Google’s free listings on its Shopping platform allow Merchants to see product results from their store across Google, such as on the Shopping tab, YouTube, Google Search, Google Images, and Google Lens.
Just as businesses don’t need to pay for inclusion in Google’s search index, displaying products online through Google is also a complimentary service. Google Shopping search results have consisted primarily of free product listings since 2020.
These listings can have a standard or enhanced appearance, depending on the amount of product data provided. Standard listings appear similar to a standard search result with some additional product-specific information:
Enhanced listings require additional product attributes such as high-quality images and are content rich:
Before the listings can be optimised, merchants must meet the minimum requirements to be eligible for the products to be displayed.
You can read more about the free product listings requirements.
Optimising Product Listings
As with traditional SEO, optimisation starts with effective keyword research and competitor analysis.
The most relevant and high-performing search terms, product attributes and details that are used to find your business’s products should be found. These keywords need to then be integrated into the product titles and descriptions to improve the chances of those products appearing in relevant search results.
Competitor analysis complements keyword research by discovering what other businesses do in the same sector in terms of their keyword usage, pricing strategies, or other factors contributing to their success. Then your product listings can be fine-tuned based on their strategies.
Optimising feed data and product attributes are the most effective ways to positively impact SEO performance.
Another important optimisation element is the selection and optimisation of product images. They should be of the highest possible quality, while complying with Google’s size and formatting requirements. Descriptive file names and alt tags should be used for them.
Landing page performance and customer reviews are other elements that can improve the performance of sales.
Google may assess the speed of the product landing pages and User experience to rank the products. So it’s necessary to evaluate the product pages to keep the bounce rates as low as possible to ensure the load time and page experience are as good as possible, to enhance the Google rankings.
You can read about how load time and page experience correlate with user time spent on site and Google rankings.
Taking advantage of the review systems that Google provides can also enhance the products’ sales performance. These are for both the seller and the products.
Finally, its worth making good use of Google’s reporting and insights for free product listings to fine-tune their optimisation.
If you want to know more about how product listing optimisation could help your business, please get in touch.