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ALAN KENT: Google Search supports multiple shopping
experiences in search results, broadly referred to as merchant
listing experiences.
These experiences include product snippets, which
add details to search results, such as their star ratings,
price, and availability; popular products,
which shows a set of similar products
that may be of interest to the shopper;
shopping knowledge panels, which display deeper information
about a product and lists multiple sellers;
and image search, which can annotate images of products
available for sale.
For your product web pages to be eligible for these experiences,
Google needs rich product data.
The first decision to make is whether to provide your product
data via structured data on web pages, via Google Merchant
Center feed, or both.
Google recommends doing both if you can.
If starting out, you might decide
to start with structured data on web pages,
then add a Google Merchant Center auto feed, which
creates a feed from your web page content,
and then grow into providing a direct, high-quality product
data feed.
You can check for existing structured data on your product
pages using view source in your web browser.
Look for structured data with type product.
You'll need to talk to your technical team to determine
if you have a Google Merchant Center feed,
as it cannot be detected from web page content.
If you're using a platform, refer to your platform
documentation to see if you have any control
over structured data embedded on web pages.
Also, check if there's any built-in support for Google
Merchant Center feeds.
Beyond that, check your platform extension marketplace
to see if there are any relevant third-party extensions.
It is likely that built-in support
or installing an extension is your most practical path
forwards.
If you're developing your own site,
check out our online technical documentation
on both adding product structure data to web pages
and creating Google Merchant Center feeds.
If you decide to add structured data,
how do you make sure it's correct?
Google Search Console includes a merchant listing report
that shows issues found in your product structure data
relevant to merchant listing experiences.
Fixing your structured data is dependent upon how
it is provided.
After making a correction, you can use the URL inspection
tool in Search Console to check if all issues have
been addressed.
Product pricing can be complex.
The simplest form of price is a single amount specified along
with its currency.
But there are many more advanced forms of pricing,
such as quantity discounts or special offers
for VIP customers.
While Google supports an increasing range of options,
your site may use a form of pricing not supported
by Google Search.
So what do you do?
The first step is to review the pricing options
used on your website, then read through the Google
documentation on pricing models to see what it supports.
I recommend periodically reviewing the Google pricing
documentation as new pricing options may be added over time.
Once you know what pricing your site uses
and what Google supports, you may
need to simplify the pricing data you provide to Google.
For example, provide Google the price of a quantity of 1
even if you offer discounts for purchases
with higher quantities.
This is to avoid shoppers becoming upset
if one price is shown in Google Search results
but a higher price is shown after arriving on your site.
It erodes trust.
Shipping information is also popular in search results,
such as shipping costs.
Free shipping is particularly attractive to shoppers.
I already mentioned pricing can be complicated.
Well, shipping can be even more so.
Shipping costs can be influenced by many factors,
such as carrier used, total order weight and dimensions,
shipping distance, and more.
To see if your listings have been correctly annotated
with shipping costs, use a site query
so you can see your products and search results.
You can check for errors in shipping
structure data via the Merchant Listing Report
in Search Console.
Otherwise, use the Google Merchant Center Console
if you provide shipping details that way.
Like pricing, you may need to simplify
the shipping information you provide
to match what Google supports.
Check out our online documentation
for current capabilities and keep an eye out for updates
as more capabilities may be added over time.
If in doubt, like pricing, it may be safer
to overestimate shipping costs to avoid surprising customers
at checkout with higher than expected charges.
Eligibility to many merchant listing experiences
requires you to provide product identifiers, such as a GTIN
number, an MPN number, or a brand and product name.
The more you can provide, the better.
A SKU, or Stock Keeping Unit, is not an acceptable product
identifier, as it is not consistent across merchants.
For example, the Shopping Knowledge panel
displays multiple sellers of a product.
This matching is more reliable if a strong product identifier
is present on your product pages.
To see if GTIN or similar product identifiers are
present in your web pages, inspect the structure data
markup.
Also check the Merchant Center report
in Google Search Console for warnings or error messages
related to product identifiers.
Your Google Merchant Center feed should also be checked if used.
To fix any issues, add a supported form
of product identifier.
How to add an identifier depends on your specific platform
or implementation.
There are many options for merchant experiences on Google.
Check out the Google Merchant Center online help
to understand the full richness of information you can provide.
Also check out the Google Search Central documentation
site for information on product structure data supported
by Google.
While structured data currently supports fewer features
than a Google Merchant Center feed,
the gap is closing as new capabilities
are added over time.
To keep up with possible future directions,
you may also like to check out the schema.org
site for the broader set of structured data
for e-commerce sites.
Schema.org markup is used by search engines beyond Google.
That's all for this episode.
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Until next time.
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