5 ways to optimise your Google Shopping data feed
One way for ecommerce merchants to get new traffic, leads and sales outside of Google’s organic search is on Google Shopping. Like SEO, there are useful steps that ecommerce merchants can take to optimise their data feed to improve a return on Google Shopping.
1. Optimise Product Titles and Descriptions
Help improve your visibility on Google Shopping by including strong keywords in your descriptions and product titles. Take advantage of keywords you know are good traffic drivers to your ecommerce website. Keywords you may want to include are keywords that you should be competing for and keywords you already rank well for in organic search – if you rank well for keywords organically, you are most likely to rank well for them in Google Shopping.
2. Optimise the Product_Type Column
The product_type column is Google’s taxonomy which is a tree of categories that describe product families. It also indicates the category of the product being sold. The column can be filled with your own internal categorisation but clear improvements in traffic are found when ecommerce merchants follow Google's product_type values. You can include more than one product_type attribute in your feed if applicable. The maximum number of values that can be included is ten and all you do is place each value within double quotations and separate them with a comma.
3. Include Rich Snippets
Give users a sense of what your web page may contain by including rich snippets to your Google Shopping data feed. Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance such as product reviews. If your web pages have individual product reviews, then you can include this information in your Google Shopping data feed. Add the following columns to your Google Shopping feed to take advantage of product reviews on your Google Shopping data feed:
- Product_Review_Average
- Product_Review_Count
- Add the rel=”canonical” link element to each of your product pages
4. Create Custom Attributes
Custom attributes allow you to include additional information about your item and will enable your products to show up for more long tail searches on Google Shopping. To create a custom attribute column for your Google Shopping feed, all you need to do is add the desired column with the appropriate column title and values and insert a ‘c:’ in front of the column title.
5. Use Trusted Merchant Reviews
Merchant reviews are written by users and provide more details about their experience with a particular merchant. Positive reviews can help instil trust and confidence in a customer. Google takes merchant reviews very seriously and only accounts for reviews that come from what they deem trustworthy review sites such as their own Google Checkout. Using trusted merchant reviews is a good way to improve Google Shopping visibility in the long term.
What other ways can help optimise your Google Shopping data feed?
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