Episode #2 Show Notes

In our second episode of Inspiring Bloggers with TwelveonMain, we’re publishing the second part of our conversation.

This is the second part of our conversation with Sara of Twelve on Main. She lets us see her stats and her Pinterest behind the scenes. We get into what is working and what isn’t in this episode and we look at her SEO report. 

00:00 Inspiring Bloggers Episode 2 Pinterest
– how to pin 10 pins per post, with frequency |
– Whats working for our client with 1million+ followers on Pinterest 

13:42 Guided Recipes 

15:10 Homepage Naming for SEO

Don’t forget to review and subscribe to catch episode #3 where we dive into planning, time management and running a side business.

Episode #2: Transcript

Inspiring Bloggers Episode 2

Cathy: [00:00:00] Welcome to WP Barista’s Inspiring Bloggers podcast. So today’s episode is a continuation of our first episode where we talk to Sarah at 12 On Main. We go over a little bit more of her stats. We go over her SEO report. We talk about guided recipes and the difference between a regular recipe and a guided recipe.

We talk a little bit about conversion call outs and how to use the block editor. For S e o, so I hope you get a lot out of it. Please leave a comment or a rating that other people can be inspired by Sarah’s journey.

The other thing I looked at was I did a report and your on page SEO is fantastic.

So your core web vitals could be a little bit better. Like it’s slow on some places.

And usability means like the tapping spots isn’t big enough. Your fonts aren’t big enough. Or the contrast. Like you use a light gray on a white, they don’t like that.

Sara: Yeah. I’ve noticed with the theme change that we [00:01:00] did, that the links are mostly like an orange color and I’ve gotten an error saying that might not be visible. So I’ve been meaning to go in and change it to a different color.

Cathy: So these are all great. See your H tag you’re using them properly now.

Sara: I need to go in and old blog posts and get my H2s and some meta descriptions and stuff, where does that lie in, in priority,

Cathy: when it comes to this nitpicky stuff, I would say not much.

If you, I had a choice to spend time on Pinterest, which seems to be a huge traffic driver or fixing metatags. I would a hundred percent go for Pinterest.

Sara: have been like I’ll get to that when I can get to that.

Cathy: Exactly. Exactly. I wouldn’t worry about it at all. So you have a ton of keywords. Like this is an amazing amount of keywords that are waiting to be bumped up.

Or bump down. If you get competition, which now that AI is coming out, you’re gonna get a lot more competition. So what you do has to be really done well. These are the people linking to [00:02:00] you. Again, Pinterest, Bloglovin,

Some usability stuff. I would do something on this because usability, some people are putting way too much emphasis on core web vitals, but you could put a little bit more. In your case, just because you should pass.

Sara: What are things that I would need to do for that?

Cathy: I’d have to do a deeper dive in here I don’t say it’s the most important, but six seconds is too long.

This looks like you’re not using the WP Rocket that we installed. If we were, this wouldn’t be a problem. It should take care of this automatically.

I’ll just write it down.

Legible font sizes. That’s just turning that up a little bit, which you already know how to do.

Sara: should I do that? What is a good font size that I shouldn’t move it up to.

Cathy: Google says it has to be 18 pixels now. Which seems quite big actually.

Sara: It does

Cathy: social is good. You don’t have a Facebook pixel, but you don’t really need it unless you’re gonna be doing Facebook ads.

So the next thing that I would do for sure is go through and [00:03:00] have a content list in a spreadsheet. Do you have a spreadsheet of all of your posts?

Sara: No I don’t.

Cathy: And then go through and, Delete the ones that have those link things. The link parties. Yeah. Anything that’s really bad content.

Sara: Do I just need hard delete those? Or do I have to redirect them?

Cathy: Here’s a thing to think about. If Google has. Say your size is in this category, so they give you X seconds of crawling time. What do you want those crawlers to see if they have a limited number of time. So go through and get rid of everything that you don’t want them to see.

