When I first started trying to figure out rich pins, I felt like my head was swimming. It’s SO confusing! BUT, thankfully, I’ve figured it out and it’s actually really simple!
To break it down for you, a rich pin is basically a pin that pulls the metadata from your site to create a more noticeable pin.
Now, I know some of that was technical jargon, so let’s break it down into something a little easier to understand.
What exactly IS a rich pin?
Think of it like the Super Hero of pins, because unlike typical pins it is more than just an image with a link!
A standard, regular pin will just have an image that links to the source of the pin. If there is a description, it is added by the person that pinned the image. With a rich pin, when something is pinned from your site it will automatically pull meta data for you, which means it will have the pin image AND it will automatically auto-populate a description and bolded title for your pin.
That means when someone pins from your site, Pinterest will automatically transfer over the title of the blog post and a short description about the article. The title is also bolded and will stand out more amongst the sea of other pins.
So WHY is this such a great feature to have? I’ll give you 3 really good reasons!
1- A title is automatically going to be added to your pin, and the title is bolded.
No matter who pins it (whether it’s you, or someone else that visits your site!) That means that no matter who pins or re-pins your pin, it’s going to stand out when others are scrolling through Pinterest, making it more likely to be seen. Plus, you can add keywords and other search phrases to your title, upping the SEO-factor!
2- Speaking of SEO… To be successful on Pinterest, you really need to utilize SEO strategies on the pins from your site.
Having rich pins helps you achieve this with very little work! Because you can control the pin title and description that is added to every piece of content on your site, you can stuff in a bunch of keywords and other good SEO practices. Then when someone else pins from your site (or your content is re-pinned) those pins will automatically have all of the SEO they need to be successful.
3-Because you get to add SEO to any pins that come from your site easily and automatically through rich pins, it means you’ve more eyes on your pins and clicks to your site.
With increased traffic to your site, your site becomes more valuable! If you sell products, you’re more likely to improve sales. If you’re a blogger or influencer having a good amount of traffic is a great way to earn money. Brands will pay more for sponsored posts, and you’ll have more opportunities for people to see and click your products and affiliate links.
Are there different types of Rich Pins?
Absolutely! Which is fantastic, because it helps you to build the most effective type of pins for your content possible!
Rich pins can be set up for recipes, articles, products for purchasing, and apps. They function slightly differently for each type of rich pin. For example, recipe rich pins will actually populate the entire recipe into the description for your pin. Talk about a delicious feature!
**Note- if you don’t own your website, you will not be able to utilize the Rich Pins function for now. However, it’s great to understand the concept and why they are important. Especially if you do plan to own your site at some point and will be implementing rich pins!**
If you want to learn more about each individual type of rich pin, there is a really great explanation you can find on Pinterest’s Rich Pin page here.
So how exactly do they work??
With any website you own, you will have the option to add some metadata. You can do this for every blog post, article, and page on your site.
Think of metadata like the “hidden info” about your site that you don’t necessarily see on the actual webpage, but if you were searching in a search engine (like Google or Pinterest), the results would show off that info as the description for that webpage.
Adding metadata is easy. For WordPress users, you can use an SEO plugin, there are hundreds of them! I personally love Yoast SEO! It’s a free plugin (with a premium upgrade option, but you won’t need it!)
Yoast SEO is available on WordPress, but there are a number of other SEO plugins available whether you use WordPress or not. For example, if you use Squarespace, they have their own SEO tool built in. You will be able to add everything you need to improve your SEO and rich pins using any of the basic functions from the majority of these tools, no matter which one you choose or which platform you’re on.
If you are using a platform like Blogger, or if you are using a free platform, you will be able to add a little bit of SEO to your blog posts manually, since you likely won’t have access to a plugin. You can do this by:
- adding related keywords throughout your blog post
- adding keywords to your blog post title
- adding a description for your post.
- update the URL to be simple and include keywords.
- make your article readable with plenty of headers to break up your text into readable sections
To understand how rich pins work, you will want to install that SEO plugin, whether you choose to use Yoast SEO or something else. Because I use Yoast, I’ll use that as the example here but the process will be similar no matter what SEO tool you use.
Once you have your plugin installed, you’ll notice whenever you create a post you’ll be able to add some additional information about your blog post (or article, product, etc.) such as keywords or a short description of your article. You can also update the title that is seen in search results here.
This section is important because what you enter into those fields becomes the metadata for your site. When you add a title and description into the Yoast SEO section for that article, it adds it as metadata to your post. Then when someone creates a pin from your blog post, that data will populate automatically into the newly created pin, creating a rich pin.
How do I activate Rich Pins?
This seems to be the million dollar question because it can be really confusing, but it’s actually super simple!
To enable rich pins, start by adding metadata to at least one of your webpages or blog posts. Copy the URL for that page, and then go to Pinterest’s Rich Pin Validator.
Paste the URL into the Pinterest Rich Pin Validator box. Then click validate.
Once you click validate, Pinterest will review the URL and enable rich pins for you.
You do not need to do this for every article on your blog or site! You just have to do it ONE TIME, on one page you’ve added metadata to, and click submit. Once it’s done, rich pins will be enabled for your whole, entire site. Any previous pins linking to your site will also start to update for any of the pages you’ve added metadata to.
On the Pinterest site it currently says to give them up to a couple of days, but typically the process only takes a few hours. I believe mine was validated within ten minutes!
For rich pins to work, you need to have metadata for each page. If you have already built up a library of blog posts, you will want to start working on adding metadata to all of them if you haven’t.
Can I analyze my rich pin performance?
YES! When you review your analytics, it’s easy to tell which pins from your site are rich pins versus which ones are not. You just go to the main analytics page in the overview section, then under the “pin type” column you will see a little R if the pin is a rich pin. If it is not a rich pin, this space will be blank.
I hope that helps you understand a little bit more about what rich pins are, how they work, and how you can use them for your blog or website!
If you want to learn more about Pinterest marketing strategies, I have a really cheap e-course full of all of the best marketing strategies for Pinterest, and I share all of my secrets for how I consistently get over 10 million views a month, drive my site traffic, and earn money. Check it out here!
Interested in more Pinterest tips? Check out this post with 9 tips to transform your Pinterest strategy, or this post about some huge Pinterest marketing mistakes that might be sabotaging your growth and how to avoid them.
XXOO
Sunny