Your profile is the first thing Pinterest reads to understand what your account is about. It is also the first thing a potential follower or client sees when they land on your page.

Check these three things:

• Your profile name: It should include your main keyword. "Sarah Johnson" tells Pinterest nothing. "Sarah Johnson Interior Design Portland" tells Pinterest exactly who you are and who should see your content.
• Your bio: It should clearly explain what you do and who you help, with one or two keywords included naturally.
• Your profile photo and website link: Your photo should be clear and professional, and your website link should be correct and working.

This takes two minutes. If your profile name has no keywords in it, that is your first fix.

Go through every board on your account and ask yourself one question. If someone searched for this exact board name on Pinterest, would it bring up relevant results?

A board called "Things I Love" does nothing for your SEO. A board called "Modern Kitchen Design Ideas" does a lot. Every board name is a keyword opportunity, and most accounts waste almost all of them.

While you are here, also check whether your boards are relevant to your niche or if there are random boards that have nothing to do with your business, whether every board has a description written with natural keywords, and whether your most important boards are at the top of your profile.

Pinterest is a search engine. If the right keywords are not showing up across your account, your content will not appear in the searches that matter. This is one of the most common reasons accounts stop growing.

If any of these are blank or too generic, that is where your keyword problem is coming from. Fixing your keyword placement across these four areas alone can make a noticeable difference in your impressions within a few weeks.

Pick your last 20 pins and go through them quickly. You are not looking for perfection. You are looking for patterns that are hurting your performance.

Ask yourself: are the images vertical (horizontal images always underperform on Pinterest)? Is the text on each pin readable at thumbnail size? Does each pin have a description or is it blank? Are the descriptions written with real keywords or just generic captions? Does each pin link to a specific page on your website and not just your homepage?

If more than half your pins have blank descriptions or horizontal images, those are your two biggest quick wins right now.

This is where you find out what is actually happening on your account. Open your Pinterest analytics and look at these four numbers. Do not get distracted by anything else in the dashboard. These four tell you everything you need to know.

Impressions: Are they going up, staying flat, or dropping? Dropping impressions usually means a posting consistency problem or a keyword issue. If you have not posted in a while, this will always drop because Pinterest pulls back on distributing content from inactive accounts.

Outbound clicks: This is how many people are clicking through to your website. If your impressions are healthy but your outbound clicks are low, your pin design is the problem. People are seeing your pins but not feeling compelled to click. This is a design and headline issue, not a keyword issue.

Top performing pins: Which pins are driving the most clicks? Look at what they have in common: format, topic, design style, keyword. That pattern is what you should be doing more of. Most accounts have 3 or 4 pins doing the heavy lifting while everything else sits flat. Finding those pins tells you exactly what your audience actually responds to.

Boards with the most saves: Which boards are getting the most engagement? These are the topics your audience actually cares about. If you are not posting enough content in these areas, that is a missed opportunity sitting right in front of you.

Ten minutes in analytics will tell you more about what is working than any amount of guessing.