How to Enable Pinterest Rich Pins and Set up Pinterest Business account

What are Pinterest Rich Pins? Benefits of Rich Pins

When you scroll down the Pinterest feed, you might not realize that some Pinterest pins are just regular pins or images. While another set of pins are the so-called Rich Pins. So what are the Pinterest Rich Pins and how do you know the difference? And why do you need to get Rich Pins activated as soon as possible?

Rich Pins are a type of organic pin that just pass some additional information from the website the image was saved from.

These types of pins will show information about your product, list of ingredients to recipes, and other title or meta description without needing to click the pin directly. These pins will get important information directly from your blog post from your site.

Since Pinterest users want information upfront, then rich pins will be beneficial for you.

The most recent Pinterest’s official definition of Rich pins for you:

Rich Pins, unlike normal pins, provide more context about an idea because they show extra information directly on a Pin. There are four types of Rich Pins: app, product, recipe and article

So, depending on the type of Rich pin that apply best to your site, the additional information attached to your pins will be different. This is definitely a must-have for your Pinterest marketing strategy. The information you can put on a simple pin on Pinterest is very limited. Having rich pins help you introduce your brand more properly.

For most of the websites and blogs, the Article Rich Pins will be the default type of pins to help increase brand awareness. These Rich Pins attach to the image the date of the publication, metadata right on the pin, SEO title and description of the page it’s saved from (both are seen when you close-up the pin, in the feed you currently see only the pin description).

This is just the visible part of the Rich Pin data taken from your website. Obviously, Pinterest also takes into consideration a lot of other info coming from your website, when they decide how to rank your pin on search results.

What do Rich Pins Look Like? Types of Rich Pins

If you are wondering how other types of Rich Pins look like and how rich pins work, here are a few screenshots.

Product Rich Pins bring with them the product price and title and product information from the shop website. You can still also edit and add a title on your own, though. You will basically write more information about your product for Pinterest users to see.

Recipe Rich Pins are taking the information you inserted into your recipe plugin, this usually includes list of ingredients, recipe rating, cook time, and serving info. This means I will be able to see the ingredients before I click on the pin itself.

Recipe Rich Pins are giving the users the generic view of your recipe, for example, the type of diet this recipe belongs too (vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, etc.), the time required for this recipe, etc. Depending on this data, the user will take a decision whether to visit your site for more details, diet preference, etc. or not.

Why do you need to use a business account on Pinterest?

If you want to use rich pins for Pinterest growth, you need a business account. The first reason you need to use a business account on Pinterest instead of a personal type of account is to comply with Pinterest Terms of Service. You don’t want your account to be closed for using a personal profile for commercial purposes, right? Essentially, if you plan to make money from your Pinterest account in any way, you should use a business account.

When you create a business account or convert your personal account into a business type, you CAN use your business name as is, and not pretend that you are a person with a first name Star and the last name Bucks.

Other advantages of Pinterest Business Account

If you want to use Pinterest for business and commercial purposes, and reach your target audience or more people on Pinterest easily, you have to use a business account. This is a set of features only available for business accounts:

• Pinterest analytics;
• Pinterest ads;
• You can attach a website to your account and enable rich pins. 

Setting Your Pinterest Account  

I suppose most of you already run an account associated with your blog or online business. But for those of you who are using their personal account to promote their site, I would recommend 2 things:

1. Create a separate account for personal use because you don’t want to confuse Pinterest’s algorithm with random pins you save for yourself.
2. When you create an account associated with your blog, make sure it is a business account. If it’s not, make the conversion to a business account. It’s a very simple and quick process that will have a great influence on your Pinterest success.

If you are creating a brand new business account, you need to follow the link

https://www.pinterest.com/business/create/

If you are making a conversion from a personal to a business account, use this page:

https://www.pinterest.com/business/convert/

The next two things you will have to make in your account – are to verify your website and to enable rich pins. I know that some bloggers, especially those who are not very tech-savvy, experience difficulties with these two steps. They both can involve editing your website’s HTML code and that’s what’s recommended on Pinterest’s official instruction.

But don’t worry because I will show you an easier way and it will be done in no time!

