Free Google Shopping in Italy, the comment of Making Science
This is the most suitable and urgent historical moment for small businesses to plan a digital strategy which, if properly exploited, can represent a great opportunity to increase business. To make this process as simple as possible for them, and to make up for the lack of skills necessary to act effectively and on a large scale, Google has made Google Shopping available for free, available a few days ago also in Italy, offering online stores a useful tool to promote their products, increasing their visibility within the search engine.
“It is important that these companies make the most of this tool. We, as digital marketing consultants, play a fundamental role in defining the best strategy for customers, evaluating the best form that best fits the needs of the individual company "commented Antonio Negro, Head of E-commerce at Making Science who continues: “From our experience in the US market we have seen that opening free shopping traffic on Google can impact business with an increase of up to 20% in paid shopping traffic”.
To start selling on Google Shopping, it is necessary that the seller owns an online store and that this is registered in the Google Merchant Center, the platform created for retailers. Once you have verified the ownership of the online store, you proceed by filling your data feed with the items you want to show. The data feed is nothing more than a spreadsheet or a text document that contains all the information about the product requested by Google.
To see the new free advertisements, you will need to enter the specific Google Shopping tab. in Google. Here you will see an organic list of products that respond to user searches. To appear in the top positions, however, it will still be necessary to invest an investment in Google Shopping ads.
In this context, SEO becomes a fundamental factor in positioning products on this platform. The SEO optimization of our data feed will improve the positioning of our products in the organic results. But what does Google consider when determining the relevance of our products?
First of all the title: it must accurately describe the product and contain the main keyword assigned to the product of interest. Its repetitive use, however, can be penalizing. This field should never be used to include promotional text. Then the description: it must be objective of the product including the keyword. This section must include any promotional text, links to the store or information relating to sales or competition. To attract more attention to the user, you can include text formats such as italics, lists, line breaks.
Also update the feed: the frequency of the update makes Google take more whether or not I account for a product feed. In this way, the more often we update it, the more we will attract the attention of Google. The more competitive and attractive price it is for the user, the more the platform will show it in a better position. Favorable product or store opinions from consumers make Google show products in a better position. Likewise, a product's star rating helps to dramatically increase the CTR.
We also need to be very careful in choosing the image, as it plays a vital role when it comes to attracting the attention of users. Thanks to this change, a window of collaboration between Google Shopping and SEO opens.