Do it a few at a time. Don’t do it all in one day. And if you can, if they’re like all soup links, we’ll then forward it to your soup categor.

Sara: Okay.

Cathy: If you can forward it, do that. But if you can’t, then just delete them because I doubt very many people are linking to it. Do you have links from Pinterest going to these things?

Sara: I [00:04:00] don’t think so. Not really.

Cathy: because if Pinterest links to them, it will tank your Pinterest account as well. Cause that is seen as a very low quality page and Pinterest is now caring.

Okay. The other thing that I would do is go through your pins.

Okay. So this is a group one. That’s fine. But I would say that’s ridiculous. You are gonna get penalized for that. 3,800 pins. There’s no way you have 3,800 posts on your site.

Sara: Yeah, probably not.

Cathy: So now it’s totally different than how we used to it

and then when we did a post, we would put up a pin and pin it to all the relevant boards. But now it’s looking at your whole profile, not at the board. So now if you do that, that one day you’ll have six pins. All the same on different boards, but to Pinterest, it looks like you have six pins all at once.

Very spammy.

Because it’s not looking per board, right? It’s looking at what you [00:05:00] upload. So we actually upload only unique pins. We do 10 per post and spread them out every three days, even if they’re to different boards. So we don’t pin back to the same link ever with the same pin, and we don’t ever pin more than twice a week to the same link.

And then of course, every pin is different. We can use the same picture and make 10 different pins cuz we have templates on Canva and then we just, enlarge one section of the artwork or yeah, move it around a little bit. But it’s totally changes how these are done. And unless these are driving traffic, I would get rid of them.

Sara: Yeah. See pinterest manager that I had before, she would go through and they. They said, yeah, let’s archive these ones. And so I have quite a few that are archived, but then we’ve kept, we had kept the ones on that were still doing something, but I just don’t know what’s still doing something.

Cathy: And the other thing [00:06:00] is when you look at your PIN profile, I actually started mine over because it was so bad because I had pins that you guys would like, not pins relevant to my topic. Yeah. So Christmas stuff. WP Barista is not about Christmas. Yeah. But that was the theory then.

So I started over because I, it would take too much time to delete everything. So when you go through here, look at your profile as this is 12 on main. So if you are not about any of these things, you gotta remove.

Sara: Yeah, I have, I’ve gone through it quite a bit and I am about all those things. . And I’ve tried to add like different boards that, to make it so there’s more places to pin, so I have a breakfast board, but I also have a pancake recipes board. Cause I have a lot of pancake recipes.

Cathy: What’s your ratio of pins to your site versus other sites?

Sara: No, I don’t pin very much to other sites right now because I have read that they didn’t care anymore. [00:07:00] They did. And then also I’ve noticed on my, my stats that like my highest pins are other people’s pins.

Cathy: Yeah. Isn’t that ironic? So now we don’t pin anybody else, but we want them to pin ours.

Sara: I know. And I’m like I still do pin other people’s stuff. It’s just more manual. I’ll just jump in and pin a couple things

Cathy: if you think oh, my readers would love this or this totally belongs on this board, but yeah, I’m with you. So this like, why are there 5,000 pins? There’s gotta be duplicates on this. The duplicates have to be erased.

Sara: So do I have to go through and try to find the duplicates?

Cathy: I know. I don’t know how to do it. We searched high and low for an app, so I’ll search again cause it’s been a couple of years since I did that, like 2021 to try and find an app to help us find duplicates and delete them because of course there was duplicates. If a pin did well, we would reppin it over and over and over again.

Sara: My question is how do I know if they’re the exact same pin or does it matter if they’re a duplicate?

Cathy: No, you don’t. [00:08:00] If it looks the same, it’s the. To Pinterest, so when it comes to the source we can pin the same source because you could have an article with five different rooms and have lots of inspiration that you would want to keep on Pinterest. That would not be spammy.

