If you've spent any time on Pinterest at all, it's likely that you've come across Rich Pins before.
We've done an in-depth post on Rich Pins on our blog before, so if you need a refresher, check it out! In a nutshell, Rich Pins are a little different from your regular ol' Pins because they give users on Pinterest more context about the page without them having to navigate away from Pinterest. They can get information such as recipe ingredients, product price, etc before they head on over to your website. Pretty handy, huh?
Here's an example of what a recipe Rich Pin looks like on Pinterest. The recipe ratings and ingredients really give you a good idea of what goes into this recipe and the quality of the post. That's a win in our book!
Today, we're going to talk about how you can set those up on your site! Spoiler alert: it's a lot easier than you think.
Make sure your site has the proper data
Pinterest needs to be fed the right kind of data in order to display your Pins as Rich Pins. So before you apply for Rich Pins and get them set up on your site, you'll have to make sure you have the required data added in.
This is where structured data comes in. Structured data is organized in such a way that machines (eg. Pinterest) are able to make sense of it. This data is included in the page source code and isn’t viewable on the front-end of your website.
Depending on the kind of Rich Pin you’ll be applying for, the required structured data on the page will vary. Let’s take a look at what’s needed for each type of Rich Pin.
Product Rich Pins
For product Rich Pins, your eCommerce solution will either need to provide that data themselves (Etsy and eBay’s Pins will provide the product information within 24 hours!), or another plugin that hooks into it will. For example, this addon for WooCommerce adds the necessary schema markup to your shop!
Article Rich Pins
If you’re using Yoast SEO, you’re in luck! All you’ll need to do is enable Facebook OpenGraph on the Social settings page and you’re all set.
Recipe Rich Pins
You've probably noticed by now that Rich Pins aren't automatically enabled for every website. That means that the installation of plugins like Tasty Recipes or Tasty Pins will not turn Rich Pins on.
Instead, you should rely on recipe plugins to generate the proper structured data for the page content (Recipe structured data). This means that any image saved from a URL with a Tasty Recipe on it can be used for Rich Recipe Pins because the correct data exists on the page.
If you’re already using Tasty Recipes, you’re already a step ahead of the game and there's nothing else you need to do but apply for Rich Pins! ?
Apply for Rich Pins
Once your pages have the right structured data, you'll need to validate that that is the case and apply for Rich Pins through Pinterest's Rich Pin Validator. Note: you won’t need to validate every URL on your site—one URL is enough!
After you click Validate, you’ll get a confirmation of whether or not your site is properly marked up. If it is, then you can just click the button to apply. It usually takes a couple of days to get approved.
If there are errors with the validation, you’ll either need to revisit the first step (adding the correct data to your page) or contact the author of the plugin that is creating the markup to see what's causing the error. Once you get those issues worked out, you can try validating and applying again.
And that's the scoop on setting up Rich Pins! Pretty painless process, right? The extra context around your post will help convince people to click through to your site and read your content, so it's a win-win situation for everyone!
Don't forget to make the most of your Pinterest descriptions as well!
