DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi I'm Daniel Waisberg,
Search Advocate at Google.
And in this video, I'll discuss the main questions
you should be thinking about if you're
responsible for an e-commerce website.
Have you implemented basic SEO for your site?
Can Google find and show your website
properly in search results?
And how is your website content performing
in Google search results?
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Before we get into Search Console,
I would like to give a few best practices
for e-commerce websites to succeed in Search.
Some of the tips here require changes to the website,
so you might need the help of a developer to implement them.
The first step to help people find and navigate
your e-commerce website is to clearly publish
all of the products you sell, whether in store, online,
or both.
These will help Google index that information
and serve it to users searching for products to buy.
Typically, this means creating pages
on your site that explain the product to sell.
These pages are commonly referred to
as Product Detail Pages, or PDP.
Here are some tips to create good content for those pages.
Add product features that clearly display the product,
with muted or transparent backgrounds
and from different angles.
This helps your website visitors decide what to buy
and may attract Google users searching for product images.
Add a detailed description of the products
and emphasize any features and specifications.
This helps users find your products
by searching for the details, both on your internal search
and on Google.
Add information on purchase details,
such as availability, price, shipment, and taxes.
These will inform users on how to pay
and when they can get the product delivered.
And add customer ratings and reviews
to help shoppers with their product research
and purchase decisions.
While working on your product detail pages,
we also recommend adding product structure data to them.
These will enable Google to provide enhanced search
and image results for your site.
If we implement the markup properly,
users can see price, availability, and review
ratings right in Google search results.
Read more about product structure data in the link
provided in the video description.
You may also want to upload your complete product inventory
to Google Merchant Center, both for products sold online
and offline.
This approach has a few advantages.
You can update data faster, like prices and stock levels.
You can supply richer data, like locality information
for inventory.
And you have more control over data
by pushing it to Google when it changes,
rather than waiting for Google to crawl your website.
In case you have implemented structured data
and uploaded a feed to Merchant Center,
Google will generally prioritize the data from the feed.
Check the link in the description
to learn more about Merchant Center
and to find the supported languages and currencies.
While not really related to Search,
you should consider setting up Google Analytics
e-commerce tracking to better understand
your users' behavior.
This will enable you to analyze your site's average order
value, e-commerce conversion rate, time to purchase,
and other interesting information.
These are just a few tips on ways
to optimize your e-commerce website,
but there is lots more to learn.
Check out the links in the description for more resources.
Now, let's talk about Search Console.
I'm assuming you have verified your website in Search Console
already.
If not, check out my video explaining all ways
to verify your website.
It is important to make sure that your structured data is
working as intended.
When Search Console detects a new structured data
type on your site, you'll see a report summarizing
errors, warnings, invalid items [INAUDIBLE]
in your Search Console [? properly. ?]
And site owners will get an email that Google detected
a new data type on your site.
After implementing product structured data,
as I mentioned a while ago, open the Products report
on Search Console.
By default, you will see the trends
for error items in the main chart.
But it can also [INAUDIBLE] valid with warnings, invalid,
to check their trends in the chart and more details
in the table.
Errors disqualify your structured data
from being used in rich results, but the page
can still be shown for relevant search results
as a plain blue link.
For example, if your markup is missing the Price, Currency,
or Rating Value fields, those will show up
as errors in Search Console, and you won't
get the fancy rich results.
But it can still get a plain blue link.
Warnings can provide a somewhat reduced experience for users.
But your products may still show up as rich results in search.
Examples of warnings would be missing description, review,
URL, or brand.
Check the link to the rich results status
reports in the description to learn more
about errors and warnings.
To get more details on a specific issue,
click an item in the table to open a detailed report.
Here you'll see the date when the issue was detected,
the number of affected instances over time,
and examples of pages where Google detected it.
You can click a simple URL to check instances
of the error in your HTML code.
Now that you know what needs to be fixed,
you have two options--
make the required code changes yourself, or share the details
with a developer that can perform
code changes to your website.
You can do that by creating a link using the Share button.
After you or your developer have fixed the error,
click Validate Fix, and Google will validate your changes.
In addition to the Search Console interface,
you can also use the rich results
test to check structured data validity
of a given page on your site.
This tool can check the syntax of your structured data,
and in some cases, provide a sample of what the result might
look like in Google Search.
After setting up your pages and seeing them get indexed,
your next step is to monitor their performance.
You can check out my previous video
on the Performance Report for a more comprehensive overview,
but I thought I'd give some e-commerce-specific tips
in this video.
First, open Search Console and navigate
to the Performance Report.
You'll find a series of tables and charts
showing how your website is performing on Search.
You should look for patterns in the data that
show how important a specific segment of traffic is.
Here are four ideas you can start with.
Check the queries driving traffic to your website.
Are people searching for your business name,
specific products, or the general kind of product you
offer?
Consider adding content to certain areas of your site
to optimize your performance on Search for queries
you want to focus on.
Check the Click-Through Rate, or CTR,
for your most important product detail pages.
If you see that the CTR is low for those pages,
meaning that users are not clicking on your search
results, consider writing better descriptions or titles
or adding structured data to those pages.
Check if a specific group of pages
are not driving product results, which
could uncover opportunities to enhance your structured data
implementation.
For example, you might find that some products are not
driving rich results, which could
point to a specific template that
is missing structured data.
And check search appearance to see in a glance
the volume of traffic coming to your website
through product rich results.
To understand your product rich result performance over time,
click Product Results in the table
to edit future including only these search result type.
These will update your performance charts
to show your product results traffic by queries, pages,
countries, and devices.
That's it.
I hope this video helped you understand
a little more about how to succeed on Search if you're
an e-commerce website.
In summary, make sure to check the SEO basics in your product
detail pages, consider uploading your complete product
inventory to Google Merchant Center,
implement product structured data
to be eligible to Google search rich results,
use Search Console to monitor structured data issues,
and analyze your website performance with rich results.
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Don't forget-- subscribe to the GoogleWebmasters YouTube
channel to watch our upcoming Search Console videos.
Stay tuned.
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