I’ve been doing some research on Google Product Search and Google Base, to see if I can improve my sales. So I thought I’d publish my findings and my experiences here. I’ve also created a new category on the blog here.
Page Rank (PR) has little impact on how high you appear in product search results, this is stated in a lot of sources I’ve found, I can also confirm this from my own sites. Optimization of your product landing page is suggested as to help, but this is less important that optimizing for the main index.
In your product feed, ensure your product description is relevant to your product title. So you need to include the same keywords. Researching keywords for specific products your customers use, also the title and description.
Including custom attributes per-say doesn’t boost your ranking. However, including a good coverage on information in fields gives google confidence in your products. Also a detailed description will help, this proves that your products are important.
Some sources say that free shipping can help.
When showing similar products a lower priced product will appear higher.
Reviews and rating help ranking too, unfortunately, I don’t have either so I’ve no ideal how you get either.
One source says that 2 or 3 keywords in the brand column is a good tip.
In several sources, having a good quantity of products will obviously increase your chances of hitting different keywords.
I guess, like any results in the main google index, getting links give you more exposure, a suggestion that submitting your site to many review sites and to get your site reviewed will increase your exposure. However, I’ve struggled to find any review sites, the sites which I have found are actually shopping comparison sites. So I’m not sure where to go with this.
A lot of discussions I have found talks about updating your feed often, some even update every day. This must refer to people using the manual submission method, which is aimed at people with a small amount of products. Having lots of products makes this kind of difficult and time consuming, maybe little changes like prices may help. Also, in the early days of base, the option of providing dynamic data wasn’t available, so updating for the sake of it, doesn’t seem worthwhile. But I guess the point is that you need to keep your data fresh and show that someone is actually alive and doing something on your sort.
One other point, which was mentioned, is the age of your products, I have one product which is our most popular and we sell at least one every week or two. The product description is detailed and we spent time on it, unlike more recent products which don’t have much content. But this product is aged.
Summary, a lot of the same rules apply as with googles main index, you need to prove your alive, that your products are worth updating. You need to adapt to change in the results. There aren’t many tricks you can employ to get higher in the results, but theres plenty of grunt work you can keep up with which will give google and your customers confidence in your service.
by JM
