Do you want to increase traffic from Google to products
on your e-commerce site,
for free?
My name is Alan Kent.
I'm a Google Developer Advocate
specializing in e-commerce.
In this Google
I'm going to describe the benefits of providing Google
with timely and accurate product data,
as well as technical best practices
to achieve it.
Let's dive in.
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First, let's look at the main ways
we show your product data.
Google Search uses special formatting
for products in search results
to assist shoppers on their purchasing decisions.
This can include:
ratings,
reviews,
pricing,
and stock levels.
Google Images also uses product information when available.
If Google knows how to display an image for a product,
it may display additional badging
and product information with the image,
such as whether the item is currently in stock.
If you visit the Google Shopping tab,
products are listed with richer information.
The Google Shopping tab provides additional tools
to help shoppers on their shopping journey,
such as filtering by price range
or brand.
Finally,
Google Maps can also show products available nearby
if you provide Google information
about where your inventory is located.
This helps shoppers
wanting to pick up purchases in person.
While these are the most well-known services
for a product to show up on Google,
there are others,
and we're always exploring new opportunities.
Product data is not new to Google,
although its usage has evolved over the years.
Let's take a quick look back down memory lane
to understand the evolution of products on Google.
Google Search was first launched back in 1998.
Originally, Google bot would crawl the web,
looking for pages,
making the content available via Google Search.
By 2002,
Google's already identifying products on web pages.
To improve accuracy of the data captured,
you could also provide a product data feed
directly to Google for indexing.
Moving forward to 2010,
Google's offerings were more sophisticated.
Structured data allowed website owners
to more accurately convey product data
to Google from inside web pages.
Google Merchant Center was launched to capture product data,
which was then fed into multiple paid experiences,
such as product listing ads in Google Search,
display ads in the Google Display Network,
and the Google Shopping tab.
Typically, you'd only share product data
for products you wanted to promote
on Google services.
This changed in 2020
with the introduction of several free offerings.
First, Google now makes it free
to participate in the Google Shopping tab.
They're still paid experiences,
but your products can be listed for free,
increasing your products' exposure to shoppers.
In addition, product data from Google Merchant Center
is also fed into organic search.
This helps Google present your products more accurately
to shoppers in organic search.
This means it now makes sense
for you to provide all of your product data to Google
rather than just a selected subset.
Google Search extracts a lot of information
directly from web pages,
so why is product data different?
The reason is product data needs to be accurate.
Extracting information from web pages
can be less reliable.
For example,
how does Google understand which is the product's price
when both the original
and the discounted price are shown?
How does Google find the right product
if the page also shows related products?
How does Google understand
whether additional costs,
such as taxes and shippings,
are included in the price?
Special treatments by Google are only available
if Google is confident
it has correctly obtained this additional information.
Also, while some product fields are optional,
others are required by Google
before it will accept a product description.
Using structured data is one way to make sure
Google correctly understands all product details
you are providing on a web page.
There are several ways to encode structured data in a page,
but a common way is to embed it
as JSON-LD-encoded content.
More information on structured data
can be found in the Google Search Central documentation.
I added a link to the description below.
So how to get your product data
into Google Merchant Center?
There are three approaches to choose between,
suitable in different scenarios:
by crawling your website,
by periodically providing a feed of all your products,
or by using an API
to update products individually.
Let's look at these approaches in more detail.
The first way is to configure Google Merchant Center
to extract product data from pages
crawled from your website.
Using structured data on your pages
can significantly increase the accuracy
of the collected product data.
In order to participate in the Google Shopping tab,
you must also click through the appropriate approvals
in Google Merchant Center.
Google Merchant Center also supports supplemental feeds
that can add additional fields to the data
from the primary field.
For example,
pricing,
sales notifications,
and stock level data
can be provided via one or more supplemental feeds,
so this data can be updated more frequently
without waiting for the next crawl of your pages.
The primary and the supplemental feed
is combined by Google Merchant Center
to form the final view of your product data.
Supplemental feeds can be provided
via a Google Sheet for small data volumes,
on-demand uploads,
or it's via scheduled fetches.
Data can be provided in a tab-separated text file
or marked up in XML.
The second strategy to provide your product data
to Google Merchant Center
is via a primary feed.
A primary feed
supports the same approaches as supplemental feeds.
For example,
you may dump your whole product catalog
to a file once a night,
then make that file available to Google to load.
It is worth noting
that Google may compare your feed data
to the original page
to verify data consistency.
Detected inconsistencies
can result in products being excluded from Google,
so it is important to keep your feeds in sync
with the product data on your site
as best as you are able.
There are times, however,
your website content is updated more frequently
than Google Merchant Center,
particularly for product availability
and pricing data.
To support these two common sources of inconsistency,
you can enable automatic item updates
to update availability and price data
in Google Merchant Center
rather than flagging as an inconsistency.
The third and final way
in which you can provide data
to Google Merchant Center
is via the Content API.
Using the API,
you can insert, update,
and delete selected products
instead of supplying complete replacement set of data
for all products
as is done in the previous two methods.
The Content API can apply changes
to specific products individually
or in small batches for efficiency.
This means your platform is responsible
to work out which product changes
you need to provide to Google,
but the results can be live in minutes
rather than waiting for the next full processing run.
It is worth noting
that organic search results may take additional time to update
after the new product data is in Google Merchant Center.
So to wrap up,
there are three ways you can provide
detailed product data to Google.
First, via web crawling product data from your site,
preferably using structured data embedded in product pages.
This can be easy to implement,
but you don't have as much control over how often your data is updated,
unless you use a supplemental feed.
Second, via feeds that you upload periodically,
say, one or more times a day.
Or third, via the Content API
where you can update specific products on demand.
With the content API,
your updates can go live in minutes.
What actions should you consider taking next?
Add structured data to your web pages
to increase the accuracy of extracting data;
decide on your strategy
to get product data into Google,
such as via website crawls,
Google Sheets,
scheduled fetches,
uploads,
or API calls;
and remember that SEO still matters for organic search.
Make your product details,
such as images and descriptions,
appealing to your customers.
If you're curious about tracking how your products appear in Search,
be sure to check out our video
on Search Console for e-commerce sites.
If you have any questions or comments,
feel free to add them below.
Thank you.
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