However, in order to make sure Pinterest knows we’re not spamming, we only do the same source twice a week. But we never ever pin the same pin. Come and see Mosaic tiles and focus on that, and then the next one would be, come and see pattern tile they have to be visually different. And then pinned apart if it’s the same source. That’s how we’re doing it.

Sara: And you’re seeing, and you’re seeing good, like good results from that,

Cathy: not jumps? No, I don’t think anybody’s seeing like a real. Forward, but we’re not seeing declines. I don’t know. Is that as good as it gets? I don’t [00:09:00] know.

Sara: Oh, that’s disheartening.

Cathy: But the only ones that we have right now, we’re only doing five pins a day. So you can only hope to maintain that.

Like you’re not, and when you go from 30 pins a day to five, you’re gonna see a drop in traffic. Because it’s just not out there. Except if you’re being penalized for being spammy, then

I’ve emailed them. I just emailed them about, about a week ago and asked them about that. I wanna make sure my account was, not being shadow banned or anything. And they’re like, no, everything looks good. They just want new, unique content. And I’m like, I, that’s what I’m doing. But I did, I went through and deleted all my scheduler back in. January, everything I had scheduled and I started this new kind of way of doing it.

And so I went from pinning probably 30 pins to probably 10 to 15 maybe now.

You’re getting 10 new pins a day. That’s amazing.

Yeah, they’re, as far as this course I took, they are [00:10:00] considered new pins,

Sara: but I think the source is it might be almost every day that I’m getting, yeah,

Cathy: yeah, because you’re gonna have to give it at least four, five months to Yeah, I wanna say six to see a difference.

Sara: This lady that she’s a Pinterest manager that I’m taking this course from, or I took it from that’s what she does. She pins it. Yeah. They, and she said that they like, they’re, she’s got all stats that say it’s doing her, their accounts are doing well. So I’m like, okay, I’ll try that. Cause I’ve never done that where I would post it, it’s a different pin, but it’s, and it’s posting to a different board every

Cathy: my Pinterest manager says not to do that. Every other day they say is technically allowed, I think. But we do twice a week to be safe.

Sara: I’ve never done before, so I’m like, okay, I’ll try it. What do I got to lose at this point?. It’s funny because I have some blogging friends that are still doing the exact same thing that they’ve always been doing and having no issues.

Cathy: They haven’t been found out yet. It has to be. Are they still at the 200,000 and the [00:11:00] higher followers on Pinterest? I know we have one account that we’re managing that has over a million. He, the group boards are working for him, oddly, cuz they don’t work for anybody else.

So we’re not touching ’em because Yeah,

they’re working, but it’s very odd.

Yeah. Like it’s disobeying their own rules.

Yeah. And that’s what I think when I see some of my friends, I’m like, you’re, that’s still working for you, but it’s not working for me. No. Just do what they want

Sara: And what they want is so vague because when they say fresh pins, okay, but nowhere did I realize that it like, they don’t want you repinning,

Cathy: To me it makes sense to me, it makes sense because they want. What they want is unrealistic but I can see why they want it. They want people to stay on the site and get fresh inspiration every time they log in. So then they only want that one pin to be there once. I’m wondering if once, once they weed out all the scammers, because of course people are figuring out a way around it.[00:12:00]

But AI with imaging is, Smart. So they’re gonna figure out that you actually have the same pin. You’ve just switched a word or something, right? Yeah. And when they figure that out, I’m hoping that it becomes more like a gallery and they’re happy with not constant pinning, but the quality of the boards because that will actually keep people there and keep them creating their own inspiration boards and they want people on the app, which is why they’re focusing on video.

So repurposing any of the shorts that you do into idea pins is great. Even putting a bunch of galleries into, a little video in Canva

Sara: another thing, idea pins have not done well for me. They’ve dropped, they tanked impressions. They, so I put them all in a different folder and we hid them

I’ve not done well with idea pins. My impressions are up, my, my pin links are way down.

Cathy: It’s a numbers. I think though they wanna keep people in it, the more quality that you have [00:13:00] and the more inspirational photos that you do, like you play their game long term, it’s not gonna get you back to where you were.

