Rich pins are a fantastic way to boost the success of your pins on Pinterest. This is mostly because (1) it gives Pinterest users a little more information about the article or product that was pinned, and (2) each pin updates as your site updates. Confusing? It was to me too. Let me walk you through this.
What are Rich Pins?
First off, let’s look at what a pin looks like that does not have rich pins. The actual image of the pin would look the same, but here is what you’d see below it:
Notice that there isn’t much info on the source of the post. In this case, there isn’t even a description, but sometimes there is a description and it’s just whatever alt text title you give an image when you add it to your site. Or it’s whatever description a pinner ads to it (but who adds their own descriptions anyway!?).
Here is what a pin from a site with Rich Pins enabled looks like:
You’ll see it shows the source of where the post was from, the description I gave the post when I wrote it, an option to read the article, and a publish date. The nice thing about Rich Pins is that if I ever update the description of this article, it will update the description on all pins connected with this article.
There are 4 main types of pins:
- Article
- Recipe
- Product
- App
Article Rich Pins
You saw an example of an article pin above. This will include the article title, description, and article source. Here is another example:
Recipe Rich Pin
A recipe pin has a list of ingredients. If at a glance the ingredients look good to a Pinterest user, he/she could click Make it and be taken directly to that recipe on your site:
Product Rich Pins
A product pin features the item, description, and price. What’s nice is as you might change the pricing of a particular product on your site, all pins connected to that product will update in price too:
{Image Source: Pinterest Business}
App Rich Pin
An App rich pin provides the Pinterest user with an opportunity to click Install and go directly to the app store to download the app:
{Image Source: Pinterest Business}
How to Enable Rich Pins
First of all, before you do this, you want to make sure you have switched your Pinterest account to a Business account if you haven’t done so already.
OK, now let’s get to it! What’s nice about enabling rich pins is you don’t need to do it for each article on your site. You do it once and it is activated for all articles on your site. Here is how you can enable the Rich pins:
Install Yoast SEO Plugin (from the same plugins page you were at earlier, you could search for Yoast and install)
From your WordPress Dashboard sidebar, select SEO and then Dashboard
Click on the Features Tab:
Under where it says Advanced Settings Pages, click Enable
Next click Save Changes
Now click on SEO int he WordPress sidebar menu. You’ll see that a different menu appears now. Select Social:
Select the Pinterest tab. Copy the code you used when you confirmed your site with Pinterest. If you don’t recall that code, remember that you can find it by going to Settings > Insert Headers and footers and copy the script there–don’t copy the entire script, only the script that appears in between quotation marks after where it says Content=
Copy that code into the blank space next to Pinterest Confirmation, then select Save changes
Go to the Rich Pins Validator. Scroll down to the section where it says Enter a valid URL, enter a link to one of your blog posts and click Validate (NOTE: you can’t just link up your homepage–you need to pick one of your blog posts).
If all goes well, you should get this message:
Click Apply Now. You’ll then receive a confirmation message:
Their email came to me relatively quickly after applying:
And that’s it! It’s incredibly simple!!!
Do you need a little more guidance on setting up your Pinterest page? I highly recommend my Pinterest Checklist. Fill in your info below to get your copy:
FREE Step-by-Step Pinterest Checklist
In this Pinterest Checklist, I break down everything that you need to do to maximize your reach on Pinterest & boost blog traffic.
