Rich pins are pins that have more information than your standard pin. Instead of just having a short description underneath, these include your blog post title, a description underneath, and a link to the source with a cute little icon next to it. Essentially they give a pin more context, making it more likely to get shared, repinned, and go viral!
Pinterest has four different types of Rich Pins: Product Pins, Recipe Pins, Article Pins, and App Pins. For most of us, we’ll be utilizing the Article Pins and Recipe Pins the most! Since implementing Rich Pins on our Pinterest accounts, we’ve noticed a surge in growth, followers, and more traffic coming back to our blogs. We’re sure you’ll see an uptick in the number of people viewing your pins which is awesome!
So, how do you set up Rich Pins? If you’ve looked on Pinterest’s site, it sounds really confusing. The first step talks about adding metadata—what?! Even for someone techy like myself, this was a bit confusing, but there’s good news. It’s actually not that hard. Follow these steps and you’ll have your own Rich Pins set up in no time!
1. make your account a business account
Even if you decide to not set up Rich Pins (which you totally should!!!!), converting your Pinterest account to a business account will give you valuable information and analytics about what pins are performing well and you’ll get access to promoted pins too. Pinterest even has its own handy board that’ll give you more tips as a business owner! You can only set up Rich Pins if your account is a business account, so if you’re running into problems with the steps below, make sure you’ve done this first!
If you haven’t converted your account to a business account or set up a new business account, follow the instructions right here to make it happen!
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2. Install Yoast SEO
We’ve talked about the Yoast SEO plugin many times before! It’s an amazing plugin for boosting your SEO and it also adds that tricky metadata for you—phew! Once you’ve installed this plugin and activated it, navigate to the settings on the backend of WordPress. It’s called ‘SEO’ and is usually located towards the bottom of the left-hand navigation.
Under the Yoast Dashboard, click on ‘Features’ from the top navigation and scroll down to ‘Advanced settings pages’ and make sure it’s enabled. This will enable the metadata that Pinterest is talking about. Much easier than trying to stick some code in somewhere, right?!
3. validate your rich pins
Once step one is complete, you’ll need to validate your rich pins. Don’t worry, it’s not a scary process. Simply visit Pinterest’s Rich Pin Validator. Click on a recent post, not your homepage, and copy the URL, then drop it into the box and hit ‘Validate’.
(Psssttt…we also made a handy Pinterest Audit Checklist help you do just this! Click below to get it, as well as access to our Free Resource Library with other helpful downloads, too!)
4. apply for rich pins
Once you hit ‘Validate’, you should receive a message letting you know that your rich pins have been validated! Next, click ‘Apply Now. You should see a pop-up with your blog’s domain and ‘HTML Tags’ selected—simply hit ‘Apply Now’ and you’re done! It can take a few days for Pinterest to approve your application and after it does, all of your pins will show up as Rich Pins (you don’t have to do this for every new post—woo hoo!)—even when someone else pins them from your page. Pretty cool, right?!
do you have rich pins installed yet? let us know if you have any questions below!