Ecommercepartners.net

Gain Access to Shoppers Who Are Ready to Buy

It used to be that doing a simple search on Google for a particular product would return relevant content sites only. You had to actually drill down and find the shopping results on your own. Until recently, Google only had a small shopping link at the top of the page that generated very few clicks; you may remember when they launched this as Froogle. Now, Google’s Product Search feature, also known as Google Shopping puts direct links to products right at the top of the search results. If you run an ecommerce site and you’re interested in putting your products at the top of the list, keep reading to learn how to send look-to-buy shoppers directly to the product page in question.

For example, let’s assume you’re in the market for a baby sling. Not just any baby sling, but an ergonomic, Earth-friendly product that will keep both you and your baby comfortable while making it easy to organize everything you need in one complete front pouch. You type your exact requirements into Google and get this as a result:

BabySling.com comes up first in the search results as well as prominently
in Google’s Product Search results

These results show us several things. First, you’ll notice that the exact baby sling you want is on sale compared to similar sites, and babysling.com appears number one in the search results for the precise item you searched for. Second, you’ll see that Google itself has become smart enough to know that the more detail you put into a search, the more likely you’re shopping for a particular item and the more likely you’ll buy from the first result that spells out exactly what you need.

What Does Google Product Search Mean for You?

Google Product Search is a shortcut to optimizing your product for the search engines. Just as if you were optimizing each page — carefully researching keywords, tailoring your content and building your landing pages, you don’t want to just dump all your products into Product Search and hope for the best. It makes sense to optimize your product listings so you have a greater chance of appearing at the top – even when competition is strong. Our research and real-world findings indicate that Product Search optimization is different from traditional SEO. The shopping engine looks for exact matches in customer search queries as well as details in every possible product attribute a consumer might think of, such as size, color and brand.

From Google’s point of view, the fresher and more relevant the content – the better. The search engines (and resulting visitors) aren’t happy clicking on a product only to learn that it went out of stock months ago. It’s because of this that Google requires you to submit new products every 30 days. You’ll keep everyone abreast of new additions while laser-targeting each of your products to become an exact match for a very detailed search and likely purpose.

How to List Your Inventory in Product Search

Google provides a way for shopping sites to submit inventory to Product Search. For one or two items, it’s very easy and can be done manually. Submit each item one-by-one using the form. There are fields for title, price, description and more. We’d also recommend including some optional information, such as color and size.You also have the option of uploading each product image directly, or pasting the URL of an image from your website.

How ECommerce Partners Can Help

With 10 or more products in stock it makes sense to provide a data feed of items pulled from your database. It’s understandable that not every ecommerce site owner has the time or know-how to build a database driven product feed and properly optimize each item for Google’s new Product Search. We’ll get your entire inventory online, complete with pictures and descriptions, whether it’s several to several-thousand products you want to sell. After all, you have a business to run, inventory to stock and products to ship! Customizing each product for top results might be high on your list of to-do’s, but somehow it always gets pushed to the back burner as new items arrive and more critical things warrant your attention. ECommerce Partners will manage the technical details of your online marketing while you focus on running your company.

For help with Google Product Search optimization and data feed development, contact Ecommerce Partners for more information. If you have a B&M storefront then be sure to ask us how we can put you at the top of Google’s Local Search listings as well.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 16th, 2009 at 4:42 pm and is filed under SEO/SEM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.