Recently, Google introduced Free Google Shopping listings in the US, and they also plan to roll the feature globally by the end of 2020. The free Google Shopping listings will appear alongside the Google Shopping Ads, as the search engine giant plans to take on Amazon for organic product searches.
It’s nothing but a massive opportunity for online retailers to start using a tool that drives traffic, and records fantastic conversion rates, that too without paying any extra money for Google Shopping Ads.
Getting your online product listings to Google Shopping Ads have been a fairly easy experience from the beginning. You could upload the product listings of your eCommerce store, both through a manual and an automatic workflow.
Do you want to take full advantage of the free version of the same? I am going to explain, how you can do so and boost your eCommerce seo on the organic Google Shopping Listings. We will talk about the organic, free Google Shopping listing, its prerequisites, how it helps you to explode your sales, and how it compares with the already existing Google Shopping Ads.
Let’s begin with the basics.
What is Google Shopping?
It’s a Comparison-Shopping Engine (CSE) that users can access via Google Search interface.
Google Shopping listings are fetched and synched from the product listings of different eCommerce website and shown to the users in a central location with four major details:
- Product Title
- Short Description
- Product Price and
- Product Images
As a customer, you can search and shop for the products listed by multiple eCommerce stores in one place on the Google Shopping interface. If you click on a product, it redirects you to the original eCommerce store, from where you can complete your purchase.
You can access the full listings by also clicking on the “Shopping” Tab on the Google SERPs. You also get different filters, like any regular eCommerce website.
What is Free Google Shopping Listing?
The Free Google Shopping Listing is the latest upgrade to the already existing Google Shopping Interface. After this update, the Google Shopping, which was until now ‘Google Shopping Ads’ now shows free organic listings as primary.
Don’t worry, the paid Google Shopping Ads are still there. In fact, you can see both free and organic listings alongside each other on different Google interfaces.
You can see Google Shopping Ads in the ‘Sponsored’ section, while the Free Google Shopping Listings in the ‘Most Popular section’ on the Google Shopping tab.
Where else can users see your Google Shopping Organic Listings?
A user can see your free listings appearing primarily in Google Shopping Tab as shown in the image above. Apart from this, you can also opt to surface your organic listings across Google’s other estates, which include:
Main SERPs:
Google Images:
Google Lens:
How to get your products into Organic Google Shopping Listings?
For now, you need not go any extra mile to add your products into free Gooogle Shopping Listings. If you have been running Google Shopping Ads and have synchronized your listings with Google Shopping Ads, Google will automatically create the free listings for you.
If you have not listed on Google Shopping Ads yet, you need to simply submit your products to the Google Merchant Centre, which has been the console for listing on Google Shopping Ads.
On the Merchant Centre Dashboard, enter your product data in the specified fields, and you are good to go. All your products added in the Merchant Center will be automatically considered for organic listings, too. Let’s understand step by step:
Step 1: Create Google Merchant Account:
A Google Merchant account is required to put free Google Shopping Listings, and also to run Google Ads on Shopping, Search, and other Google Interfaces.
- If you are new, you need to create a Google Merchant Account. Please note that you need a Google account to set up the merchant account.
- Once you create your Google Merchant Account, you need to set up your profile by:
- Updating your business information
- Updating your business address etc
- Once you complete updating all the business information, you need to verify and claim your business URL to finalize the setup.
To make your feed show in the Free listings, start with opting into the “surfaces across Google”, which shows in the “Choose the programs that fit your objectives” section of the process.
You can upload your products in two ways:
- Individually and
- By creating a data feed
Step 2: Create and upload your product feed
You can create your product feed and upload it to the Merchant Center via a data feed. The data feed is a file with defined attributes that you need to provide for the merchant center to get the same as per Google’s templates. The attributes in the file include the fields such as:
- Availability
- Size
- Product Type
- Title
- ID etc.
You can learn more about Google Shopping Feed on Google’s help content here.
You can create your data feed in one of the following formats; you need to choose one of these options while creating and connecting your data feed:
- Google Sheets: Update your product data in Google sheet to be automatically applied to your account.
- Scheduled fetch: Host your data feed file on your website and schedule an interval for Google to synch the updates.
- Upload: Create your data feed file and upload it manually via SFTP, FTP, Google Cloud, etc.
- Content API: Create an automatic workflow of the process by integrating Google Merchant center in your website via API.
- Major Required Fields
Whether you are uploading manually or creating an automated workflow, update these fields carefully in the defined formats to avoid failure or rejection:
You can learn in deep about attribute specifications from this link from Google.
That’s it. Once you create an upload your data feed in the specified format without any mistake or violation of Google’s policies, you are good to go. The merchant center feeds your data to Google Shopping, your listings become eligible for the organic results.
Apart from specified formats, make sure you have an optimized data feed to ensure a successful listing. This optimization is not very different from the general eCommerce SEO. They are crucial for getting maximum click-through rate, better engagement, and higher relevance.
Use your keywords carefully in the title and descriptions. Avoid keyword stuffing, all capitals, promotional text, and enrich your description with user-centric content. In short, follow all your on-site listing optimizations for your Google Shopping listings, too.