The best tool for finding Pinterest keywords is PinClicks
Real Pinterest search volume, the cluster expansion that turns one phrase into a month of pins, and the trend view almost nobody opens. With live numbers I pulled while writing this, and an honest correction about the one thing it does not do.
If you only take four things from this
Pinterest is a search engine
People type words into it and expect results. That single fact is why a keyword tool beats a prettier pin every time.
Volume is the metric that exists
PinClicks gives you real Pinterest search volume across more than 20 million keywords. It does not give you a competition score, and anybody telling you otherwise has not used it.
One keyword is not a strategy
The value is the cluster. One seed phrase expands into thirty related searches, and thirty related pins pointed at one post is what makes traffic compound.
Direction beats volume
A keyword growing 35% year over year at 56,000 searches is a better bet than a flat one at 100,000. The trend view is the part most people never open.
Why a keyword tool beats a better pin
Pinterest is a search engine wearing a mood board costume.
People go to Pinterest and type words into a box. That is a search, and searches have volume, and volume can be looked up. Everything about how you should make pins follows from that one fact.
Which is why the prettiest pin in a niche nobody searches loses to a plain pin sitting on a phrase 8,000 people look for every month. The design decides whether they click. The keyword decides whether they ever see it.
The Pinterest search bar will show you which phrases exist. It will not show you how many people search them, which are growing, or where you currently rank. That gap is the entire job of a keyword tool, and it is the reason I pay for one.
Six steps, with real numbers
Start with the plainest possible phrase
Open PinClicks and type what a real person would type. Not your clever title. The plain words.
This is where most people go wrong before they have done anything. You search the phrase you wish people used, get a low number, and conclude the topic is dead. The topic is fine. The phrasing was yours, not theirs.
Keyword Explorer covers more than 20 million Pinterest keywords, and it is showing you Pinterest volume specifically. That is not the same as Google volume and the two disagree constantly. A topic can be quiet on Google and busy on Pinterest, or the reverse, and building Pinterest content off Google data is one of the most common expensive mistakes I see.
Read the volume honestly
Here is what came back when I searched small apartment storage while writing this page.
The top phrase is small apartment storage ideas at 8,285 monthly searches. Then 6,841. Then 1,524. Then it drops fast into the hundreds.
That shape is normal and it is the point. People expect one giant number. What you actually get is one decent number and a long tail of small ones, and the long tail is where the traffic lives, because almost nobody is making pins for a keyword with 154 searches a month.
A number in the hundreds is not a failure. Twelve keywords at a few hundred each, all pointed at one post, beats one keyword at eight thousand that you will never rank for.
Expand the seed into the cluster
This is the step that changes your results, and it is the reason a tool beats the search bar.
Pinterest’s own search bar gives you suggestions. It gives you no numbers. So you can see that a phrase exists, but not whether anybody searches it, and you end up making pins on vibes.
Expanding a seed inside PinClicks gives you the phrase list with volume attached. When I expanded meal prep it came back with meal prep for the week at over a million monthly searches, meal prep ideas at 586,746, meal prep lunch at 104,204, meal prep aesthetic at 56,235, and on down through high protein, breakfast, snacks and aldi.
Now look at what that list actually is. It is not a keyword list. It is a content calendar. Each of those is a pin, and several of them are posts.
Check the direction, not just the size
This is the feature almost nobody opens and it is the one that would change your year.
Volume tells you how big something is today. Trends tell you which way it is going, and those are completely different decisions.
When I pulled the twelve month history on three keywords: meal prep aesthetic was up about 35%, from around 41,700 to 56,235. Meal prep ideas was flat, sitting near 586,000 the whole year. And small apartment storage ideas was stable, up about 4%.
Read those three as a strategy and they say different things. The rising one is where to build, because demand is arriving faster than supply. The flat giant is where not to start, because everyone competing for it got there first. The stable small one is a dependable brick in the wall.
A keyword growing 35% at 56,000 is a better bet than a flat one at 100,000, and you will never see that from a search bar.
Judge whether you can actually win it
Now the honest part, and it is the thing most articles about this tool get wrong.
PinClicks does not give you a competition score. There is no difficulty number, no colour-coded easy or hard rating. If you have read that somewhere, including in an older version of this very post, that was wrong and I am correcting it.
