Hello, my name is Tom, you've seen me guest blog here before but today I'm blogging and ill. So I'm going to dispense with the usual chit-chat approach and lay out the facts. Some of you may even like it that way! Shame on you. Still, here's the content.
Google Base aka Google Shopping aka Google Products
What do you know about Google Base? If you're running a site which sells something, you should be paying attention to Google Base because it's the service which underpins various vertical search portals from Google, including Google Products.
In case you're not familiar with Google Products and what they look like, let me give you an example:
See how Apple can't even rank top of Google for the phrase 'buy iphone'? Those 3 links above them are pulled from Google Shopping results. So having your products ranking highly in Google Shopping/Products/Base is clearly a good thing. But how do you get good rankings in this arcane Google offshoot? Is it all about pagerank?
Major Ranking Factors For Google Products
Below I present to you a list of the major ranking factors in Google Products, in no particular order. I've not done enough research to determine which are more important than others:
Title
Having your keyphrases placed strategically in your title tag can help you rank, just like with regular SEO.
Price
If you sell a product cheaper than your competition, you stand a better chance of ranking higher than places which sell it more expensively. Capitalism ftw.
Description
Having a well-thought-out and keyphrase rich description is important. As far as I can see, Google doesn't crawl the URLs you submit to them for any ranking factors - they take all the information from your data submission, so a description can help you rank for long-tail phrases which you can't cover in your title tag.
Data-Stuffing
Data stuffing is so the new keyword stuffing. What do I mean by data-stuffing? Well, in Google Base you have the options to upload data for all kinds of fields. Only the bare minimum are essential, and most are optional. In my experience, however, I've seen that adding more data-fields helps you rank higher and for more varied queries.
Fresh Data
This is actually a ranking factor which Google recommend to get higher rankings, so it would be remiss of me to not include it in this list!! Fresh data, as in updating your feed as often as possible or setting the scheduler to crawl your feed frequently, helps both your rankings and the accuracy of your data. Since Google doesn't crawl your pages, it's important to ensure your feed is up to date with the latest descriptions, prices and names.
Positive Reviews
Notice how I've not included pagerank (or mR) on this list? That's because I'm not sure how important it is to have a trusted domain in the traditional SEO-sense. More importantly, I think, is having a trusted domain in the traditional sense of the word. How does Google measure that? With reviews. Getting positive reviews for your site helps a lot with Google Local, and it's the same principle for Google Base. Although I've not listed these tips in order of importance, I think this is definitely one of the strongest ranking factors, particularly for competitive queries. So, to help you out with your Google Base rankings, I've listed below all of the sites which Google permits as review sites for use in Google Base. Before I list them though, I should point out that there's one site which Google seems to favour above all others for trusted reviews. There'll be no prizes for guessing who it is.... Yep, Google Checkout.
In my experience and research, Google Checkout reviews seem to count for more than reviews left on 3rd party sites. This does seem to make sense since these reviews are presumably more trusted by Google (since it controls the spam filtering and authentication) than 3rd party reviews. That said, it does mean you have to have Google Checkout enabled to profit from them!
An interesting aside here: it's not something I've tested, but if I were building a ranking algorithm based on reviews, I would make the raw number of reviews count as a ranking factor, positive or negative. Why? Because this signifies trust and brand awareness. The more people that are leaving reviews about you, the bigger your brand is. Given Google's shift towards brands recently, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a factor so bear this in mind when getting reviews.
Anyway, if you can't get Google Checkout reviews, try some of the sites on this list (separated by US and UK sites, as they're different!).
US Google Base Review Sites
dealtime.com
pricegrabber.com
cashbaq.com
epinions.com
flamingoworld.com
mrrebates.com
readprint.com
resellerratings.com
shopzilla.com
rateitall.com
reviewstream.com
mouthshut.com
pricespider.com
dooyoo.co.uk
mtbr.com
viewpoints.com
merchant-reviews.com
couponclock.com
UK Google Base Review Sites
pricegrabber.co.uk
reviewcentre.com
shopzilla.co.uk
ciao.co.uk
dealtime.co.uk
truste-marketing.co.uk
webuser.co.uk
maxxsave.co.uk
dooyoo.co.uk
resellerratings.com
From analysis of the top sites across many different searches, these are the sites which Google is reporting as trusted review sites. I've reviewed over 50 Google Products searches and probably at least 100 domains, and this is a list of all the review sites listed. There are probably others but they're either very small sites or aren't particularly trusted. These are the major ones.
