the results.
Step Three: Use the Guided Search Tiles to Find Specificity
After running a search, Pinterest displays a row of colored topic tiles below the search bar. These are called Guided Search tiles and they show the sub-topics that Pinterest has identified as highly associated with your search query.
Click through them.
"Veggie garden" plus "small space" is more specific than "veggie garden" alone. More specific means smaller search volume and a less crowded results page. For a new account, smaller and less crowded is usually better than large and competitive.
The guided tiles are Pinterest's own map of how users navigate from broad to specific within a topic. Follow that map. Every combination of a broad keyword plus a guided tile modifier is a potential pin keyword. Some of them will have very thin results pages, meaning almost nobody has created content targeting that specific combination. Those are the gaps.
Keep a running list. You are building a keyword bank, not choosing a single keyword to target. Different pins targeting different specific combinations means broader coverage across the topic with less head-to-head competition on any individual keyword.
Step Four: Validate With Pinterest Trends
Pinterest Trends is a free tool at trends.pinterest.com. You can enter any keyword and see a graph of its relative search interest over time.
Use it for two things.
Seasonal validation. Gardening content searches spike predictably in late winter and early spring. If you are publishing veggie garden content in October, the search volume context matters. Pinterest Trends will show you when a keyword peaks so you can time your publishing accordingly. For seasonal keywords, you want your pins indexed and circulating at least four to six weeks before the peak.
Trend direction. A keyword that shows growing search interest over the past twelve months is a better long-term target than one that peaked two years ago and has been declining since. Pinterest Trends shows this clearly. Prefer keywords with stable or rising trend lines over those in decline.
Pinterest Trends does not show absolute search volume. It shows relative interest on a scale of zero to one hundred. A score of seventy does not mean seventy thousand searches per month. It means that keyword is at seventy percent of its historical peak interest. Use it for direction, not for volume estimates.
Step Five: The Ads Manager Keyword Tool (Free, Rarely Mentioned)
This is the least known method and the one that gives you the most useful data.
Go to Pinterest Ads Manager. You do not need to create or run an ad. Navigate to the campaign creation flow and get to the targeting section where you enter keywords. Type your keyword into the keyword targeting field.
Pinterest will show you suggested keywords and, in some cases, estimated search volume ranges. The volume data is approximate and the ranges are broad, but it is the closest thing Pinterest offers to an actual volume estimate. More importantly, the suggested keywords the tool generates are different from the autocomplete suggestions in the search bar. They represent how Pinterest's internal ad targeting system categorizes user intent, which is a useful secondary signal for organic keyword research.
Exit the campaign creation flow without publishing anything. No ad is created. No money is spent. You just used Pinterest's own advertising intelligence as a free keyword research tool.
The Framework I Actually Use
Here is the practical workflow for every batch of pins I create.
I start with the article I am pinning. I identify the main topic and two or three secondary angles the article covers. I run each one through the Pinterest search bar autocomplete and write down every relevant suggestion. I press enter on each and spend two minutes reading the results page, noting whether the competition looks manageable.
From those lists I pick three to five specific keyword targets per article. One broad term. Two to three specific long-tail terms from the guided tiles. One niche combination that showed a thin results page.
Each pin going to that article targets a different keyword from that list. The pin title changes. The description angle changes. The board I save it to may change if different boards are more relevant to different keyword angles.
The result is five pins going to the same article, each targeting a different search query, each with a chance of appearing in a different set of results. That is five separate surface areas for the same piece of content without writing a single new article.
This is the same workflow that produced the distribution behind 200,000 impressions in four months on a fresh account. The keyword research was not done with any paid tool. It was done with the Pinterest search bar, the guided tiles, Pinterest Trends, and ten minutes per article batch.
The full account of how that growth actually happened, including which board drove most of it and when the compounding started, is documented in this post: How I Got 200,000 Pinterest Impressions in Under 4 Months.
The Mistake That Wastes the Most Research Time
Targeting keywords that are too broad too early.
"Veggie garden" is a real keyword with real search volume. It is also a results page dominated by accounts that have been pinning gardening content for years with tens of thousands of saves on individual pins.
A new account targeting "veggie garden" is not going to displace those results in month one. Possibly not in month three.
"Veggie garden small space apartment balcony" is a real keyword too. The results page is thinner. The existing content is less polished. The searcher is highly specific about their situation, which means a pin that directly addresses their exact constraint will get a higher save and click rate than a generic gardening pin.
High saves and click rate on a specific long-tail keyword builds your account's authority faster than low engagement on a broad keyword you cannot rank for yet. Start specific. As your account builds authority through consistent saves and outbound clicks, the broader keywords become reachable. Trying to skip that progression is what most new Pinterest accounts do, and it is why most of them plateau.
What Low Competition Actually Means in Practice
A low-competition Pinterest keyword is one where:
The results page is not completely locked up by ten accounts each with over a hundred thousand followers. Some of the ranking pins are old enough that fresh content could displace them. The visual quality of the existing results is uneven, meaning some of the ranking pins are genuinely weak and are only there because nothing better targets that query. The guided tile combinations for that keyword produce results pages that are even thinner than the broad term alone.
None of that requires a tool to assess. It requires spending three minutes looking at what is actually ranking and asking whether your content can do better.
For a gardening and wellness blog in month one with no followers and no domain history, the honest answer to that question for a broad keyword is usually no. For a specific long-tail combination where the results page shows four-year-old pins from mid-sized accounts with low save counts, the honest answer is often yes.
Find those gaps. Pin into them consistently. Let the specific keywords build the authority that opens up the broader ones later.
Kamal Deen builds niche blogs and grows them with Pinterest and SEO. Everything documented in this series comes from his own accounts with real numbers.
More in this series:
- How I Got 200,000 Pinterest Impressions in Under 4 Months (Fresh Account, Real Numbers)
- How to Set Up a Pinterest Business Account for a Blog (Step by Step)
- Your Pinterest Descriptions Are Being Read by an Algorithm, Not a Human
- What 1,000 Hours of Blogging Actually Produces (A Realistic Case Study)