What it gives you instead is better, it just takes one more click. Top Pins and Stats shows you the pins already ranking for that keyword along with a Pin Score for how they are performing. Account Explorer shows you who owns them. Pin annotations show you the official Pinterest keyword tags on those top pins, which is as close to an answer key as this platform gives out.
So you judge competition by looking at it. If the top pins are all from enormous accounts with huge scores, that keyword is not your first move. If they are from accounts your size, or the pins are old and ugly, that is an opening.
This is a better method than a difficulty score anyway, because a single number cannot tell you that the top five pins are four years old and badly designed. Your eyes can.
Turn the cluster into pins, then track it
One post. Ten to twelve pins. One per keyword in the cluster. Same destination, different overlay text, different image, different description. That is the whole mechanic, and it is why one good post can carry traffic for a year.
Put the anchor keyword in the pin title and the description. Put the variant in the overlay text. Do not stuff every keyword into every pin, because you are not trying to rank one pin for twelve phrases. You are making twelve pins that each rank for one.
Then close the loop. The Keyword Rank Tracker tells you where your pins are actually landing for those keywords over time. That is the difference between doing research and running a system, and it is the single feature that makes PinClicks worth paying for rather than just interesting.
The full week-by-week version of this is written up separately. Here is the Pinterest workflow.
The PinClicks links on this page are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you if you sign up through one. I pay for it myself and it runs behind every Pinterest post on this site. The numbers on this page were pulled from it in August 2026 and search volumes change, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a fixed figure.
One search, twelve pins
This is exactly what came back when I searched small apartment storage. Nothing removed, nothing dressed up.
| Keyword | Monthly Pinterest searches | What I would do with it |
|---|---|---|
| small apartment storage ideas | 8,285 | The anchor. This is the post. |
| small apartment storage | 6,841 | Same intent, second pin, different overlay text. |
| small apartment storage solutions | 1,524 | Third pin. Nearly the same page, different words. |
| small apartment kitchen storage ideas | 1,270 | Its own section, or its own post if you have enough to say. |
| small apartment storage hacks | 857 | Pin it. Costs you ten minutes. |
| small apartment bike storage | 443 | Narrow, but the person searching it knows exactly what they want. |
| small apartment shoe storage | 352 | Same. |
| small apartment bathroom storage ideas | 268 | Same. |
| storage in small apartment | 225 | A phrasing variant. Free pin. |
| small apartment living room storage | 177 | Free pin. |
| small apartment storage ideas bedroom | 167 | Free pin. |
| small studio apartment storage ideas | 154 | Free pin. |
Twelve keywords, one blog post, twelve pins. The four at the top would take most of the traffic. The eight underneath cost about ten minutes each and are the reason the post is still working next year.
Direction beats size
Same tool, different tab. These are twelve month histories on three real keywords.
| Keyword | Monthly searches | Direction | My read |
|---|---|---|---|
| meal prep aesthetic | 56,235 | Rising, up about 35% over the year | Build this now. It is growing and it is not saturated yet. |
| meal prep ideas | 586,746 | Flat across twelve months | Enormous and static. You will not outrank the incumbents from a standing start. |
| small apartment storage ideas | 8,285 | Stable, up about 4% | Dependable. Not exciting, and it will still be there next year. |
Every part of it, and what it is for
| Feature | What it gives you | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword Explorer | Search volume for 20+ million Pinterest keywords | The core of it. Type a phrase, get the real monthly search volume, and see every related phrase Pinterest maps to it. |
| Top Pins and Stats | A Pin Score for how a pin is actually performing | This is how you judge whether a keyword is winnable. Look at the pins already ranking and at who owns them. |
| Account Explorer | Keyword rankings, pin and board stats for any account | Point it at somebody already winning in your niche and read their keyword map. Faster than guessing what works. |
| Keyword Rank Tracker | Track where your pins rank for a keyword over time | The part that turns this from research into a feedback loop. You find out whether the pin you made actually moved. |
| Pin Trends Chrome extension | Live stats on pins, boards and URLs while you browse | Real-time numbers on whatever you are looking at, without leaving Pinterest. |
| Pin annotations | The official Pinterest keyword tags on any pin | Pinterest tells you what it thinks a pin is about. Reading those on top-ranking pins is the closest thing to seeing the answer key. |
| Flagged pins alerts | Warns you when a pin is AI-modified or de-linked | Pinterest sometimes strips the link off a pin. Without an alert, you find out months later when the traffic never came. |
| Bulk pin stats | Batch analysis across a board or a set of related pins | For when you are auditing a whole board instead of one idea. |
The Pinterest Traffic Engine
The full bundle. Keyword research, pin design, the batching system, and the posting rhythm that turns one blog post into a month of traffic. Everything I actually run, in one place.