There are plenty of ways of gaining reviews for your site, and I'm not going to go into detail on them here, but David Mihm has a solid post on getting local reviews and the process is exactly the same for products. Check it out, he links out to some great sources there too.
In conclusion, if you're selling something, you should definitely be investing some time in Google Base as it can bring some great results pretty quickly.
Random Musing: by the way, while researching Google Base, I noticed that you can submit all kinds of stuff to them, from jobs to recipes to events to cars. As far as I can see, most of these uploads won't net you much benefit, but I think it can only be a matter of time before we see Google Base results ranking in the main results for job queries, events and all manner of other queries. How long before getting reviews for your site becomes an integral part of the SEO process?
Re: Your point on data stuffing, I know Google say in their Base guidelines to be as descriptive and use as many fields as possible, but I found the entire opposite to be the case, using the bare minimum worked better for me.
I definitely agree on your Fresh Data point though, when we changed it from the default 30 days to 7 days, base referrals had shot up within a week.
Also, if you have a huge range of products, make sure your feed is set to be crawled at a time when your site's traffic drops off (Friday night, in our case), this means the delay in waiting for your products to be published and searchable again is less damaging.
I wholeheartedly recommend this tool also: Google Base Competitor Analysis
Interesting that you saw the opposite re: data. I wonder why that was?
That tool is really interesting - I'll be sure to check it out, thanks!
A company I work for puts items in Google base and we have out ranked our competition. Yet we only use the bare minimum. I cannot speak for the competition, but it seems to work for us - less being better.
I just wanted to backup my point about reuploading your data feed at a time when traffic is low:
Outcome: Data feed upload successful
Number of items processed: 6258
Number of inserted items: 6258
Uploaded at: 17 April 2009 22:00:00 BST
Processed at: 18 April 2009 01:51:13 BST
So that took the best part of 4 hours for everything to be published and searchable again, just a thought ;)
Greg, that idea of submitting while you have a low traffic time for your site is excellent. I never thought about that before but it seems very logical.
LOL, Tom the Developer's tool. I have known him for a few years now. Found him in the Google Base forum years ago. I acutally worked with him on the sniping competitors data project when he first conceptualized it. It used to work, copying high ranking products data display/keyword placement and density, etc. But it doesn't really anymore, for me anyways.
So the Stats tool from Tom to me is the most useful right now, although beeing able to compare your price with the Competitor's is a useful piece of the competitor analysis tool. But I can never seem to get it working right for me.
Wow this is great Tom, thanks! I did start to submit our products through Google Base a little while ago but the products just kept getting completely lost and were completely impossible to find unless you knew the exact title or description.
This has certainly given me the motivation and some pointers on how to start focusing on the product submission and start to improve it.
Thanks again Tom - Hope you’re feeling better soon :)
Thanks Hannah - glad you enjoyed the post and found it useful. You're also the first one (of 40 comments!! shame on you all) to say get well soon so thanks for that too :-)
Hi Tom,
I'm glad to see someone covering shopping engines finally here! I have been somewhat of an expert on comparison shopping sites and have done alot of work with them, to great success, in the past 3+ years. I have to disagree with something about Google Product Search (GPS). Data Stuffing does not work in helping to get you ranked higher. Way back when GPS started allowing custom fields I tested this out by creating every possible descriptor for my products. Length, height, width, fabric type, wood type, basically ALL materials and anything else I could think of. And NADA, not a damn thing changed. But yes, getting more data to Google will help you show up for more queries but it won't help you rank higher for your main keywords.
Many tricks that used to work in GPS do not anymore. And their algo for it is still one of the worst Google employs. It is THE worst algo and their results are poor as well. But its free so there are a wide range of merchants in it. Plus the exposure in the SERPs with onebox results helps, if you can get in the onebox. I used to be able to execute the Trifecta (all three onebox listings) and also take over the entire first page in GPS for my merchants. But alas, those days are gone. The algo is still all over the place and not great. There are currently not really any tricks one can do (wink wink) to improve rankings since the algo seems to be so all over the place.
