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.

Google announced today that it has added an enhancement to the seach snippet that is displayed to users on search engine results pages.  Prior to today, search snippets were only comprised of the META description provided by webmasters, a snippet randomly taken off the page by Google, or a combination of both.

From today on, seach snippets on results pages can also include named anchors in a contextual text link format to help users jump directly to specific locations on the page rather than always being taken to the top of the page and being forced to scroll through all of the page content in order to locate the desired information.

Here are examples of 2 search snippets that include the new named anchors:

What Does This Mean For Search Marketers?

It appears that there is now a good reason to include named anchors in page content.  It would be a safe bet to assume that search snippets containing a relevant named anchor that is now clickable and blue instead of an entirely plain text snippet could lead to an increase in click throughs from organic search results.

Google Docs, the free suite of online office tools will start being crawled and indexed soon.  According to a post made by a Google employee on the Google Docs help forum, “This is a very exciting change as your published docs linked to from public websites will reach a much wider audience of people.”

Google Docs, which is being used by millions as a free alternative to the pricey Microsoft Office suite, currently offers programs for creating and editing word processing documents, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations and forms.

How To Keep Your Docs Private

It is important to note, due to Google Docs being crawled, if you create a document that you do not want to potentially show up in search results, make sure you choose the “stop publishing” option under the “publish / embed” settings under the “share” tab…. especially if you are one that keeps a spreadsheet of  usernames and logins for websites and software programs.

It will be interesting to see whether or not organizations will be able to benefit in terms of SEO from this change.  PDF documents have been crawled and indexed for years, and in my experience tend to rank even higher than standard html or php pages for certain types of keyword phrases…. looks like it’s time to run some tests!

I decided to write this blog post today due to the number of e-commerce site owners I have worked with that are not aware of the benefits involved with utilizing product data feeds to increase site visibility.  Not only is data feed marketing an excellent way to get your brand in front of more eyeballs, it’s generally quite inexpensive and easy to setup and manage.

A data feed is a file (commonly in xml, csv, or other format) that allows you to easily upload your site’s entire product inventory to online shopping portals or comparison engines.  A few example of these type of sites include Google Product Search (Google Base), Yahoo! Shopping, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, ShopLocal, Gift.com and more.

Many of the sites charge a fee to list your inventory, but it’s almost always worth the charge due to the large volume of traffic and high search engine rankings these sites tend to have.  For those of you that would like an introduction in data feed marketing, but aren’t interested in paying a cost per click or a cost per conversion, the ideal place to start is with Google Base.

Google Base is a service that Google offers that allows merchants to upload a data feed of their inventory to Google Product Search.  There is no charge by Google for the service, and it is a great way to gain more exposure for your online store.

There are two main benefits to using Google Base:

1.  Your products are added to Google Products. Google products is a service provided by Google that assists consumers with comparing products based on pricing, location and several other criteria.  It is a completely free service for both product buyers and product services.

Below is an example of a Google products search for “black and decker weed wacker”

2.  Your products can appear in the natural results as “Shopping Results”. This is undoubtedly the biggest benefit to using Google base since the majority of online searches start with Google.com.  For certain types (not all of them, usually longer tailed search phrases) of product searches, Google currently delivers 2 to 4 “Shopping Results” mixed into the natural search rankings.  These shopping results are often times found about 3 listings down in the results, but have been known to appear number 1 for less popular search terms.

Notice in the example below, by using Google Base, one can essentially achieve a #4 Google position for a search term with 195,000 competing pages.  Not too shabby, eh?

Below is a screenshot of a Google.com search for “Black and Decker weed wacker”

There are some steps that need to be taken to properly export your product inventory in the format that Google Base accepts, so if your e-commerce platform has an extensions or plugins available to help automate the data feed export process, they are almost always worth using.

Also, just because you add your data feed to Google Base doesn’t automatically mean you your products will show up in the natural results, often times product descriptions and titles must be tweaked in order to gain the desired visibility.

Do you have questions about whether or not your website can benefit from data feed marketing?  Ask below!