If you’re clicking on this post then you may have already realised that Pinterest is one of the best social media platforms around, especially when trying to build your website traffic & brand. That being said, it can be hard to get momentum going on the platform, and even when you do – you’re always looking to improve. That’s where Rich Pins might help.
One way to improve your pin’s conversion rates would be to enable ‘Rich Pins’ on your account. Rich Pins are pins that show further information on your blog article, product, recipe or app, based on the meta data entered on your website. To enable Rich Pins, you can use Pinterest’s very own Rich Pin Validator Tool. In order to validate your website and enable Rich Pins, you will need to paste in an URL from your website and click ‘Apply Now’.
Before you do that though…
It is recommended that you ensure that you tweak some settings on your website before validating your account. If you own a WordPress website, I recommend doing the following:
- Change your Permalinks. Go to Settings > Permalinks and change them to ‘Post Name’. An example of a Post Name permalink would be https://mikewalterz.com/rich-pins/
- Install the Yoast SEO plugin. Go to Yoast > Social > Facebook and enable ‘Add Open Graph meta data’
Once you’ve done that then you’re good to go, click Apply Now on the validator tool and then wait for it to confirm whether it worked or not. Once you get the green light, you should see the changes within 24 hours, although for me I know the changes were pretty much instantly.
Types of Rich Pins
Rich Pins can be applied to four main categories: product, recipe, article & app.
Product Pins allow you to directly add your product description, pricing and details on how & where to purchase the product. Recipe Pins are perfect for adding details on the meal ingredients, cooking times & serving sizes. Article Pins are perfect for bloggers & journalists alike, as they allow the author to include details on the post’s headline and author, as well as a short snippet of the post. Finally, App Pins arguably have the best function of the lot, as they include an ‘Install’ button on the pin, allowing the user to… well… install the app.
You can find examples of these four pin types here on the Pinterest Business website.
Benefits of Rich Pins
As mentioned previously, the benefit of having a Rich Pin is that it shows more context of what the pin is about – directly on the pin itself. This could potentially be the deciding factor on whether the user clicks through to your website or not.
This is mostly because a pin image can only say so much, at least without ruining the aesthetic of the pin, hence why it can be better to move more of the details into the description, rather than on the image itself. For example I used to include my blog post’s subheadings on the pin image, albeit in fairly small font, however I don’t need to do that now – as I can summarise those headings in the rich pin description.
For instance, the image of the pin may say “How to quickly set up Rich Pins on Pinterest” but in the rich description, I could mention how I talk about the types or rich pins, the benefits of those pins & how to optimise your WordPress images for Pinterest, which leads me to my next point…
How to optimise your WordPress images for Pinterest
Okay so now that you’ve enabled Rich Pins on your Pinterest account, you’ll want to know how to optimise each and every pinnable image on your (WordPress) site.
I won’t go into how to create great Pinterest images in this post, instead i’ll want you to focus on the Alt Text of each image that you add to your website, not only will this help for Pinterest growth, it will also help you rank higher in search engines too. For those that don’t know, Alt Text works as a descriptive tag that you add to an image to help Google categorise it in their Image searches, so it helps to be as relevant as possible when adding Alt Text.
How to edit Alt Text in WordPress
To edit an image’s Alt Text on your WordPress site, you can either…
- Go onto your WordPress site dashboard, then under Media, click Library and select your image. If you haven’t uploaded the image yet then you’ll need to click ‘Add New’ at the top & Select files. Once you’ve upload the image, you can select it in the media library, it will open up a window with the image and various text boxes on the right. On the right you will see “Alternative Text”.
- If you’re editing the image in a particular WordPress page or post, provided you’re using the updated version of WordPress, you can simply click on the image and then click on the pencil icon (a.k.a. Edit), this will open up a similar popup window as the media library, whereby you will find a text box labelled “Alt Text” on the right.
What to write as your Alt Text
Your image Alt Text should not only include your target keywords on your blog posts, but also they should offer a detailed description of what the image is about. For instance, in this post i’m targeting the keywords “Rich Pin”, which admittedly is more generic than I tend to go for, but i’ll stick with it on this example. Anyway, for the pinnable image below I might use the following in its Alt Text…
Interested in growing your Pinterest account & getting more link clicks? Learn how to increase your conversion rate with the addition of Rich Pins today! – Mike Walters #pinterest #image #rich #pin #wordpress
As you can see I’ve included the keywords “Rich Pin”, as well as a brief description of what can be found in the article. You’ll notice I’ve also included hashtags too – they do work on Pinterest, so use them!
Conclusion
Enabling Rich Pins on your Pinterest account and website is incredibly simple, and can be a quick way to improving your pin’s repin & link click rates. The main benefits of Rich Pins are that each pin includes greater description on the pin itself. Such description could include ingredients on a recipe pin, pricing on a product pin or even an install button on a pin for an app! So what are you waiting for, set up Rich Pins today!
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