The tips you gave are the things to do that will give you the best shot though.
I will add one tip to this post. I have noticed that age of your domain with GPS as well as a high number of products, seem to give you more weight. When I say age I really mean age of your feed. Now your feed needs to be resubmitted every day for freshness, and it can change daily if you need it to. But the longer you have been continuously submitting to GPS the older your feed is. So maybe its Feed History. I see older companies that have been submitting for years now starting to rank higher with no apparent special changes to their data (and I can snipe competitors data, but that's a topic for another post). So the longer you have been submitting the stonger, more trusted your feed will be. I have also noticed that stores that submit HUGE numbers of products get more love in GPS.
Hi Miguel,
Thanks for stopping by and thanks for the lengthy comment. It sounds like you've done more testing than me but I certainly saw improvements in rankings (and no of queries) by adding lots of data. That said it wasn't a controlled experiment and perhaps the age of the feed or some other factor was responsible.
I'd love to catch up about some of the tips you allude to, in particular about sniping competitor's feed information. If you'd be able to share that information I'd love to hear from you - drop me a message!
Thanks
Tom
I just started an internet store (3 weeks old), and went to Google Base and added my 2 products. Because I only have 2 items, I added them one by one and not as a data feed. They now show up in Google Base, it states that they are published and searchable, but even when I search on the brand name (SaniManiPedi) nothing shows up. Does it take a few days? I can't imagine I did anything wrong adding the products to base, as it was simply fill in the blank. Did I miss a step?
"I have also noticed that stores that submit HUGE numbers of products get more love in GPS. "
Yes, which is a bad thing for us small fish....
I have sites that place #2 and #5 in the google natural SERPs for our keywords. Problem is that now you can't even SEE the #2 search engine result without scrolling down because it is pushed down the page by both adwrods listings and google base results, made up primarily from target, ebay, amazon, or walgreens products.
I'm just revisiting this post today. Miguel absolutely hit the nail on the head.
1-2 years ago, there were a ton of levers in place to improve relevancy on Google Product Search. Today not so much.
The most important factors by FAR are:
- Google page rank
- Data feed consistency (update your feed every 24-48 hours)
- Data feed submission history (the longer, the better)
- Total # of products in your data feed
- Total # of reviews
These are obviously factors that an agency can't control for their clients. So all of the data feed optimization "experts" who promise instant results on Google Product Search are not being honest with their prospects.
If you are a merchant spending a lot of time tweaking your Google Product Search data feed, stop wasting your time! Stay consistent with your data feed updates and delivery method and try to get feedback from the sources that Tom mentions in this post.
Your results will improve slowly over time as your site gains Google's "trust", you just have to be patient and have realistic expectations.
Very useful Tom thank you. Any plans on you distilled guys submitting a few of your recipes? :-)
You're right about Google Base and the multitude of different items to submit. We did job uploads to Google Base for a long time but gave up because there just wasn't the traffic to make it worthwhile. Shame, actually.
Ha, I'd love to do an upload of recipes but I don't think recipes get much traffic in Google Base either (same as jobs). It seems strange to me that Google doesn't focus on it, jobs.google.com could be massive for them and really easy to implement (since they already have Google Base!!).
For most of our recipes check Will's nomorerecipes.com (hopefully updated soon!)
Hey, recipe sites are hot right now! :-)
Tom, Trent here. I would like to hire someone to write some Google trusted Reviews for my site, can you or do oyu know anyone?
[email protected]
360 825 2122
Please let me know, thanks.
Second this about the job feeds. We've got a couple of recruitment clients submitting to Base but it drives virtually no traffic. Actually we see Google news results showing up more often for job related searches than base results which seems a bit weird.
I know some of the big job boards are nervous (rightly so) about Google doing a recruitment offering
Great post Tom. I've been doing some testing around Google base ranking factors recently, esp "data stuffing" as you call it, and will post back here once I see the results.
