Beginner’s Guide to Verifying Your WordPress Site on Pinterest

Verifying your website on Pinterest is necessary if you’re seeking to effectively use the platform for marketing purposes. It’s a great way to attract traffic to your website and build credibility, among other benefits.

However, it’s not a one-click process, and a few steps along the way include unexpected, albeit slight, quirks to note.

That’s not to say it’s incredibly code-heavy or that the process should dismay you. Indeed, especially for WordPress site owners, it can be quick, easy, and error-free – following proper steps.

Thus, let us go through them one by one in this beginner’s guide to verifying your WordPress site on Pinterest.

What Is Site Verification on Pinterest, and What Are Its Benefits?

Site verification is exactly what the name suggests; it verifies you are the owner of the website you are claiming. This is in line with such profile verifications as Google My Business (GMB), except it uses a different method.

Finally, your WordPress site aside, Pinterest states you may claim your accounts across other platforms, namely:

• Instagram
• YouTube 
• Etsy

The team behind MoversTech CRM argues that doing so carries many benefits. Initially, you will need to use a Pinterest business account, which adds the following features over personal accounts:

• Analytics.
• Ads Manager.
• Audience Insights.
• Conversion Insights.
• A Verified Merchant blue checkmark on your profile and Pins.
• A business hub default landing page, instead of a Home feed.

These benefits will enable you to engage in multiple lucrative practices, such as the following. 

Promote Your Blog

A verified business account will allow you to promote your website more. Any Pins that come from your site will include your profile picture, and a checked globe icon will appear next to your website’s URL on your profile.

Moreover, you will have access to analytics for Pins, allowing you to fine-tune your practices over time. Thus, verifying your WordPress site on Pinterest is a great way to make your writing visible and expand your blog’s reach.

Inform Your SEO

Similarly, a verified business account can help enhance your SEO efforts. As highlighted above, business accounts offer a plethora of analytics options, including audience and conversion insights.

Much, in the same way, you’d use Google Analytics and similar tools, these too can offer valuable, actionable information. Consider which content and Pin audiences engage with the most, and adjust your SEO strategies accordingly.

Expand Your Reach Through Ads

Finally, a verified business account allows you to use paid ads to expand your reach. As with all paid traffic practices, these cannot substitute for organic traffic but only augment it. Nonetheless, Pinterest ads are indeed a great way to expand your reach and visibility, as they will appear in:

• Your audiences’ of choice home feeds.
• Category feeds.
• Relevant search results.

Do note, however, that Pinterest ads are not available in all countries. They are available in Canada, the US, and most of the EU, for example, but they are not in Turkey, China, Russia, and so forth. You may find Pinterest’s list of supported countries here.

Finally, ads have a few specific requirements of their own, such as being saved to your own business account and having destination URLs. You may also find these requirements in Pinterest’s aforelinked article.

Verifying Your WordPress Site on Pinterest

Now, having explored the benefits of verification, let us walk you through the process.

1. Get a Pinterest Business Account

As highlighted above, getting a Pinterest business account is the first step. We’re using the word “getting” deliberately, unlike “upgrading” or “converting”, because it is, in fact, a different account. The steps to do so are the following.

1. Create a Pinterest account.
2. Log into it.
3. Navigate to the top right corner of the screen and click on the down arrow.
4. There, click on the “Unlock business tools option”.

Then, you will be presented with a list of the aforementioned benefits of business accounts. Click on “Switch to business” at the bottom to continue.

2. Set Up Your Pinterest Business Account

Next, you will be asked to set up your Pinterest business account. The first screen will ask for your basic business information:

• Profile name; here you may use your business’s full name.
• Website, if you have one; here you may add your website’s URL.
• Your country/region.
• Your language.

After clicking “Next”, the next screen will ask for more information:

1. The focus of your brand.
2. Your goals.

Select the options that best suit your business, and click “Next” to continue.

The next screen will ask you to describe your business again, this time to get customized recommendations. Select the one that suits you, and click “Next” again.

The next screen will ask if you would “ever be interested in running ads on Pinterest”. For the sake of simplifying this guide to verifying your WordPress site on Pinterest, we’ll choose “No” here. You may select “Yes”, “No”, or “I’m not sure yet”, depending on your plans, and click “Next” to continue.

The final screen will present you with options to get you started, including plugins. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll click on the X icon to skip this step.

3. Claim Your Website on Pinterest

Now you may claim your website. There are two main ways to access this option:

1. Simply click on the “Claim domain” button on your business hub page, or:
2. Navigate to the “Claim” section of settings, and click “Claim“. You may navigate there either by clicking on the down arrow in the top right corner and clicking on “Settings” or by navigating to your Pinterest page and clicking on “Edit profile“.

You will then be presented with 2 claim options:

1. Add HTML Tag.
2. Upload an HTML file.

The first option is the easiest, so select that to proceed.

You will then be presented with some meta code. Copy this to some safe location for potential future reference, and you may continue. Leave this page open, as you will return to it after the next step.

4. Add Pinterest’s HTML Tag to Your WordPress Website

This is the more challenging part for less tech-savvy users and beginners. There are a few different ways to proceed here, but we’ve chosen the two easiest ones for convenience.

Verifying your WordPress site on Pinterest can be made a breeze through two different WordPress plugins; Jetpack and Yoast SEO.

Both use for different purposes, and both are powerful plugins in their own right. You may thus use them beyond this process or simply use their free versions for it and remove them later.

Having said that, let us explore both of them.

Jetpack

Jetpack is, essentially, a site performance plugin. If your WordPress website is hosted through WordPress.com, you will have access to it by default. If it is not, you may find it here.

After installing it, should you not have it, you may use it to verifying your website through the following steps:

1. On your WordPress dashboard, click on “Jetpack”.
2. There, click on “Settings” at the top right corner.
3. Within the settings screen, click on “Traffic”.
4. Scroll to the bottom, and locate the option “Verify site ownership with third-party services”. It will be switched off by default, so toggle it to “On”.
5. There, locate the “Pinterest” box, and paste your meta code there.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is, in brief, an SEO plugin – as the name suggests. You may thus use it beyond this process, in either its free or paid version, depending on your needs.

For the purposes of verifying your WordPress site on Pinterest, however, you will only need the free version. You may find it here or in WordPress.org’s plugin library.

To verifying your WordPress site through Yoast SEO, you may follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Yoast SEO on your WordPress dashboard.
2. There, click on “Social”.
3. On the “Social” page, click on the “Pinterest” tab.
4. There, locate the “Pinterest confirmation” box, and paste your meta code there. 

5. Submit It to Pinterest

Finally, you may now return to Pinterest to submit your website for review. Click “Submit for review”, then click “Submit” to confirm. 

That is all you need to do on your end, and you may now wait for Pinterest’s confirmation email. Officially, Pinterest states that the process may take up to 24 hours. It is usually much quicker, however, sometimes only takes a few minutes to an hour.

Conclusion

To conclude, verifying your WordPress site on Pinterest doesn’t have to be a code-heavy process.

WordPress site owners have the notable benefit of having access to many plugins that offer to simplify it. Two of the simplest ones that do so are Jetpack and Yoast SEO, as we’ve covered above.

What’s more, these and similar plugins may also boost your SEO and site performance beyond this process. Nonetheless, we hope this beginner’s guide will help you delve deeper into Pinterest’s business side.

Author Bio

Brian Allen is a digital marketer and part-time web designer. Dealing with SEO regularly, he currently writes blog posts and content in which he discusses how the power of WordPress facilitates SEO in the digital age.