Cuz we could all basically scam the system and it worked great. But it might be able to get you someplace in long term. That’s my hope for all of our clients.

Sara: I noticed on my recipes It’s on my Google search console that I get like some errors on my, mostly on my recipes. Let’s see if I can remember.

I’d get the emails from ’em and like page indexing issues, which I don’t know what that is. And then there was, okay.

I’m trying to find the email guided recipes, structured data issues.

Guided Recipes

Cathy: Okay, so here’s 10 that are invalid for guided recipes. Okay. Guided recipes are voice activated as opposed to regular recipes. So they give you these warnings, but it’s really unfair. They’re things like doesn’t have a video. Not every recipe that you have [00:14:00] has a video.

Now, if it doesn’t have an image, they won’t show it. So having an image is actually a thing.

See, 117, don’t have a video. Who cares? The ones that, these are the yellow ones. This one you actually do care about. I would go into here, find these 10. For some reason it doesn’t like the

Sara: so it’s the image in the recipe? Yeah. Okay. I’ll have to, okay.

Cathy: Just these ones. I don’t know why it doesn’t seem to like, down at the bottom is your recipe card.

Sara: Oh, so it doesn’t have an image. Okay. When I have like the questions or the links, I’m putting them in like my conversion callouts so that they keep it, so there’s not a chance for an ad to go in between.

Cathy: Don’t put them in conversion callouts unless they’re a conversion callout. Use the block the way they’re intended. Don’t use a block because it looks pretty it has to be a conversion block in order to work properly in the future.

Sara: Or instead of doing questions about sourdough, call out with frequently asked questions, and I’ll put all those on that so that they’re not separated and cause I get frustrated [00:15:00] when you have questions and then there’s ads in between all the questions

Cathy: where’s one that has your faq?

Sara: Okay, so my first couple of, like my most recent blog post, let’s see.

Homepage Naming for SEO

Cathy: Home is not good for seo. So go down here. Go down here into the SEO thingy, mi bob at the bottom of the page, and change it.

Change it right here. Just remove that title here and change the name. Okay. For now, you can go in and do something better. I just put 12 on main instead of home.

Sara: Yeah, I didn’t know that.

Microphone (HD Webcam C525): The end of this episode got cut off, but essentially we ended up discussing conversion callouts and how to use them properly for SEO in the future. And this goes with any block, not just conversion callouts. You wanna make sure that if you’re adding, say, A paragraph and you like the style of the page title, and you’d wanna put this title in the middle of your post.

[00:16:00] So you pick H one. So that it looks like that big, bold title that’s actually incorrect for seo. Now Google thinks that’s your page title. There should only be one H one in the page. So this is, you don’t have to know all the stuff about H one s and what should be there and what shouldn’t. What you have to know is that you use text the way it’s intended. So just cuz you like the way something looks does not mean that you should put it there.

If you like the way an FAQ looks, so you put it in there as an accordion, but it doesn’t actually have frequently asked questions, that’s a problem for seo. Put the text you want in there and get some help to make it look the way you want it to look, but only use the blocks for what they’re intended to be used for.

Now in this case with her conversion call outs, the FAQ was just a div, it was just a division In HTML terms, it wasn’t the [00:17:00] schema. That goes for FAQs. But there was a little toggle in the block that said, is this a frequently asked question? You’d click it to yes. And then it automatically changed the HTML to be SEO friendly.

So that was perfect in that case. And those are the conversion callouts by restored316. I think that was just about the end of this conversation. Next time, we have a great talk about getting it all done, how she’s prioritizing all the things that she has on her plate right now and what’s working and what is not.

We also talk about building a team and our kids graduating? It’s an interesting couple of episodes coming up for you. Don’t forget, please to leave a quick comment or a rating. It helps other people find the podcast so we can inspire more bloggers.

So if this is something that you’ve enjoyed, please let me know and we’ll keep following Sarah.

But for now, be encouraged and have a great week.