Re review sources, you missed off Google Checkout reviews which I often see pulled in to Product Search result - you can get them by becoming a Google Checkout merchant, although their recent hike in prices means that's not as much of a no-brainer as it used to be.
With the other review sites, its not always clear how to get reviews from these sites. Do you need to be a paid subscribed to these comparison engines before you can be reviewed on them? It seems that way to me, and for this reason I don't think reviews are as important as they seem for Google Base ranking - I've definitely seen a lot of sites rank well without having any reviews.
Finally I'd be interested in your thoughts in the recent change in the way products appear in google results. It used to be that you could see the individual price right there in the search results and click directly through to the site. Now (as in your screenshot) Google are giving a price range and getting you to click through to a Google Products page to review the different prices. Which means a lot less clicks from Google SERPS than there used to be. Still worth investing some time to optimise the feed IMO, but if your prices aren't competitive it's probably not going to help you much.
Hey Jaamit, I mentioned Google Checkout separately as I think Google weights it separately to the other reviews. Definitely important.
You're right that plently of people rank well without reviews, it's hard to reverse engineer though without being able to see their upload and see what data they've submitted...
Let me know when you've got some data - I'd be interested to see that!
oops you're quite right you did have a whole paragraph about google checkout which I managed to miss out on completely first time round (apparently my skim reading technique needs some work...)
Will def let you know about my test. basically I'm taking a reasonably large (700 odd products) data feed in quite a competitive niche and just adding as much new info and optional / custom data labels as I can in there, to see how much effect it has. Not completely scientific, but if it shows some useful data I'll do a youmoz post on it.
Ha, no problems, I thought you might have missed it ;-)
I think that would make a really interesting youmoz post - it's always good to get hard data from the wild, even if it doesn't show anything too ground breaking it's always interesting to analyse it.
Speaking of interesting data, in your post you said:
Well, that's what I thought too - until I noticed an example of a client's site where Google was doing just that - indexing products in Google Shopping without a data feed!
Has anybody similar experience?
"Finally I'd be interested in your thoughts in the recent change in the way products appear in google results. It used to be that you could see the individual price right there in the search results and click directly through to the site."
You still can, it's dependant on how competitive the product is, as far as I can tell. Example
Yes, nice one for picking me up on that. I guess from a user point of view this is a good balance from google - the more competitive products/keywords warrant a more detailed price comparison.
jaamit, Google still displays the data the same way its just that when there are multiple merchants selling the same product you get that different look. Its always been there and is the same way on all other shopping comparison sites. You have to click on that button and the next page has a list of all the merchants selling the product that you can sort through. This is why SKU, UPC, etc are SUPER important to include in your feeds. Of course for unique products you won't see this, or products without SKUs or UPC.
And yes you do need to participate in the other paid comparison shopping engines (CSE) to get reviews from them, like NexTag for instance. But hey, if you are toying with Google Product Search (GPS) why not try the other sites, who are bigger and better established?
CSE are such an underutilized selling medium for ecommerce merchants for so many years now. That is why I have held that llittle secret closely the past few years while I have been selling hundreds of thousands of dollars in product each month through the CSE.
Great list of review sites. Thanks for sharing.
The other option is to be a large publishing company that have literally thousands of reviews and then Google will add you to the list...
We've just had reviews accepted for the UK on one of our sites, and will monitor any increase in traffic that results. At the moment Google seem quite keen on getting more reviews data into their shopping section, so these tips are very useful for people who aren't large publishers!
That's interesting, would love to see the results of getting accepted along with the ins and outs of getting Google accept you. Perhaps a youmoz post?
It's worth a post definately. How much I can disclose I'm not sure though. I'll see what I can do once our results are appearing (in the next four weeks or so)
Fresh data..we find this so important. I swear the more work we do on our website, the more products we add, the more editing we do, the more Google likes it. Google just wants you to work tirelessly on your website and they will reward you!
Totally agree with that. Google seems to love sites that change & add content regularly. I started my own SEO company www.riseandshineseo.com and have had the most success with sites that are constantly adding pages with great content.
