product rich pins on pinterest

What are Rich Pins – Types, Benefits and Implementation

Disclosure- Hello there! Before you get started just wanted to be transparent and let you know that Blogging Unplugged is a blog that makes most of its income from affiliate commissions meaning some of the links on this page are affiliate links and if you purchase a product using our link we will make a small commission. Also, the product purchased will not cost you anything extra and in some cases you might get a decent discount using our links. Thank You for listening and Have a good day.

What are Rich Pins

If you are using Pinterest to drive traffic to your website then I’m sure you would have heard about Pinterest SEO or Pinterest optimization.

In case not then let me tell you briefly about it. Pinterest is often referred to as a social media – visual search engine because it has features using which you can connect with people having similar interests as you.

And on the other hand, if you want to find something on the platform you need to search for it using keywords just like you do on search engines like Google, Bing and more.

Now, for your images to appear on top positions for these keywords, you need to optimize your pins for it. And that is where Pinterest SEO comes into play.

Pinterest SEO is the technique using which you can optimize your pins to increase your site’s visibility and reach on the platform.

Just like search engines, for Pinterest SEO you need to optimize various elements of your website, Pinterest profile and pins to rank higher on Pinterest search. And some of the factors that impact your site’s presence on Pinterest are

  • Creating a business account
  • Claiming your website
  • Catchy and optimized pin titles
  • Optimized pin descriptions
  • Enabling rich pins
  • Image and video pins dimensions
  • Pinning to relevant boards

And more.

To help you with optimizing the images on your website for Pinterest, you can use Tasty Pins. It is an easy to use Pinterest optimization plugin using which  you can

And more. If you are looking to boost your website’s reach on Pinterest then this is a must have plugin.

Also, another important factor that contributes to your visibility on the platform is consistency. And when it comes to maintaining a regular posting schedule you need Tailwind

Using Tailwind for scheduling has 2 major benefits

  • Consistent pinning
  • Saves time

As discussed above, it is a tool that is used for scheduling, and using it you can schedule pins for weeks in advance. This means you will have to invest only a few hours for creating a schedule and the rest of the time can be invested in doing other activities that will help grow your blog or website.

If you are serious about generating traffic using Pinterest then I will highly recommend giving this tool a try and using our link you can get started for FREE.

Having said that

Another important factor that impacts your website’s visibility on the platform is Rich Pins and in this article we will be covering

Let’s dive into the article

What are Pinterest Rich Pins

While searching for the web for your favorite recipes or product reviews, often you may have seen some listings that look very different from the rest.

And the reason behind this is, these listings contain addition information on them such as ratings, images, cooking time, ingredients and more.

recipe rich snippets on search engine results page

If you are thinking, how can you add this to your site then let me tell you this can be done by implementing structured data on your pages.

And if you have a WordPress.org or self hosted site then most SEO plugins will let you select a select type when creating posts and pages.

In case the plugin you are using does not offer this feature or only has a limited type of schema to select from then you can use Schema Pro plugin.

When you select and implement structured data or schema markup to your posts, it adds a code fragment to the page that gives search engines more information and context about the page.

Pinterest Rich Pins are based on the same concept as well. These pins are very different from the normal pins and contains quiet a lot of information on them which helps a user decide, if they want to take an action or not and at the same time letting Pinterest know about the context of the pin.

recipe rich pins on pinterest

As you can see, the above screenshot is of a recipe and it contains reviews, cooking time ingredients, description and more.

All of this metadata is retrieved by Pinterest automatically when you implement Rich Pins and when changes are made, it is automatically reflected on the pins. You don’t have to edit or re-upload the information.

Earlier, after applying for rich pins, some metadata was displayed on the Pinterest feed as well.

recipe rich pin on pinterest feed

However, this has changed now and you will only find title of the pin and your branding under the pinned image.

rich pins on pinterest feed

Having  said that,

It is important to keep in mind, for Pinterest to display correct data or type of Rich Pin you have to apply the relevant structured data and provide required information. Also, open graph tags play an important role so it is required to configure them properly by adding all your socials.

Now that we know what exactly are rich pins, the next question is

How many types of Rich Pins are there

As mentioned above, Pinterest Rich Pins are very similar to rich snippets on search engines. But when it comes to types, there are a lot of schema types available to select from and only 3 types of rich pins. And in this section we will be discussing each one of them briefly.

