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Pinterest Board Names 101
Pinterest is an incredible platform for driving traffic to your website, but it all starts with your boards. Strategically coming up with Pinterest board names can help your content get categorized more efficiently, making it easier for users to discover your pins.
How Do Pinterest Boards Work?
Your Pinterest board names should align with commonly searched terms. It’s more important to clearly communicate the purpose of your boards to Pinterest’s algorithm than to showcase personality in their titles. This ensures that Pinterest knows exactly who to send your content to.
The truth of the matter is a Pinterest profile is not often viewed by Pinterest users. It is essential in a Pinterest marketing strategy, BUT it is because it properly categorizes and identifies your content to the Pinterest algorithm not because people view it and follow you from it. While this does occasionally happen (hence why I recommend using it to warm people up further in my Bare Pinimum Profile Set Up E-book), it’s not common.
How People Actually Find Your Pins
It all goes back to the root of what Pinterest is: a search engine not a social media platform. Pinners come to the platform to find valuable information, inspiration or to shop. They do not come to chat with people or even to find people to follow on Pinterest. Often, they engage with the valuable and interesting information or save it to read later and THEN convert to followers or subscribers.
Remember, as a business owner, your goal on Pinterest is to help the algorithm categorize your content more quickly and accurately so that they can serve your content to your ideal readers or followers.
Pinterest boards act like buckets to categorize your content into. They speak to the algorithm to say “here’s what you can expect from the content I Pin here” and that helps the search engine put your content into the correct internal buckets.
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How to Name Your Pinterest Boards
The most common mistake I see when it comes to naming your boards on Pinterest is treating it more like a personal account than a Pinterest business account. As a regular-degular user, you can be silly or cutesy. As a business, you want to be direct and specific.
Here are some good guidelines for naming your boards:
1. Be Direct
- Avoid vague board names like “My Favorite Things” or “Cool Ideas.”
- Opt for both descriptive names like “Modern Minimalist Home” or “Weeknight Dinner Recipes”
2. Do a Mix of Specific Board Names and Broad Board Names
- Create more broad boards like “Living Room Decor” or “Dinner Recipes” AND
- Go more niche by adding adjectives that pertain to your specific brand i.e. “Modern Organic Living Room” and “High Protein Dinners”
3. Include Keywords
- Think about what people are searching for on Pinterest and use those phrases in your board names. Make sure you’re coming at it from someone who’s looking for your content without always knowing exactly what they’re searching for. For example, if you’re a fashion blogger, “Casual Work Outfit” vs. “Business Casual” might be something you weigh and research before settling on the right one for a board title.
- Use Pinterest’s search bar identify relevant keywords in your niche
3. Match Board Names to Your Content Pillars
- Do include board names of topics you actually create content about on a regular basis
- Do not include board names of content you have never created content on or rarely post about. This was best practices back in the day to match your ideal reader avatar rather than your actual content log. Nowadays, it’s better to hone in on your content.
4. Keep it short
- Long board names can get cut off in search results and on your profiles. Aim for under 30 characters if possible.
Examples of Optimized Board Names
Here’s how you can improve cutesy board names into ones that Pinterest can actually understand and categorize for you:
- “Put a Ring on It” ➔ Engagement Rings
- “Getting Fancy” ➔ Formal Dresses
- “Yummmm” ➔ Easy Dinner Recipes
- “One Day” ➔ Hawaii Wedding Inspiration
What Are Group Boards on Pinterest?
Group boards are boards that have multiple profiles connected to it and collaborating on it. These different users can add to the board and the board shows up on every collaborators profile.
Are Group Boards Still Useful in 2025
In my humble opinion, not really. They were much more effective in the past, and, while some group boards can actually provide great exposure and engagement, some are completely useless and can really affect your profile. If you come at group boards from the perspective we’ve been talking about: as a way to categorize content for the search engine, often group boards are not able to stay that niche and that high quality.
Group boards can get filled with low quality content therefore garnering low engagement therefore not helping your content get seen.
I do know some Pinterest pros that love group boards, so I do think it’s niche specific and group board dependent BUT as a Bare Pinimum rule, I say skip the group boards and focus on the boards you can optimize and fill with your own content.
What are Secret Boards?
Secret boards on Pinterest are boards that exist on your profile and can have pins saved to them BUT no one else can see them. These are a great for business owners because it’s a way to hide content that might not help with their business profile optimization.
For example, if you’re a food blogger on Pinterest, but you previously had a board all about summer outfit ideas (whether for personal use or because it was something you thought you had to do in past years), you can just toggle the secret board and that is officially unseen by the Pinterest search engine.
That way you can continue to pin to that board personally without it affecting your business profile and overall Pinterest profile optimization.
How to Make a Pinterest Board Private?
P.S. These instructions are when accessing Pinterest from your desktop.
- Head to your profile and find the board you want to make secret
- Click the pencil icon in the bottom right corner
- Under “Settings,” check “Keep this board secret”
- Click the red “Done” button
Pinterest Board FAQ’s:
How Do I Change Names of Boards on Pinterest?
- Head to your profile and find the board you want to make secret
- Click the pencil icon in the bottom right corner
- Type in a new name
- Click the red “Done” button
Do I Need Pinterest Board Covers?
Yes, you need board covers, but no, you don’t need those fancy custom ones. All you need is to select a relevant image from the board itself to make the cover. I like to check that these are updated every year or so, but otherwise, these are not a mandatory thing for a Pinterest profile to perform well.
How many Pinterest Boards Should I have?
My Bare Pinimum recommendation is 10 boards, but it’s really dependent on your content (both the amount of backlogged content you have and frequency in which you post). You just want to make sure you have enough boards to cover the buckets you create content about that are relevant for Pinterest. Start with just enough to cover and add as you go and see how your boards perform.
Should I Make a Brand Board?
I always recommend a catch all brand board that’s named your business name. This serves as portfolio of your content for the rare occasions someone ends up on your profile.
It can also be useful for sending to people on social media or via your website for a visual content bank.
Other Useful Tips for Pinterest Profile Optimization:
- Bare Pinimum Profile Set Up E-Book has everything you need to know about getting your Pinterest profile up-to-date and as a great foundation for your interest marketing strategy
- How to start from scratch with a Pinterest Business profile
