If you’re new to Pinterest and haven’t heard of Rich Pins, you’re likely missing out on one of the best native features to help boost engagement on all your pinning activity. In this post I’ll show you how to enable Rich Pins (for blog articles) and in the process explain:
- What Rich Pins are.
- How they can boost engagement on your pins.
- How to enable Rich Pins.
What Are Rich Pins?
Rich Pins differ from regular ones because they provide extra information to anyone who sees them in searches or in their Pinterest feeds.
They are categorized into 3 different types:
- Article.
- Product.
- Recipe.
The detail pulled into a Rich Pin varies according to the categorization of the pin.
- Article Pins: Display the HTML title and description metadata (the element shown as the page description in search engine results ages) as well as the Pinterest author.
- Product Pins: Display the price, availability and product description.
- Recipe Pins: Display the title, serving size, cooking time, ratings and ingredients. They also show if a recipe is paleo, vegetarian, vegan or gluten-free.
The extra information Rich Pins show comes from the landing page they link to. These extra details “enrich” the pin, hence the imaginative name!
The great thing about Rich Pins is the extra detail they provide updates automatically to reflect any changes you make on the linked article.
Rich pins are only available to Pinterest Business Account holders. If you have a General Account you won’t be able to take advantage of them. Find out how to create a Pinterest Business Account here.
The Benefits of Enabling Rich Pins
The principal benefit when you enable Rich Pins is that they stand out far more compared to regular pins.
Look at these examples:
The Rich Pin shows the verified author of the pin. You see this in search results and feeds and it makes the pin stand out compared to its neighbour. It’s perhaps a small difference. However, such differences can help a Rich Pin encourage a close-up or click more often than it’s regular counterparts can.
We can see another benefit when clicking for a close-up:
This is a close-up view of one of my Article Rich Pins. You can see the title and meta description pulled from the page it links to, as well as additional author details about my Pinterest account.
The meta description adds more text to the detail in the Rich Pin. This helps to make it more relevant for Pinterest searches and might help it rank higher in results. The enriched detail may also increase the likelihood that someone will click a link to visit your blog.
A third benefit is that enriched information in a Rich Pin always stays with the pin. If someone repins it, your titles, meta description and author details remain with it and cannot be changed by the repinner.
Finally, your Rich Pins update whenever you modify the title and description on the pages they link to… even if they’ve been repinned by someone else!
How to Enable Rich Pins for Articles in WordPress
There is a two step process for how you enable Article Rich Pins as a WordPress blogger:
- Add required metadata.
- Apply for Rich Pins.
You can add required metadata manually using Open Graph or Schema.org into the header of each of your pages. However, it’s very fiddly and and manual… I’ll neither explain it here or recommend it if you’re not comfortable with code.
It’s far easier to use a WordPress plugin such as Yoast to handle the heavy lifting of creating the metadata Pinterest requires for Article Rich Pins.
Here’s how you do it.
Enabling Article Rich Pins With Yoast.
Step 1
Install the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress and activate it.
Step 2
When Yoast is activated, use the navigation menu on the left hand side of your WordPress admin area and go to SEO > Social > Facebook and click the Enabled button. This automatically adds the required Open Graph metadata to your pages.
Validating Your Metadata
Step 3
Now you need to validate one of your blog posts in Pinterest. Head over to the Pinterest Validator and add your post URL (but not your homepage) into the “Enter a valid URL” field.
Next click the Validate button. This submits the URL for Pinterest to check your page metadata to see if it everything look okay.
If the page validates without problems, you’re all set to move onto the next step. If ther’s a problem, the validator will explain what it is so you can investigate and fix any issues with your page and resubmit it for validation.
Step 4
When your URL correctly validates and the page reloads, Pinterest will invite you to apply for Rich Pins. You’ll be presented with 3 options to tell Pinterest which protocol you’ve used to build your metadata. If you’ve used Yoast as described in the steps above, choose the option for HTML tags (Open Graph) and click Apply Now.
Now it’s simply a waiting game until Pinterest approves your application… it usually takes around 24 hours. I should mention that once approved, Pinterest will automatically validate any Rich Pin from your domain, so you don’t have to use the Pinterest Validator again!
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Check out my review of Tailwind App for Pinterest.. a tool to super-charge ALL your Pinterest activity!
Summary
- Rich Pins are only available to Pinterest Business Account holders.
- They show additional information to pins from your domain that you add to your Pinterest Boards.
- Ruch Pins can make your pins stand out against regular pins in the Pinterest feed by displaying your Author profile beneath them.
- They tend to command higher engagement that regular pins.
- When you’ve successfully validated your page code once, Pinterest will automatically validate any page on your domain.
- When you click for a close-up of a Rich Pin, you’ll see the HTML title and meta description for the actual page the pin links to. You’ll also see further details about the Author account.
- If you modify the title and meta description of your page, any Rich Pin linking to it updates with the changes you’ve made.
If you’re currently trying to grow your Pinterest account, you should check out this Pinterest marketing strategy!
That’s all for now!
Paul
If you’re struggling with how to enable Rich Pins drop me a message in the comment section below.
Hi Paul,
I have also followed these steps and cannot get rich pins to work.
Any ideas?
Hi Ginny. Send me a message via my contact form and put your site and Pinterest details into it and I’ll take a look for you.
Hello,
I noticed a problem with my pins.
After going through the whole procedure to validate my site, my pins appear normal and not rich. ( I have a WordPress website and I used Yoast SEO)
I can’t understand the reason for this.
I also check with the validator and everything is fine but still my pins look normal.
Hope you can help me.
Thank you
Hi Andrea. I’ll drop you an email and see if I can help.
Hello Paul, I have the same problem – when I do the Rich pin validator it show that the author is missing although the author is displayed on my posts and I have set up all the social media accounts on WordPress. Did you manage to resolve the issue with Sarah?
Hi Jacomie. I’m not sure if Sarah has fixed it as yet but I’ve just sent her a mail to check. I’ll drop you a message when I learn how it’s going.
Hey Paul, Thanks this is a really great post on how to use rich pins!
I have followed these steps and still am unable to get the metadata to pull through on my pins. Any ideas on how I can fix this?
Hi Sarah… I’ve had a quick look and I think I see where the issue is. I used the Pinterest Validator to check one of your pins and it validated successfully, but without an author name.
I can see you’re running Yoast on your WordPress blog. Go in to Yoast settings in your admin dashboard (SEO > Social) and check if you’ve added the full URL for your Pinterest account.
Hey Paul, Thanks for your reply! I have already added my Pinterest homepage URL in Social > accounts. Any other ideas why the meta data still isn’t pulling through?
I’ll send you a mail so we can explore offline.