I've been looking for ways to improve the SERP of my Google Products listings, and the information out there seems very thin. I wanted to put together a post with what I know, what I suspect, and what I don't know in the hopes that some of you can help fill in the blanks. 90% Certain: 1) Product Title - Very Important. Primary keywords should be in title, not more than twice. 2) Product Description - Very Important. Again, repeating keywords more than once may lead to penalties. 3) Freshness of feed - Very Important. Products that are new and uploaded on a regular basis are listed above stale products. Upload product feed at least once a week, preferably 2x a week. 50% Certain: 1) PR of selling site - Relevant, but not as much as regular web search results. Unsure: 1) Keywords in URL of product? 2) Keywords in URL/name of product image? 3) Keywords on product page on seller's site? 4) Does offering Google checkout improve position at all? 5) Does having positive (or any) store ratings improve position? Please jump in with any info you may have. I've seen pretty good results with Google Products in the past, but as the service becomes more saturated and the big guns move in (Target, Mongomery Ward, Sears, Kmart, etc), little guys like us have to work a little bit harder to stay relevant.
Yes but if you have enough quality backlinks pointing to your site it will get indexed regularly regardless of your PR.
I think what metros was trying to say was that the PR of the "hosting" site affects the position of products in the search results. Speaking of indexing, I've noticed that googlebot will crawl the urls of submitted products.
By saying upload feed regularly, re-upload the same products every week or adding new products? Our business does not offer new products most of the time so will re-uploading the same feed will help?
One key aspect from this excellent overview is accuracy of pricing. Google occasionally spiders pages to insure the prices you have in your feed match the prices on your actual webpage. -L
I have to agree 100% with Nemo. I had a feed with google products for a month or two. It was doing okay. One of the products was listed for my keyword in position 7. I got a couple hundred clicks over a month from it. The other day I decided to see if I could raise my ranking and rank in the top 3 to get in the google organic results for shopping. I added all the attributes i could to my products that made sense, made sure to keyword was in the product name and description, and then reuploaded it. Couple days later I now have three products listed in the top ten results for my keyword and one is in position 4 now. So I am REALLY close.. I need to figure out how to push one of the top three out. I bet that customer reviews plays a big part... all three have a 50-300+ positive customer reviews. I have 6x 5 star reviews. Malice95
Ratings are not a part of the G Base algo yet (maybe in the future), however, if you have good rating you are more likely to get clicks because there is an option to sort products by ratings. Don't worry about PR, it is not considered. And don't worry about being the "little guy". Unless you are selling books or CDs, you can succeed in Product Search. I had a client, who had 20 items on his feed and I helped him to have 2 of his items on the page #1. It is possible! You are right. PR has nothing to do with rankings in Product Search and this post has nothing to do with serps. There are sites with PR0 or no PR at all ranking high in Product Search. The trick is to optimize the feed, in this case G doesn't care if your page is optimized BUT it compares your feed's titles and descriptions with ones on your page. How would you include ALT in your feed? There is no such attribute in Google Base. You cannot provide any backlinks to your feed. It is all about the feed. Your on-site stuff is considered only when bot visits to check if the prices and descriptions match!
I would opine that feed freshness and regularity are both factors, so I would suggest updating the feed as often as something changes, but not less than once per week on a very regular basis.
1) I honestly do not think freshness of feed matters. I have not updated mine for a month and still show up in google organic google base listings, in a competitve market. 2)My PR is 0 currently, and I am showing up on google organic google base listings consistantly. 3 & 4) both are a mystery and would love to know the answer also. I do know that in webmaster tools I show up #1 for several keywords but when I go do the search myself I actually don't. It is my google base listing showing up in organic searches that show up 1st. I love google base, it puts you on the main google SERP, and I get sales from it. Not to mention it is 100% free. There is one trick I do know with it. You really need to get google checkout along with it. Once you get approved with google checkout it will show those results first or only on searches. JJ
Great post, i have myself furniture store and Google base can be a great way to adv. site and product. thanks
This is driving me CRAZY! I have products that are ranked #1 in organic search, but are not even on the 1st page of google shopping results. I have done everything recommended in this thread (and more) and my results still stink! Strange thing is if I go to base.google.com, then my results are similar to an organic search. Every now and then I have a product appear in the first three shopping results that come up on the organic search page. When that happens, the increase in sales is noticable. I have therefore put some serious time and effort into this. In addition to the suggestions in the first email, I have populated every possible field in the base upload, have a boat-load of incoming links (enough for #1 in organic), pages are SEO'ed with tags & keywords, and probably much more. Either I am missing something fundamental or there is a major component to google product/shopping/froogle search that is missing from this thread. I know there is now silver bullet, and I know there's a fair amount of google black magic, but any ideas would be very much appreciated.
Google Product/Shopping/Froogle/Whatever-it's-called-today results at have a STRONG INVERSE relationship with how you do in organic! Here's how I've come to this conclusion: We were doing well in our Google Shopping results until earlier this year. Beginning in April we began aggressively seeking backlinks to improve our organic search results. As our organic results improved, we dropped in our Google Shopping Search results. Now ANY product in the top 3 of organic are NEVER in the top 3 (or even the 1st page) of Google Shopping. Thinking about it a bit, I hardly ever see a page top-ranked in both organic search and in Product search. On a related note, doing a search at base.google.com, we still rank well, so it appears that the search algorithm for Google Base is different than for Google Shopping Search in that it does not consider organic placement.
Is anyone using Google Base for things other than products, e.g. services? If so do you find it helps in any way?