6 Ecommerce Tips from Google – Use Structured Data & Google Merchant Center

Table of contents:

• Improve Your Ecommerce Visibility in the Search Results
  • Make Sure Your Products Are Indexed
  • Make Sure Your Product Prices in the Search Results Are Correct
  • Make Sure There’s No Lag With Price and Availability
  • Make Sure Your Products Can Be Displayed as Rich Results
  • Share Your Product Inventory Data
  • Sing up for the Shopping Tab

In the recent video, Google shares 6 tips on how to improve ecommerce website presence in the search results using Google Merchant Center and structured data.

According to Google advocate Alan Kent, uploading product data through the Merchant Center feed is a more reliable way to ensure Google is up to date with your products than through bots crawling your website.

Does that mean you can skip structured data altogether?

Google recommends using both Merchant Center and structured data so it can cross-check data from the feed and your website.

 Improve Your Ecommerce Visibility in the Search Results

If you own an ecommerce business you definitely should pay attention to those tips:

1. Make Sure Your Products Are Indexed

How does Google discover products on your website?

Thanks to bots that crawl your pages following links that connect them.

The problem starts if some of your pages are not linked with others and are accessible only through the internal search results. Google bots can not discover these pages and won’t index your products.

Check if your page is indexed using the Google Search Console URL inspection tool, or a “site” command in Google Search.

To make sure all your pages and products are indexed, you can create a sitemap that will help Google bots crawl your website and reach all the pages.

Screenshot from Google video

Apart from that, you can create a Merchant Center Product Feed to help Google discover all the pages that should be indexed.

Screenshot from Google video

2. Make Sure Your Product Prices in the Search Results Are Correct

Check if Google is displaying the most up-to-date price of your products in the search results. It may extract the data from the product pages incorrectly and show the original price, instead of a discounted one.

Screenshot from Google video

To make sure your prices are shown accurately, include the structured data on your website and provide the Merchan Center with structured feeds of your product data.

3. Make Sure There’s No Lag With Price and Availability

Sometimes Google may display the old data in the search results due to a lag between your website and search indexing. Google simply won’t discover the changes you’ve made until the next crawl. This can have a negative impact on your products in the search results.

You can reduce this time lag by adding your price and availability data into the Merchant Center and requesting it to process your feeds more frequently. This way all the changes you make on your website will be discovered quicker.

You can also use automatic item updates in the Merchant Center, so your product data is updated automatically based on your page contents.

4. Make Sure Your Products Can Be Displayed as Rich Results

To get rich results special presentation, provide structured data on your product pages and a product feed in Merchant Center.

5. Share Your Product Inventory Data

If you own a physical shop, make sure your products can be found when users are looking for local results using the phrase “near me”.

To do this, add your shop address to the Google Business Profile and provide a local inventory feed to the Merchant Center.

Google knows where your inventory is located thanks to the product identifiers and store codes included in the Merchant Center feed.

6. Sing up for the Shopping Tab

To make sure your products show up in the Shopping Tab provide data feeds in the Merchant Center. You need to opt-in to ‘surfaces across Google’, as well.

Screenshot from Google video

Without it, your products won’t be included in the Shopping Tab. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to reach more clients!

Use the tips provided by Google to increase your visibility, traffic, and revenue!