In a world of fulltime jobs and overtime, online shopping has become the main way to purchase products and let people spend their hard-earned money. Now it’s the merchants’ job to display their products on Google as lovingly as they would in their own shop windows.
When customers look for products on Search or Google Images, they currently find rich snippets which include product description, ratings and price to help them choose a product that’s right for their needs. Whilst Google Shopping was purely focussed on Google Ads, we see this returning to organic search with opportunities for both channels.
Providing consumers with this information is essential for the Google shopping journey. Now the search engine giant has released three new features to improve results and thus make life easier for merchants – and consumers.
Search Console
In order for Google to fully understand products, structured data mark-up is key. But nobody’s perfect and sometimes there may be issues in the mark-up. To help with this problem, Google offers a brand-new feature in Search Console: A new product report for sites that utilise Product schema mark-up to help identify specific issues with the code, monitor this over time and later validate resolved issues by crawling the affected page.
Merchant Centre
In addition to properly displaying product information, Google offers a new feature to directly provide up-to-date information with the help of the Google Merchant Centre: Realtime product data that is updated on the platform will now be eligible for display in results on Search and Google images and not limited to those running AdWords campaigns. It’s important to add here, that the ranking will be solely based on the relevance to users’ queries and can’t be paid for. As the results are based on the user’s search queries, it is therefore important that your feed contains relevant product data and is optimised to get the best return. The new feature is currently only available in the USA, but other countries will be added later this year.
Manufacture Centre
Last but not least, Google has introduced a new feature in the Google Manufacturer Centre. The goal is to improve a brand’s visibility and thus help customers find the product they are looking for through authoritative and up-to-date product information such as descriptions, high-quality images and videos.
All of these features help merchants to inform potential customers about their products and facilitate their shopping journey on Google – just in time for payday!
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