Best Practices for Google Product Search

Let us inspect Google’s own best practices for Google Product Search and how we at Intecca are trying to make sure that your product feed meets these practices. You can always go over the full article on Google Product Search Best Practices.  We will just use excerpts here and will try to honestly access how our feed service follows them. So here we go.

  1. Submit all products available online.
    We should be on target here. As long as we can collect required product data form your Yahoo Store you can be sure that your product will be sent to Google Product Search. The require fields are
    as follows:

    • title (any product in a Yahoo Store has it by default)
    • description (any product in a Yahoo Store has it by default)
    • id (any product in a Yahoo Store has it by default)
    • link (any product in a Yahoo Store has it by default)
    • price (any product in a Yahoo Store has it by default)
    • condition (we deploy special logic to make sure this field is submitted)

    So as you can see we are covered here – all items will be sent, granted they are legitimate items with name, price, link etc.

  2. Submit all relevant attribute
    Our feed service takes care of additional optional attributes for your product feed as well:

    • product description
    • product type
    • product weight
    • product UPC code
    • product image URL

    Obviously, in order for us to submit these, your store needs to have these attributes.

  3. Update your feed often
    All our clients’ feeds are updated once every 24 hours unless requested otherwise. We do not charge our clients extra for the high frequency feed submissions.
  4. Check your performance
    This one is really up to you. Just visit your Google Merchant center dashboard to take a look at your product feed Performance report.
  5. Maintain high data quality
    This also falls into feed owner’s hands. The Data Quality tab in your Google Merchant Center Dashboard will tell you how many (if any) of you products could be  improved.  Long titles, short descriptions, missing product type values, missing or invalid identifiers may negatively influence your performance.  On our side, we do run a lot a validation checks, but ultimately it is up to you, the store owner to make sure that all data is in place and valid.

    to be continued below…

  6. Track Google Product Search as a sales channel
  7. Submit high-quality images
  8. Use the rel=”canonical” tag on your website
  9. Make the most of your product data
  10. Submit your store locations and the online only attribute.