Justinblase.com

Several months ago I wrote about the missed opportunity of many online store owners by not taking advantage of Google Base to upload their store inventory and optimizing for inclusion in Google product search (and more importantly in the Shopping results embedded in the Google universal search results).

The face of Google universal search has been in a constant state of change for several years now… but with the integration of real time search, local search, video, forum discussions, images and more over the last couple years – it has become clear to savvy Internet marketers that you must strike when the iron is hot.

This is important for 2 reasons:

1. Striking while the iron is hot can result in a tsunami of relevant, high converting website traffic
2. The iron can be taken away at any time… and there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it… so ride it out while you can

For E-commerce store owners, the “hot iron” lies in utilizing Google Base & Google Product Search.  Check out a few of the examples below that illustrate opportunities:

Let’s say I want to research rain gauges online in order to score a cheap, good one (I forgot to pour out the water back in November before it froze and cracked the bejesus out of my old one).  If I head over to Google and search for “best rain gauge”, I am presented with the following:

The “3rd result” in the universal results belongs to a “3 pack” of shopping results pulled from Google Product Search (which is fed directly from data feeds via Google Base from e-commerce store owners around the world).

Take notice of the fact that there are over 1.7 million competing pages for the keyword phrase, but these product results surface near the very top – not to mention the fact they stick out like a sore thumb essentially screaming for attention with the product image, reviews and pricing information.

The best part of marketing products online via Google Product Search is the fact that a. the service is absolutely free, and b. the process itself can be completely automated with a bit of creativity and smarts.