Google Products SEO & Optimisation

Google Product Search (formerly Froogle) was released in the UK in October 2004. If you’re selling online and are unaware of Google Product Search then you’re missing a trick. It is a free service aimed at those who are selling products and services online and appears in the main search engine listings when Google believes you’re searching for a product.

To see an example of this perform the search ‘puky trike‘ and you’ll see “Shopping results for puky trike”. These results are brought directly from data that merchants have uploaded to Google Merchant Centre, at the time of writing the top two products are from one of my clients We Love Toys.

Upload your products to Google Merchant Center

In order to get your products into Google’s search results you’ll need to upload your product information to Google. To do this Google has a service called Google Merchant Center which you can upload products to manually or setup an automatic product feed. For our clients we setup automatic product feeds which Google collects on a nightly basis, this ensures that the latest prices and products are always available to appear in the search results.

Optimise your Google Product feed

If your Google Products feed is optimised correctly it can be a very good source of traffic, from my experience traffic coming from Google Product Search also converts at a much higher rate than regular search engine traffic. The reason behind this is fairly obvious, when a user clicks on a product from the search results they are already aware of the price which is not the case when a user clicks through from a regular listing.

Based on my experience of optimising Google Product feeds I have the following tips:

1. Do use keywords in product titles and descriptions
   Just as you would when optimising a normal webpage, ensure you include all relevant keywords otherwise your products stand no chance of appearing in the search results.

2. However tempting don’t over use keywords
   A problem many face when optimising content is the overuse of keywords, this leads to copy which is hard to read and switches customers off.

3. Make sure each product includes pictures
   Having a compelling, high resolution picture for each product not only helps your position but also encourages users to click for more information.

4. Complete as much information as possible
   There are many data fields on Google Products to complete, the more of these you complete the better, include as much information as possible, even if it is a pain.

Tags: google, google products, merchant centre, optimisation, seo