Does anyone know how a site becomes a Google Base/Merchant review site? Do you suspect it's first proving yourself as a valuable review site in Google's eyes, then you may get added to the list at the top of this post? Other ideas?
You're on the right track. Once you have a well known and credible review site Google will contact you. Not the other way around.
Update for Miguel and the rest of the commenters:
We recently rolled out another round of Google Base tests for our clients and a lot of the old optimization techniques are now working again. Adding a column or 2 has been increasing traffic by 25-50% almost instantly.
Email me - [email protected] if you want to discuss in more detail.
-Rick
Very interesting post on Google product search. But, I have one question on review side. How Google calculate reviews? I am working on one product feed & when I checked review so, I saw Google checkout review & Amazon review. What about it?
I work for a "deal a day" website, meaning everyday we sell one product and change that product at midnight. Would it possible for me to have my feeds updated quickly enough for Google Base to display the correct product for that day?
You'd have to do a little bit of testing but I'm sure it would be. Many google product feeds are crawled daily so you should be fine.
Do you think it would be best to upload the feed a couple of days in advance? For instance if today was the 8th and i wanted to sell "product a" on the 10th would you upload that prouducts feed today on the 8th or wait until later?
Based on my own experience, you will need to upload all the products first and then tweak them after they've been successfully published. Google takes some time to update and send your feed to the live engine, provided that you don't have any errors, but if you do, it will take longer. If you get them all approved, then you just have to replace/overwrite/update the product feed and it will take less time to be go live again. But bear in mind, this is not real-time. You may want to try updating at midnight in case you go into a "downtime"so products are available after a few hours of its original submission.
Thanks for the advice I will definitley be trying this in the near future. As always the SEOmoz staff and users provide valuable information in a constantly changing industry.
Great post as usual, even if it is aging nicely :-)
Just wondering if anyone else saw a performance crash at the start of April focused solely on Base? In the course of 1 day traffic dropped by 60%, with no change to our feed/competitors/products etc.
The new performance has been steady for 2 months now, still at the reduced level, and has not been experienced from any other traffic source, is very odd.
Thanks again for the post and comments, all very helpful :-)
No we have not seen any drop in traffic for our clients.
Do your products match (e.g. sku up) on Google Product Search? There is a chance that your products had unique listings before April and Google started product matching in your category.
The matching helps most sellers by increasing exposure but it hurts the sellers that were showing up on page 1 with unique listings previously.
-Rick
Hmmm...I've always worked with sites that were previously indexed in Products, but I just started with a very small ecommerce site and we've begun soliciting reviews via Reseller Ratings, but despite getting a few positive reviews, Google hasn't picked them up yet. I know the volume is low, but there are plenty of stores in this very small niche that are ranking well with no reviews. How long will it be before Google picks up these reviews, and is there any way to speed that process?
I don't know of any way to speed things up I'm afraid. I'd ensure that you're submitting your feed daily to ensure the data is fresh - I know Google likes fresh data in products search so that may help? Sorry, not sure what else you can try! Perhaps getting more links for increased domain authority (but this isn't exactly easy!)
Tom,
does it make a difference if I submit 10, 25 or 1,000 items to the feed? Will I have the same success rate in each case, or do you recommend these type of campaigns for merchants with catalogs over a specific number of items?
William,
Google Product Search definitely gives preference to merchants with higher inventory counts.
So add as many products as you can without including duplicates.
Thanks for the quick reply. It's what I have noticed in the past, but was wondering what the case would be if I wanted to heavily target only a few items vs a bunch of them, which requires a lot of time to properly optimize (titles and descriptions, mostly).
William
William,
I would start with the highest quantity possible and then you can always optimize individual products as your time permits.
You should also use the initial "basic" feed as your baseline for any optimization tests. You might find that the optimization you are doing isn't having an impact on your client's relevancy.
If that's the case, just list the basic feed, stay consistent with the feed format and the relevancy will slowly improve over time.
This article was a big help. Great place to get started. Thanks.
Tom,
Great article. Do you know how I can find stats on how often people use Google Product Search to find products (as opposed to just Google)?
