Brandon Adcock dot comMy Thoughts, Mostly on Direct Response Marketing

As universal search becomes increasingly integrated with the different offerings of each search engine, top ranking real estate spots will only become more difficult to achieve. It was just a few years ago, that websites only competed with other websites for top rankings, that’s not the case anymore. Now that pictures, videos, news, and soon to be products (not to mention 1 spot guaranteed to Wikipedia) are included, companies and sites must make use of every type of medium they can to achieve rankings.

Eventually Google Product Search (formerly known as Froogle) will be a fully integrated part of the search results. Currently product search is accessible in ways pointed out by the screenshot below.

Optimizing a product feed is very important and should not be overlooked when creating shopping feeds, especially ones that will be uploaded to search engines. For this article I will be using Google as the example, but these basic principles apply to others as well.

Google publishes a list of required and optional attributes for their product feeds, some are noted below.

• Title
• Brand
• Condition
• Description
• Expiration date
• Id
• Image link
• Product link
• Price manufacturer’s part number (MPN)
• Language
• Size Dimensions
• Made In
• Product Type

Google product search uses a different algorithm than standard search to return its results, though the same theories/principles crossover. Factors include title, brand, description, age of feed, click-through-rate, breadth of product selection, ID, MPN, and seller ratings (pulled from resellerratings.com)

Title
The title field in the product feed might be the single most important section. Write the title exactly how you want it to be displayed in the results. Google does not pull any other categories into the title. Factors to put into the title are brand, keywords, category, and the actual product. In the screenshot below the titles are denoted by the red arrow and the descriptions by the blue. This is not necessarily an example of how to write one, I was just sticking with the “Tools” keyword.

Description
I would rank the description as the second most important attribute. Product feed descriptions, like website descriptions, should make the potential customer want to click your link, be clearly worded, keyword rich, strong call to action, and be unique. You do not want to copy and paste your product titles into the description field. The human editing element is also very important here, but may be difficult when dealing with large quantities of products.

Brand
It is required and very important to include the accurate brand of the product. Users can refine their searches by brand which makes including this field, having it spelled, and displayed correctly, very important. Also, do not include trademark or other symbols next to the brand name, they are stripped on upload.

Age of Feed
The longer your account runs a feed on Google, the better it will rank. This is very comparable to age of a domain for regular search result rankings.

Seller Ratings
I believe this to be a heavily weighted section that will continue to evolve as Google works on their product search more. Currently, seller ratings are pulled from ResellerRatings.com. However, in the future I am sure they will be using others either to add on to this, or in place of. Seller ratings are Google’s trust attribute to the feed. I don’t know that I would directly compare it to PageRank, but it is the only visible piece of information to quantify the trust worthiness of a seller. One way to actively benefit from this would be to encourage satisfied customers to leave positive feedback on this site after their purchase.

Summary
Product search is important to anyone selling a product, and it will only become more important in the future. Include as many optional fields in your feed as possible, the more attributes a feed has, the better that feed will rank. Spend time on crafting or designing titles and descriptions, they are important. Make sure to make your feeds are keyword rich, using similar types of keyword research as you would for SEO, and include strong call to actions. Getting an early start on optimizing product feeds now, will put you one step ahead of the competition as they become increasingly saturated.