Article rich pins

As the name suggests, article rich pins are the ones that prominently display the title and description of your article or blog post on the pin.

This type of rich pin is for simple and straight forward articles on your website.

article rich pin on pinterest

A few months back, article rich pins used to have

  • Author name
  • Publishing date
  • Meta description
  • Title

on them.

expanded view of article rich pins

But this has changed now. These pins now only display the meta description and title of the article.

Also, it is important to keep in mind when a page uses a schema type such as article or blog post then the associate pin will be a recipe rich pin.

See our article rich pins.

Recipe Rich Pins

I’m sure you have already guessed that this type of rich pin is for recipe or food blogs. Recipe rich pins contain quite a lot of information on them about the recipe attached to the pin such as

  • Number of reviews
  • Ratings
  • Ingredients
  • Serving size
  • Cooking time
  • Title
  • Description
Recipe Rich Pin Example
Recipe Rich Pin Example

Access to this data makes it easy for users to decide if they want to read the complete recipe or not, driving only your  target traffic to your website

And this can lead to increase in conversion rate and sales.

Having said that,

For your pins to covert into recipe rich pins, you need to implement recipe schema type on your blog. If you have a WordPress self-hosted blog this can be easily done by using a plugin that adds recipe card and schema to your article.

And for this, I will recommend using Tasty Recipes. It is one of the best recipe cards plugin which will not only help add the recipe schema type but also will allow you to add beautiful recipe cards that will enhance the design of your post.

Before we move forward, it is important to know, often I have seen food bloggers struggling to implement recipe rich pins correctly. And the reason behind this is using wrong schema type.

Keep in mind if you are publishing recipes and are using any other schema type than recipe, then the connected pins will not convert into recipe rich pins.

That is why make sure you are using recipe schema type on your recipe blog posts.

Product Rich Pins

If you have an E-commerce website and are looking to increase your sales using Pinterest then this type of rich pins are for you.

Product Rich Pins are the ones that you can use to showcase your products on Pinterest. These pins have a

  • URL to the product landing page
  • Price
  • Availability
  • Product description
  • Title

on them.

product rich pins on pinterest

It is important to know using Product Rich Pins you can shorten the journey of a buyer which can lead to increase in sales.

Also, the best part about Product pins is when the product is out of stock or not available, its status will automatically update on the platform as soon as it is changed on the website.

Having said that,

If you are a website owner selling only a small number of products and thinking if you should apply for Product Rich Pins or not then let me tell you, you must apply for this feature now as it will definitely help increase your sales.

Now, the only requirement for implementing product rich pins is your product page must have “Product” schema and opengraph tags on it because it will let Pinterest know that the pin is related to a product.

In case you have a Shopify store then all you need to do is grab the product specific URL and validate it using the Rich Pin Validator.

For sites hosted on Etsy, Teachers pay teachers or eBay you don’t have to do anything. Just start pinning and within 24 hours, the pin will start showing all the information.

Before we move forward and discuss the next topic, it is important to know earlier Pinterest used to have App Rich Pins as well.

And as the name suggests this type of rich pin was for mobile application download pages and was available for U.S based users for iOS apps only.

While writing this article, I found Pinterest support and development documents updated and there was no reference to App Rich Pins.

And it seems this feature has been discontinued.

types of rich pins

The above screenshot is from Pinterest help and you can see it clearly states that there are 3 types of rich pins.

  • Article
  • Recipe
  • Product

And App is missing mostly like discontinued.

Having said that,

The next topic we are going to discuss is

Rich Pins vs Regular Pins

After learning about different types of rich pins, you may be thinking

  • How can you differentiate between a rich pin and a regular pin on the Pinterest Smart feed.
  • What do rich pins look like

In this section I will be answering both of these questions simultaneously here and by the end of this topic you will be easily able to tell the difference between a normal pin and a rich pin.

Let’s start off by discussing how can you differentiate between normal pins and article rich pins.

As discussed above, article rich pins highlight the title and the description of the article or the blog post connected to the pin. This means article rich pins will have another meta description on it and that will be fetched from the blog post itself.

meta description on article rich pins

As you can see in the above screenshot, there is a small description under the title and that is the meta description fetched from the article. Also, there is a custom pin description on the pin which is very different from the meta one. You can check this pin and see it for yourself.

Also, it is important to know sometimes instead of meta description, Pinterest will automatically fetch an excerpt from the article and display it.