Eric
Dear Tom Critchlow
As this topic is still Hot please include the following company in your original post:
eKomi - The Feedback Company
We have been integrating our reviews since 2010 into Google Shopping in Germany, United States, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Currently we help over 10.000 retailers worldwide with the Feedback collection auf authentic and independent customer or product reviews.
UK:
www.ekomi.co.uk
US:
www.ekomi-us.com
Kind regards Matthäus Bognar Head of International Sales eKomi - The Feedback Company
3 years past as this post was published, but the topic is still hot))
Now, im wondering if new Google Trusted Store badge can give you a huge benefit in getting higher with product search results as well as SERPs.
I was trying to find some store with this badge to see how it looks like and test their serps. I've tried to find it on o.com, waifair, babyage(websites that are named as first google trusted store testers) but there are no badges from google there :(
It would be so awesome if this post was updated for 2013!! What does SEO strategy for large ecommerce sites look like now? How do products do well in Google search results post panda/penguin?
DanielleID,
You are right about updating this thread. Some things have changed:
1. The product is no longer free, now it's PPC-based.
2. Best practices can be found at https://www.google.com/ads/shopping/best-practices.html (or a PDF at https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/shoppingbestpractices.pdf).
Best practices for product feed optimization are still the same and can be found at https://support.google.com/merchants/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=2473824&parent=2475443&ctx=topic
Hope this helps.William
I'd recommend having a look at the PDF rather than the website.
@Tom Critchlow
Nice reading man!! Now, Google merchant center dashboard is providing very good facilities to improve data quality. Up to date product feed with all attributes will perform well compare to less. Google organic search and Google shopping search, both are different animals. Google shopping does not indicate indexing of page but trying to focus on best value products with help of attributes.
I have posted similar question on Google Merchant Center Help forum to get it done and got really great tool which suppose to help in same direction. Reviews are very important in Google shopping performance and you have done excellent work to list down some great websites. Thanks again Tom!!
Hi Tom, Great Artical Thanks Man.
Just want to know how Google Base review sites work, and is the list mentioned above for UK are paid.
Waiting for your reply.
Thanks Again
I searched the internet for info on optimising for Google Shopping results, I should have just checked SEOMoz to start with! Excellent post with really helpful updates in the comments too, thank you all.
@Tom_C: Great post. Google Products definitely has its own ranking factors! thanks Tom_C!
Thanks, this has been very helpful
if you want to rank up with 2-3 specific items you simply can click them up.
just use 10-20 devices with diferent ip ranges and click once a day on one procuct. after 1-3 weeks your up.
dont know if that helps, but it works.
i really hate the concept of gps for example if you have 200 products of one manfucaturer, lets say cables, you have one merchant up in the first 2 pages, the you see the next and after page 10 you see on product of the top 10 merchants and the the next 2 pages the next merchant an so on. sorry thats plain bullshit.
Hi Tom,
Thanks for the valuable post.
For our own feeds on Google base, we are already taking care of all points you have listed - daily feeds, 142 positive reviews on Google Checkout, Data Stuffing etc. Yet our rankings are below other sites which are in fact not doing the same.
Example: search for 'Nataraja' - https://www.google.com/products?q=nataraja&hl=en&aq=f
Why would First Ireland appear before us, even though it is priced much higher, and the landing page is less favorable to Nataraja as a keyword than our page? Numerous other examples can of course be given.
So I am not sure what is the best way to ensure a good ranking on Google Base?
Kapil.
Anyone done any research to see if clients using other Google products such as PPC and GA are getting better rankings and more listings as compared to those who do not use any Google products at all except Google base?
I have not encountered that and had my suspsicions too. But after 3+ years of working in shopping engines I have not been able to correlate. But having the Google checkout icon in your listing as well as the added exposure Google checkout merchants get does provide some benefits.
Great post, its something that I have played about with in the past - and Im interested in your take on when/why a product actually gets a google base listing in the SERPs?
In our industry, I can only remember one product in the past 12 months that had a google shopping listing between 3rd and 4th organic position, but it was for a relatively small interest product, when we have certain things that are very high search volume, and I can see no real reason why they dont appear in google shopping results.
Overall, a good post. However, with regard to your comment,
This is way to easy to fake. Spammers have killed this oldie, which is why it is likely you are seeing Google trust it's own Google Checkout reviews the most.
