Google’s Top SEO Tips For Your eCommerce Website
Google’s Top SEO Tips For Your eCommerce Website
Does your business have an eCommerce store set up? If so, you are already on the road to generating sales and accruing repeat customers. As a business, we know you want to grow your store, find new consumers, and make more money. While paid ads on Google, social media, etc., are important, you need to consider every angle for your marketing.
The team at Google recently shared six SEO tips that combine structured data and Merchant Center to help you get the most out of your site’s presence on the search results page. Alan Kent, a Developer Advocate at Google, can be found explaining each tip in detail in a video on the company’s YouTube channel.
Before we get into an overview of the tips, let’s recap what structured data and Merchant Center are to ensure you are up to speed!
Per Google, Structured data is:
“a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content; for example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on.”
Google uses structured data to understand the content of your webpages and to gather information about the web and the world in general.
Merchant Center lets you manage how your in-store and online product inventory appears on Google. Per the platform, merchant solutions help your business reach hundreds of millions of people looking to purchase products like yours a day.
Now that we are caught up on the terms, here are Google’s SEO tips for your site:
1 – Index Your Products
Googlebot may miss pages when crawling a site if they are not linked to other pages. Ensure Google crawls all your product pages through tools like Merchant Center and an XML sitemap. Since Merchant Center is a Google tool, having a product feed guarantees the discovery of all the products on your site.
2 – Check The Accuracy Of Product Prices In Search Results
To accurately promote product information like list price, discounts, and net price, Google recommends you add structured data to your product pages and provide Merchant Center with structured feeds of your product data.
3 – Minimize Price & Availability Lag
Google has its own schedule when it comes to crawling pages on your site. Therefore, if you make changes, Googlebot may not pick up on those changes until the next crawl session. These delays can cause search results to lag behind site changes. For example, if an item you carry is out of stock, it may appear as in stock on Google. To keep things consistent, utilize Merchant Center product feeds to keep pages updated.
4 – Make Products Eligible For Rich Product Results
To get the rich product presentation format, your business can provide structured data on your product pages and a product feed in Merchant Center. Doing so ensures that Google understands how to extract product data to display rich results. One thing to note, however, is that even if you do everything right, rich results are displayed at Google’s discretion.
5 – Share Local Product Inventory Data
Your in-store products are discoverable by people searching for items with the phrase “near me” at the end. To make your products searchable, register your physical store location in your Google Business Profile if you have not done so already. Then, provide a local inventory feed to Merchant Center.
6 – Sign Up For Google Shopping Tab
If you do not know whether or not your products are showing up in the Shopping tab on Google, just try searching for them! Structured data and product feeds alone are, unfortunately, not enough to be included in the Shopping tab. To become eligible, ensure you provide product data feeds in Merchant Center and opt-in to “surfaces across Google.”
Ready to boost sales and drive customer loyalty through your eCommerce site? Call or email us at sbellem@bbrookstone.com to get started. We would love to help you improve your SEO efforts.