- The keyword and cluster method in full
- Pin templates and the overlay formulas
- The batching system for a month in one sitting
- Yours to keep, no subscription
The written versions
Pinterest Power Stack
Turning one post into many pins. The cluster method on this page, written out step by step.
Pinterest on Purpose
The no fluff system for Pinterest traffic and passive income, start to finish.
Five ways people waste good research
- Researching with Google data and pinning with it. Pinterest search volume and Google search volume are different numbers for the same words. Use the one that matches the platform you are posting on.
- Chasing only the biggest number in the list. The 586,000 keyword is owned. The twelve keywords in the hundreds are not, and together they are more traffic than you will ever take from the giant.
- Looking up one keyword and stopping. One keyword is one pin. The cluster is the reason the post keeps working. If you are not leaving with ten phrases, you stopped too early.
- Never opening the trend view. Volume is a snapshot. A keyword up 35% and a flat one at the same size are completely different bets, and you cannot tell them apart from the number alone.
- Treating research as a one-time task. Without the rank tracker you never find out whether any of it worked. Research without a feedback loop is just reading.
Want the batching part? Batch 30 days of pins in one day is $27 →
Where to take this next
The full weekly workflow
One post into thirty days of traffic. The Pinterest workflow →
Pick the lane first
Keywords only compound inside one subject. Pick one profitable niche →
Fit it into a real day
Where the research block actually goes. The daily routine that pays →
What it can add up to
The arithmetic behind traffic-driven income. What makes $10,000 a month →
About PinClicks specifically
Is there a free version?
There is a five day full-access trial of the Plus plan with no credit card required, and a free keyword tool limited to the top 20,000 interest keywords. The free tool is enough to see whether the numbers change how you think. It is not enough to build clusters with, because the long tail is exactly what gets cut.
Does PinClicks show keyword difficulty or competition?
No, and this is worth being clear about because the claim circulates. There is no competition score and no difficulty rating. You assess competition by looking at the pins already ranking through Top Pins and Stats and at who owns them through Account Explorer.
Can I just use Pinterest’s search bar instead?
You can, and it will tell you which phrases exist. It will not tell you how many people search them, which ones are growing, or where your pins rank. That is fine when you have one post. It falls apart the moment you are trying to build a system.
How is this different from a Google keyword tool?
It is reporting Pinterest search volume rather than Google search volume, and the two genuinely disagree. Plenty of topics are quiet on Google and busy on Pinterest. Using Google data to plan Pinterest content is the most common expensive mistake in this whole subject.
How many keywords should one post target?
One anchor and eight to twelve variants. Each variant becomes its own pin pointed at the same post. More than about twelve and you are usually splitting hairs rather than reaching new searchers.
How long before Pinterest traffic shows up?
Longer than social and shorter than Google. Weeks to a few months for a pin to settle into its position, and then it can keep working for a year or more. That slow start is exactly why researching before you make anything matters so much here.
“The design decides whether they click. The keyword decides whether they ever see it.“— Lori Ballen
Want my one person business field notes?
The three buckets I run everything through, and how I decide which traffic sources are worth the work. Short, free, and the same map I use.
Let’s design your keyword clusters together
Research is easy to do and easy to do wrong. In group coaching we pull your actual keywords, build the clusters around your real posts, and set the pin schedule so the work turns into traffic instead of a spreadsheet.
Join group coaching →Look up one phrase today. Take the twelve variants. Make the pins.
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Hey there! Just a quick heads-up: some of the links on this site are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase (including through the Amazon Associates program), at no extra cost to you. Occasionally, products featured here are gifted by brands.
I also use AI tools to help research and create content for you! While I love sharing strategies to help you succeed, please remember that everyone's journey is unique—individual results vary, and there are no guarantees. Thanks so much for stopping by!