With regard to "data stuffing," adding as much possible information about your product(s) in your Google Base (formerly Froogle) feed is recommended by Google in their FAQs. I can personally confirm that what you are seeing is true. The more you add, the better your chances to rank well. Furhter, my thought is that a spammer will quickly build and submit feeds, while a person with a deep understanding of a product will take much more time adding information about the product prior to submission.
Aside: I would bet that there is some sort of time variable built into this algo and likely other Google algos, which looks at the time between creating accounts and submitting information.
Eric
We have one client who had 5000 jobs uploaded to Google Base on a regular basis. Saw poor traffic generated from it and decided to abandon all together. So I agree...not the best solution for jobs.
Man ... If Google where Microsoft they would've been sued and slashed a hundred times.. all that data in one hand *sighs*
I'm about to start rolling out some SEO on a fairly larg ee-commerce site in a competive vertical so will give this a bash. Thanks in advance.
Great post Tom. This is the first time I've looked seriously at Google Base as I always scan over it to see the organic listings. Thanks for the work on the review sites too. I'll definitely have to check that out.
I'm wondering if anyone can answer this question. Do you know where the cutoff is on Google Base for showing products? It seems that as you dig down into niches, there is a cutoff point for showing results. Is this based on traffic for the keyword phrase?
My experience is you only get some clicks if you are in top 3. So it doesn't matter really how many products google lists in google product search for a particular product.
There is very little awareness among common search user about availability of google products search yet. People don't specifically use google product search as they use google web search. They simply search in google web and click on one of 3 links on top of search results.
"There are plenty of ways of gaining reviews for your site"
Nicely done Tom. It's 6am here in Austin, Texas and my eyes are not quite wide open yet, and as I first read this sentence above, I thought it said "gaming"! Not that anyone would do that (unless your name was BrentDPayne), but it reminded me of another clever post of yours.
Keep up the good work.
Ha, I definitely said 'gaining' not 'gaming'. I'd never recommend anything blackhat ;-)
Thanks for the shoutout for my last post too!
Nice post on Google product search! You don't see enough articles about Google Base.
What are the odds Google starts to display Google Base results in recipe queries?
For example, Yahoo has "Food Results" - When you query 'chicken recipes' you are presented with Yahoo Food Results before the organic index.
I'd be interested to hear any opinions.
I think there not anything you can say with 100% certainty about Google base at this moment. I am using it from almost a year now. No doubt if you are on top you get lot of traffic. But I have seen that in some cases say you have a Google base listing without even key phrase in title and then a second listing with key phrase in the title. I have observed that the listing without the key phrase in title can rank on top. I have not been able to find why.
2 Tips for Starters:
1. Don't start looking at Google base results just immediately after you upload your feed. Initially when your listing becomes active, it might rank say at position 100 in product search. But next day when you look at it, it might be 4th. I mean give it at least 24-48 hours after upload. I generally just experiment with my listing and see when it comes in top 3. I change every 2 days till it comes to top 3. Or give up after 10 days if I can not find how to get this into top 3. And try again after few weeks.
2. First I follow general guidelines that we follow for our pages : key phrase in title and description etc. If it doesn't come to top 3 in 48 hours then I simply see what on top 3 now. Just see where keywords are placed in those listings. Then just try something close to that and try out placing them from top.
Copying what others are doing used to work but I have not had any success with that tactic for about a year now. I guess other niches may be different but that does not make too much sense.
Does anyone know if you can submit services to the Google base or does it have to be tangible products?
It is a product based marketplace for merchants and assuming you represent a merchant or are one yourself, you can certainly sign up and see if you get accepted. Prior to signing up, I'd make sure to have a specific service page(s) on your website that you can justifiably link to, which will allow people to purchase the service(s) from your website. In other words, present the service as a purchaseable product.
Note: Some affiliates have managed to get accepted into this advertising program.
Nice post Tom. I always figured more is more and have added a plethora of additional "optional" tags to my feeds to ensure that all sorts of complex or varied queries have the potential to be picked up and served.