How to verify your site on Pinterest with Yoast SEO plugin & Add Rich Pins

There are several ways to verify your site on Pinterest, but I think for most of the bloggers who don’t want to mess up with HTML code and other methods, the easiest way is to use Yoast plugin (Free version includes everything you need site verification).

First, get into your profile settings on Pinterest and scroll a little bit down to the section “Claim Website”:

After you add your website URL and click on Confirm website button, you will see a popup window like the one below:

Don’t close this pop-up window while you are completing the site verification process.

If you haven’t installed the Yoast SEO plugin yet, just do it now because it’s the best SEO plugin at the moment, and it’s free. This plugin will help you to verify your site and also on the next step it will allow you to enable Rich pins on your Pinterest account.

Get to the SEO tab in your WordPress dashboard. Find the tab Social in there and you will see the Account screen.

For those users who can’t see the “Social” tab, you probably need to check if the advanced settings are ON, as explained by Yoast SEO team here.

You need to add here your Pinterest account and “Save changes”.

Go ahead and fill in your social accounts, or at least your Pinterest business account. Click “Save Changes.” Now head to the “Pinterest” tab:

Remember the pop-up window Pinterest showed you? You need to copy from there the entire rich pin meta tags on that page and Save changes.

Now you need to get back to your Pinterest account and click the “Finish” button.

You should see now that your site has been confirmed. Pinterest will show a green checkbox next to the Website claimed, which means everything is great!

We can move to the next step.

How to Enable Pinterest Rich Pins (for WordPress)

Having Rich Pins enabled is important for several reasons. Rich pins are a great way to boost your pins more and get engagement. I personally have enabled rich pins on my Pinterest account!

But more importantly, you can enable your rich pins at no additional cost! Here are some benefits of rich pins:

• your posts will show up on Pinterest with titles and this text, if you use keywords in your titles wisely, helps you to rank in Pinterest search;
• Pinterest puts more trust into pins that are associated with a fully verified and confirmed website. Enabled rich pins increase your reach and engagement.

Yoast SEO plugin will help you again to avoid messing up with your HTML code

Get to the “Social” section in your SEO tab in WordPress.

Click the Facebook tab, and make sure Open Graph metadata is enabled. Your screen should look like this:

Next, you will need to validate the website on Pinterest. You can do so by going to the Rich Pins Validator and pasting a URL from any post on your blog into the “rich pin validator”. Make sure you are adding a post URL and not the main page. It’s been tested by many people and works way better if you validate a post URL.

After applying, you should see “Thank You” notification from Pinterest telling you that they will review your account and let you know via email.

Pinterest should let you know within 24 hours if you are approved or not!

They will email you with a stated approval or explain why you were not approved.

After your site has been approved, and you turn rich pins on, Pinterest validator will return results like this:

Pinterest Rich Pins Not Working?

After you applied for rich pins on Pinterest, in most cases it will work properly without further efforts. Rich pins are approved pretty quickly. However, I’ve seen several cases of my students when rich pins were not working and they had to contact Pinterest support as well as their web hosting providers.

You see, rich pins not working, in my practice, is an issue on the side of your hosting provider or even more often, your SSL certificate.

What usually happens is that your site is already verified, you even might have received a response from Pinterest support saying that they can’t guarantee that rich pins will be working or it’s working. This is a canned response they send to every website owner to tell basically that the problem is not on their side and they will not investigate further for each website that has some issue preventing the rich pins from being scaped.

So, how you can detect such issues to have more arguments when you contact the support of your hosting provider.

First, check which issues can be detected when you use Pinterest pin debugger. You just need to provide a URL of any post from your blog and see which errors Pinterest points you to.

Second, if you Pinterest doesn’t give you any specifics about the cause of the issue, try to use Facebook debugger or Open Graph debugger. The latter usually gives the most specific information about errors on your site preventing any metadata from being scaped. You can screenshot those warnings and errors and ask your hosting provider for support. They might end up sending you to your SSL certificate provider’s support, but I think it’s always easier to start with your hosting provider.

Set Up Rich Pins Using Rich Pins Validator

You will need to verify your Rich Pins automatically before they appear on Pinterest, according to Pinterest Developers.

