She renamed her image files and tripled her reach

She renamed her image files and tripled her reach

A candle maker came to me frustrated. Her pins looked gorgeous but pulled 1,200 monthly impressions, flat for months. We didn't touch the design. We changed how Pinterest read the pins.

Her files were named like IMG_4471.jpg. We renamed each to the actual search phrase before upload — soy-candles-for-small-apartments.jpg — and wrote the same phrase as the first line of every title, not buried mid-sentence.

Ninety days later she sat at 3,800 monthly impressions. Saves went from roughly 40 a month to 130. Pinterest's algorithm leans hard on the first few words and the file metadata to decide what a pin is about, and hers had been saying nothing.

Takeaway: Pinterest can't see your beautiful image — it reads the text around it first. Front-load the keyword in your filename and the opening words of your title, before anything else.