But on that note, does anyone have any insights into the ranking mechanisms of Google Base that support optimization - other than price and abundant data supply?
Not as versed in Base as in other service or social sites for SEO.
If there is an informational category available in the feed template that you can fill out, do it! Also, I have found that being incredibly precise with your title and description of a product helps. Pretend you are optimizing a specific product page when filling out info for each product. If one of your products is a Blue-green Widgety Widget, use that as your title. Don't add any other words unless absolutely necessary (i.e. a realted SKU or Model # people would add to their search to find the product). Good luck!
Interesting Post. Before today, I haven't really given Google Shopping a good look. I will give it a try and see if it increases sales.
Great post.
I had a client asking me about this just yesterday and I had to tell them I would find out.
One tip I found was be careful what words are used in the feed.
I had one feed the other day that used the word adult in it a lot ie Santa Costume for Adults
The feed performed terribly and after a little research it turned out only 400 products of 5k were showing in the normal results. The rest were filtered within the safe search.
After quite a bit of tinkering we managed to filter out any words that implied the products were adult orientated and now 4.5k of the products are listed normally and traffic from Google product search has risen by 5 fold.
Google Base is essentially free traffic from a position on Google which in PPC terms would be super expensive on a CPC rate.
We have been creating detailed feeds for our ecommerce clients driven directly from all possible stored data against each product which are automatically uploaded once a week. Some products have become quickly successful where as others are still to feature; those that have begun to show in the top 3 list (rather than the shopping search pages) have become established - presumably due to a ranking factor similar to Quality Score for those results.
Agreed that price doesn't appear to have a bearing; unless of course the cheapest listing is clicked more frequently and therefore looks more popular and improves it's rank accordingly.
On average, our client's feeds are generating 250 clicks a day (7,500 per month) which, although still fairly modest, is traffic that would have otherwise cost upwards of £1,875 per month assuming a £0.25 CPC.
Age of feed seems to help too - as you would expect a new feed's results don't quickly land into the top spots; even if they are well optimised. A little patience and results begin to come through strongly (around 4 weeks for our most recently started feeds).
Good post Tom :)
Great post and thank you...I posted some of it at my blog on ecommerce and mcommerce at www.eTaildTail.com and redirected back to you...hope that is okay?
Have a great weekend.
Chip
Thanks for the info, I found it very useful. When you start a business as a novice it can be very daunting and Google Base etc are things I have left to one side. Now with the help of articles like yours and others, I am getting the hang of it and am raring to go!
https://www.postapresent.co.uk
Great article. The only factor i'm not so sure I totally agree with is "Price". I've seen prices range across the board for google base products. If it's a ranking factor, my opinion is that it's a small one.
Google Base has both good and bad elements when used in terms of SEO. It seems that Google loves content - key rich websites and sites that add new content on a regular basis. As a result, this will increase your page rank in search results. SEO is very much pot luck - there are so many different techniques and processes mentioned, that it's hard to know which one to use. The answer is to test as many as possible - see what works and benefits your website most.
Hi Tom,
Love the Article, it cleared out some of my doubts regarding Google Shopping. However are any other factors that might help or influence your rank among the other merchants? For instance I used to have thousands of visits a day to my products, now I get only 100 or even less. So I was wondering if there is something else that is causing these poor results. Even though we have invested a great deal of time, trying to improve our customer experience, once they enter the store. When I try to search for the naame of the store Outlet Season when we search for a product such as this MSI N560GTX-Ti Hawk GeForce GTX 560 Ti Graphics Card - 950 MHz C
With long tail keywords, we only get results if we add the words outlet season at the end of the keyword tail, otherwise the name of the store is not even listed.
Thank you again for all the tips.
[links removed]
I added the links because they were relevant to the post so you can visit my site and check out what I mean, and give me your opinion.
Thanks for the valuable tips Tom! It's really interesting to learn Google's different approach for shopping products! Nice posting and really helpful!!!
Google products is a good idea, however, the results are still limited to the user submitted entries.Vendors will be most benefitted if there were a true search engine for shopping, that searches for products from everywhere on the Web. On that spirit, try Cazoodle Shopping Search (available for laptop and cameras). https://shopping.cazoodle.com