A way to set up your rich pins include:

1. Choose any page on your site that you’ve added metadata to. Enter your chosen URL below and click Validate.
2. Correct any problems you see with your metadata.
3. Select one of three options depending on how you marked up your page:
4. HTML Tags, if you used Open Graph or Schema.org formats.
5. Shopify, if you have a Shopify site.
6. Click Apply now. Your Rich Pins will show up within the hour.

Note: You only need to validate and click apply for one link on your site to enable Rich Pins across your whole domain.

How To Disable Rich Pins?

Disabling Rich Pins doesn’t take much time and is not a non-reversible process. You don’t need to un-claim your website in your account settings, you don’t need to contact Pinterest support if you want to turn rich pins off.

You only need to add one short line of code to the head of your site. What happens next is Pinterest can’t access your rich pin data and stops showing it for all your pins. Your old pins will keep showing rich pin info for a few days (probably, it’s some cache on Pinterest or in your browser). In about a week, all your pins, new pins and old pins, will show up on Pinterest without rich pin data.

Here is the code snippet you need to add:

<meta name="pinterest-rich-pin" content="false" />

In most of the premium WordPress website themes, there is an easy way to edit the head of the website. If you are not aware of any simple way to do it in your theme, you could use a plugin Head & Footer Code to be able to edit the head section sitewide.

If you prefer to check the instructions on Pinterest’s developer documentation, you can find them here.

Why Disable Rich Pins?

For some types of Rich Pins, there is an ongoing debate whether the additional info provided in the Rich Pins is reducing the click-through rates to the websites.

For example, the Recipe Rich Pins provide a lot of information in the pin, such as ingredients, cooking time, type of diet, etc. and then add the headline or title to that list of information. Does it help users to make a decision to click-through to your blog? Sure, it does. But in some cases, the info in the pin is detailed enough so that users don’t even need to click-through to read your post.

In other cases, users might find one trigger word in the Recipe Rich Pin description and decide not to visit your site. For example, they might see some optional ingredient they don’t like, and just close the pin without looking into your recipe details. While you could have in the recipe description a note that this ingredient is optional, they will never know because they already moved to the next pin.

This topic is an ongoing debate among bloggers, especially in the food niche. Some bloggers have disabled Rich Pins and seen an improvement in their Pinterest traffic. Others haven’t seen any improvement after disabling Rich Pins.

If you are a food blogger, I recommend you explore this topic further, ask some people in your niche what is their experience. You may even try to experiment and disable rich pins for a month and see if this gives you a boost in Pinterest traffic. After all, if the experiment doesn’t show good results, all you have to do is remove this code snippet and your rich pins will be back.

I don’t see any reasons for bloggers in other niches to think that rich pins are taking away their traffic. But if you already tried this and it was helpful, please share with us in the comments to this post, the results of your experiment.

HOW I USE PINTEREST FOR MY OWN ONLINE BUSINESS AND MY RESULTS

My site is just a little over 1 year old, I started with a 0 following Pinterest account and by the 10^thmonth of blogging, I reached 172,000 monthly pageviews to my blog, with about 90% of traffic coming from Pinterest. So yes, my traffic got better on Pinterest!

I started my second blog in Feb 2018, and the new blog momshealth.co already hit 74,000 monthly pageviews in less than 90 days! And again, almost all the traffic comes from Pinterest. My pins make and do the work for me.

If you are interested in growing your Pinterest traffic fast or getting your article or blog post discovered, you can get yourself set up for success with my Pinterest SEO Traffic Secrets course. It’s over 6 hours of video training packed with my personal know-hows and Pinterest hacks – from SEO, affiliate links, and more!

I can guarantee that at least 50% of the Pinterest tips and tricks I share with you in the course, are absolutely exclusive and you will not find them in any other Pinterest course.

If you don’t need to grow fast and don’t mind working at your 9-5 job for a lot longer, you can totally keep reading my emails and posts because I also share tons of free advice. It’s just a matter of how FAST you want to grow your blog and income.

Did this instruction help you? If you are still in the middle of the process and need to get back to this post, just save THIS PIN below to your Blogging board on Pinterest.