Using Google Shopping Results to Your Advantage

If you have an online store then you should be submitting to “Google Base” (aka “Froogle”).
It’s free. And aren’t we about getting free listing and free traffic here?!

Has anyone seen my stapler?

Within “Google Merchant Center” you can upload your product feeds, which go into Google Base (their product database)

And then when searches match those products, you’ll see a “Shopping for …” section. The position of that section will vary.

I haven’t done a real analysis into the position, but I often see it in positions 1-4.  Sometimes you’ll see it further down.

For example, if you search for “red stapler” (made famous by the movie “Office Space”) you’ll see a Shopping section with the title “Shopping for Red Stapler”.  When I just did it there was first an “Images” block at the top. 2 regular listings. And then the “Shopping” listing.

The Shopping section shows 3 listings within it. 2 for Amazon and 1 for Buy.com.

Even though that example has big name stores, any stores can be listed.

I’m starting to get some nice free traffic from those.

And yesterday I got a $412 sale from one.  And that was being listed number 3 in the Shopping block (not to be confused with the “Chopping Block”!)

That’s a free sale that I probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

And now that I’m started to “Crack the Google Shopping Code” I’m going to get more traffic and more sales.

Like most things dealing with web traffic, it’s about being in the top x number of listings.

For the most part it seems the section usually shows 2-3 listings. Listings below that will still show if someone clicks the Shopping link. But it’s a lot better to be show in the actual search results, in that Shopping section.

To get shown there, there are some things that help. It’s a little akin to regular SEO. But Google has it’s own separate algorithm to determine ranking within Shopping.

And just like with regular SEO, it helps to know what keywords (in this case, product name variations) tend to pay off – and then focus more on those.