Every new product or service in the e-commerce market requires a website or an app to conduct its business profitably.
Broadly termed as an online presence, every product requires to be ranked the highest in Google’s search result page to generate revenue and improve their user base.
If you’re a website that sells a product or a service, it is extremely important to understand how Google Products and the new ‘Popular Products’ feature works.
It may sound complex but is quite easy to understand.
Once you get the hang of how the Google base works, it can do wonders for your business in a short turnaround time.
As a web design agency, it is necessary to understand how to optimize your product pages to be tagged ‘relevant’ by Google’s search engine and scale your business up.
When you look for a product online on Google, the top search results presented to you depend on multiple factors that influence the appearance of links in a certain manner.
With the introduction of features like Google Adwords, the online marketing game underwent a revamp.
This is because every search result page reflects links that are Ads for certain products related to the user’s query whereas the main website is ranked much lower on the page.
There are multiple factors that can be used to your benefit if studied, understood, and used properly.
Every product search requested on the Google platform by the user, a search engine results page is generated and divided into sections like Videos, organic results, Ads, and Google Shopping.
These sections have links that are ranked and appear in that manner to the user.
The ranking is based on the new Popular Products feature which provides equal opportunities to all e-commerce retails and based on the information stored, it appears above or below the fold on a result page.
Here are 4 ways to help you rank higher in Google’s SERPs:
The Popular products feature introduced by Google has changed how business is conducted online.
By enabling more organic traffic to go to smaller businesses, Google is helping create a channel for the consumer to buy products directly from small-scale e-commerce merchants.
This, however, has hit the large-scale giants like Amazon and Walmart as well as vendors who conduct business through them.
As a website designer of a new product being launched, here are a few tips that will help you rank higher in the SERPs.
1. Google Merchant Center – Setting it up
The first step to enable Google’s search engine to identify your product and list it as a relevant option on the result page.
This is based on the information present in the Google Merchant Center along with perfectly optimized, SEO-friendly content.
Make sure that as an individual or an agency, it is important to take time and carefully set up a merchant center for your product.
Whenever a user searches for a product that is relevant to your brand, the merchant center helps Google’s search engine identify the information entered which in turn helps your brand be ranked higher than other e-commerce retailers.
Google provides an extensive guide to help you set up and use this to your maximum benefit.
Once this is set up, appearing on SERPs will become easier. Thus, making your product and brand more visible and accessible.
Information like the ID, title, a crisp description, an image link, price, brand, etc. needs to be added onto the merchant center for the best results and better business.
2. Schema Markup Addition – Paying attention to microdata
To make your brand and product page appear higher on SERPs, it is important to follow guidelines and add schema or microdata into the code of your website.
Google crawlers scan the web and having schema embedded into your website code helps easier identification.
Adding structured schema also helps to match queries to your product, making it relevant for searches all across the Google platform.
Using multiple types of schema markup, you can add images as well as enable positive reviews to be visible to the Google crawler.
If you can show the breadcrumbs of your website, it is most likely to show up on stronger result pages and gain a higher ranking.
Using the correct language is also crucial to a business.
Usage of the right product language on your website supports the search query by a user at the other end.
This, when coupled with multiple site links to a range of different products, helps higher ranking.
3. Product detail pages – The game-changer
Categorizing and structuring your product’s data is important to drive that specific traffic to your product page.
Once a user searches for a product using certain words (this is where SEO comes into the picture for your content), the Popular Products and the result page are displayed.
On clicking one of the Popular products, the user is redirected to the Product Detail Page.
This page, therefore, needs to be crafted with the utmost care and included/embedded wherever recommended and necessary.
For example, Product detail pages must be in line with Google Ads and its best practices.
The help center for Google Ads will answer all your questions and help you go from zero to one and one to ten, real quick.
Similarly, make sure that the product detail pages are included in the Merchant Center while you set it up for maximum visibility.
4. SEO + PDP optimization – The key feature
Before you begin to optimize your product detail pages, it is necessary to carry out a background check of where the official page of the brand is actually ranked at.
Once done, you may proceed to identify and work across areas that require optimization.
Every word that you decide to embed into code for your website and the content that you use to describe your product and its features must be SEO-friendly to yield the best results. Here’s how you can break it down:
For the content that goes onto the Product detail page, add a title that is short and crisp with the company name, product name, and a keyword that would help the search engine identify and match you better when a user searches for it.
After the content is optimized and involves all the keywords that could help the website, make sure you organize or arrange the pages in a particular hierarchy.
Organizing your PDPs into product lines while including a good meta description and URLs that are similar to the title and includes the primary keyword.
The meta description is to be kept short and is a good way to create visibility as Google may highlight the words mentioned by the user if it is present in your product’s description to highlight the relevance.
Create and organize all the content that goes onto your product page to aid and assist Google in assessing the relevance to the user’s search.
If your content that is published onto your PDPs is not strong enough or doesn’t contain SEO content, it may be neglected by Google.
Hence, it is very important to pay attention to all these steps to rank higher up in the SERPs and generate more of the organic traffic and otherwise to your product/website.
What’s next?
‘Google it’ is something we’ve all said at one point in our lives and understanding Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs) is crucial to a website design agency or otherwise, to enable the product or service to be ranked higher based on the new ‘Popular Products’ feature.
Tracking your product’s progress is an important metric in the e-commerce business and needs to be paid attention to.
Constantly changing the content or launching brand campaigns to create more noise in the market will impact your SERPs at all times.
Keep a track of your progress to help identify gaps and work through them to get better with every search.
Remember that while developing your page and before publishing it, it is very important to develop and review the content to fit your needs and give the expected results.
Conclusion
The e-commerce industry is at its peak of the booming stage with new products and services launching every day along with the competitors increasing.
Google’s Popular Products feature is to help organic traffic be directed to online e-commerce retailers directly and the best way to start appearing higher in searches is through effective feeds in Google’s merchant center with good schema markup and perfectly optimized content. As your website or product ranks higher, it affects the profitability and business.
Once the business increases, you must remember to pay attention to your customer’s data and security which should be taken care of right from the beginning to provide a smooth, seamless and safe experience to the user.
The customer experience will also help you establish your brand in the market in the form of positive reviews which will help your website rank better as well.