Having said that,

If you find any pin on that has 2 different descriptions just like the one above is an article rich pin.

On the other hand, a regular pin will just have a custom pin description displayed at both the places.

regular article pin

The above example is one of our recent pins from the article What is Google Analytics and you can see that there is no meta description on the pin and the only description you can see is the custom pin description. And this is what differentiates an article rich pin from a normal one.

It is important to know we have applied for rich pins recently but the pins have not yet converted.

Now, when it comes to differentiating between regular pins and recipe rich pins, the difference between the 2 can be spotted easily. As discussed above, a recipe rich pin has most of the information about the recipe on it such as

  • Ratings
  • Reviews
  • Ingredients
  • Serving size

and more.

In the above screenshot, you can see the pin contains all the data related to the recipe it is linked to. And on the contrary, this information will be missing from the normal pin.

Similarly, there is quiet a lot of differences when we compare product rich pins to normal pins. As you know product pins contain the price of the product, availability, description and title on the pin.

product rich pins on pinterest

And when compared with a normal pin this information is missing. Also, it is important to note that you can easily spot a product rich pin on the Pinterest feed as the price of the product is visible on the pin itself without having to expand.

product rich pins on pinterest feed

I’m sure after reading this you will be easily able to spot rich pins in your Pinterest feed.

The next topic we are going to discuss is

Benefits of implementing Rich Pins

Till now we have established that rich pins are enhanced version of normal pins and have additional information about the attached link on them.

But,

Is there any benefit of using rich pins or not?

In short yes, there are quite a lot of positives, when you implement rich pins. And below I have listed a few compelling about

Why you should use Pinterest Rich Pins

  • As we know Pinterest rich pins have additional information on them and that is why these pins stand out from the normal pins on the Pinterest feed. For example- on a product rich pin you can see the price of the product without having to visit the website.
product rich pins on pinterest feed
  • Pinterest rich pins boost the user experience drastically as these pins let users know about the important details of the article, recipe or product linked to the pin which helps them take a decision if they want to visit your website and take action or not.
  • As we have discussed above, the additional data helps user decide if they want to take action or not and this is what drives targeted traffic to your site leading to boost in conversion rates and sales.
  • Rich pins helps improve your brands visibility on the platform. When you apply for rich pins, you will notice your logo and brand name being displayed below the pin on the Pinterest feed and also below the description when you expand the pin.
  • Because of the contextual information available on the pin, chances are high that your pin might show up in Pinterest search for multiple keywords which will boost your reach on the platform.

Now that you know the benefits of using Rich pins, its time you apply for this feature.

How to implement rich pins easily

With so many features and benefits, applying for rich pins may seem like a complicated process. However, it reality it is not.

To apply for rich pins there are a few requirements and below I have covered everything you need know when implementing Pinterest rich pins

  • First things first rich pins is a feature that is only available for business profiles that is why to apply you will have to create a Pinterest business account. In case you already have a personal profile and want to convert then you can easily do it for free.
  • Once you are done creating a business account, the next step is to add open graph tags. If you have a WordPress blog then this can be easily done by using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math. If you are using Yoast SEO, the open graph tags can be found under Social, and for Rank Math users, these tags are automatically applied when you configure the plugin.
  • After implementing open graph tags, the next step is to add relevant schema markup to your pages. In case your SEO plugin has limited schema types to select from or does not offer this feature at all then for food bloggers I will recommend Tasty Recipes and for any other schema type use Schema Pro.
  • Once you are done till here, the last step in the process is to visit Pinterest Rich Pins Validator, enter the URL in the space provided and click Apply. When you click Apply, it will show you all the relevant data that Pinterest will fetch. Now you need to verify all the information and if it is correct then you will have to wait for a little while for the pins to be converted. If not then recheck the open graph and schema markup settings and run the URL in the validator again.

For the complete step by step tutorial, you can follow our guide on How to set up Rich Pins. In this article, you will find everything you need to know about Rich Pins and the complete implementation process.

With that said,

I hope you find this article helpful and are able to understand What are Rich Pins. In case you have any queries related to this then feel free to reach out via comment section or social media.

Also, if you are looking for other blogging related tools, themes, and WordPress plugins then you can visit our Blogging Deals and Discounts page.

To stay updated with our content Join our Facebook group, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on social media.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *