May 14, 2026
Day 2 of BrightonSEO April 2026. Martijn Hoving and I sat down with Boluwa Olojo in the podcast corner an hour after the morning sessions wrapped.
She’d given a talk the previous day. Her opening claim: Pinterest is not social media. Her proof: an account she built in September 2025 that now has 1.4 million monthly views and 99 followers.
That ratio doesn’t happen on Instagram. It doesn’t happen on LinkedIn. It doesn’t happen on any platform that rewards social connections and follower counts. It happens on Pinterest because Pinterest is a search engine. On search engines, your content reaches people whether or not they know you.
Boluwa has been making this argument since September 2025. She pitched it to BrightonSEO in November. They accepted. By the time we interviewed her, she had the numbers to back it up on her own account.
Why isn't Pinterest a social media platform?
The distinction matters structurally, not just semantically.
When you open Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, you're looking at people you follow: friends, colleagues, brands you've opted in to. The feed is built around connection. The platform's job is to keep you there as long as possible. Every major social network (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X) optimizes for dwell time. They want you scrolling.
Pinterest is built differently.
When you open Pinterest, you have a specific intent: a wallpaper color, a guest bedroom layout, a barbecue setup, a holiday wardrobe. You type it into the search bar. Pinterest returns a visual catalog of results. You find something that works, you click through, and you leave. The platform considers that a success.
Ben Silbermann, Pinterest's co-founder, put it plainly at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference: "There are recipes to cook, there are products to buy, there are places to visit. And we figure our job is taking this huge catalog of ideas [...] and to show you the right ones at the right time. And I think that's a different thing than a social network."
That outbound-click priority is why Pinterest behaves like a search engine. A platform that rewards sending users elsewhere has to use search signals to decide what to surface. Relevance to query, not relevance to social graph.
Who is actually on Pinterest?
Pinterest had 619 million monthly active users in Q4 2025, growing 12% year-on-year. The demographic skew Boluwa describes is real: around 70% of users are women. Fashion, beauty, and home design dominate.
Martijn had already let slip that he uses it for housing mood boards; I had to concede that my awareness of it was similarly architectural.
The practical implication: if your customer is a woman in fashion, beauty, travel, food, or home design, they are almost certainly on Pinterest. If your customer is anyone with a home renovation project, they are almost certainly on Pinterest. The gender split doesn't mean Pinterest is niche: the verticals with the heaviest Pinterest usage also skew significantly female.
One data point cuts through the audience question entirely: 96% of Pinterest searches are unbranded. People come to discover, not to find a brand they already know. Discovery intent, not social intent.
For tech brands and gadgets, Boluwa notes Pinterest is growing there too. People sharing iPad setups, computer peripherals, and desk aesthetics.
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How do you run keyword research on a visual search engine?
The first step Boluwa recommends for any brand exploring Pinterest is trends.pinterest.com. It's free with a Pinterest Business account (free to create), region-specific, and shows exactly what users in a given country are searching for within each category.
You can check what's trending in fashion in the UK, what's popular in home furnishing in Australia, and what demographics are searching for which products.
Pinterest's own search bar is the second tool: autocomplete. Type a category term and Pinterest surfaces the long-tail variations people actually use.
I asked whether conventional SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush could plug into this.
The critical adjustment: Pinterest keyword strategy requires long-tail terms. Short-tail keywords don't work here.
The mechanism is identical to a competitive Google search. Bidding on a generic head term in a crowded vertical means competing with every pin that's ever been tagged with that word. Long-tail terms carry specific intent, surface to a more relevant audience, and face less competition.
Pinterest also gives you a description field and a tag system in the back end: keyword placement isn't limited to the image title.
What does 1.4 million monthly views with 99 followers actually prove?
This is the question I kept coming back to during the interview.
Boluwa's account. September 2025. Built to support her Pinterest-as-search-engine thesis. Eight months old. 99 followers. 1.4 million monthly views.
That ratio is the proof of concept. You don't reach 1.4 million people through 99 social connections. You reach them because 1.4 million searches surfaced content that matched intent.
This connects directly to a framework I've been thinking about for a while: Search Everywhere Optimization. The idea is simple: your customers are not just searching on Google. They're searching on YouTube, Reddit, Amazon, ChatGPT, and yes, Pinterest. Each of these platforms has a search mechanism, a discovery layer, and a content format that favors different approaches. Treating them all as distribution channels for social content misses the point. Each is a search surface with its own keyword signals, ranking logic, and audience intent.
Pinterest is the clearest example of a platform that looks like social media on the surface (it has profiles, followers, sharing) but operates entirely on search logic underneath. The brands winning on Pinterest are not the ones with the most followers.
They're the ones with the right keyword coverage, the right board architecture, and content that matches specific search intent.
Boluwa's 1.4 million monthly views are not a social media outcome. They're an SEO outcome. The platform just has pins instead of blue links.
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Why is Pinterest sitting in the wrong team?
I asked Boluwa a question I ask a lot in the agency context: how do you get a seat at the table for Pinterest SEO when the platform is already being managed by a creative agency?
The organizational problem is real. Most brands assign Pinterest to whoever handles Instagram. Creative agencies own the brief. The KPI is followers, reach, and engagement rate. This is the wrong model applied to the wrong channel.
Boluwa's recommendation isn't to create a dedicated Pinterest hire (most CMOs won't fund that). It's to assign ownership to someone who thinks in search terms: the content exec who also manages the blog, or a person with SEO instincts who can treat boards as topic clusters and pins as indexed pages. Pinterest needs its own keyword strategy document, its own KPI framework, and a person who understands that 99 followers and 1.4 million monthly views are the goal, not the problem.
The KPIs shift, too. Traffic to the site, outbound click rate, and saves (which signal future return visits and purchase consideration). Follower count is the one metric that tells you almost nothing about how the account is performing as a search surface.
The LinkedIn budget mistake Boluwa still thinks about
We always end the podcast with a fuck-up question. Boluwa doesn't have a Pinterest SEO mistake to share (the account is performing), but she has a vivid one from a different channel.
LinkedIn's ad UI has a UX problem: the lifetime budget and daily budget fields sit close together and behave similarly until they don't. Boluwa set a £400 lifetime budget for a LinkedIn test campaign. She was in a rush, leaving for a holiday in Spain. She set it up the morning she left.
She came back to a £400 daily spend.
LinkedIn gave her 50% back. She has not run LinkedIn ads since.
The mistake is on LinkedIn's interface, not on Boluwa's execution. Reddit confirmed she's not alone. But the lesson holds: new ad platforms deserve a second check before you board a flight. The interface is the hazard, not the strategy.
Resources
- trends.pinterest.com: free keyword and trend research tool from Pinterest; region-specific, category-level, shopping-focused
- Pinterest: the platform itself. The search bar autocomplete is a legitimate keyword research tool
- Sprout Social: Pinterest Statistics 2026: up-to-date MAU data, demographic breakdowns, and performance benchmarks
- Fortune: Ben Silbermann on Pinterest as a catalog of ideas: the founder's framing of Pinterest as a discovery engine, not a social network (Fortune Brainstorm Tech, 2015)
Listen to the full conversation
The full SEO Cast interview with Boluwa Olojo was recorded live at BrightonSEO April 2026 on Day 2. She covers the full Pinterest SEO methodology: keyword research, board architecture, pin strategy, KPI frameworks, and the seat-at-the-table challenge for SEO teams. The 1.4 million monthly views stat lands early and sets the frame for everything that follows. Listen on Spotify.
Head of SEO
As Head of SEO at Seeders, Hans helps companies scale smarter by combining search behaviour, paid performance, and conversion insights into systems that drive real growth. Recognised as a Top 20 Content Marketer by Small Business Trends, he brings a lean, experimental approach focused on building what actually works. Rather than relying on reports or one-off strategies, Hans focuses on creating marketing systems and tools that turn visibility into measurable business impact. His goal is simple: help clients move from scattered efforts to structured growth.
