Google Gives E-Commerce Brands 6 New Tips For Standing Out

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A new video from Google focuses on helping e-commerce brands stand out on the search engine, including specific strategies for ensuring your listing is eligible for search features that make your listing more prominent and visible.

For starters, the video lists three general guidelines for making your products stand out:

  1. Images help visitors understand your products
  2. Product reviews and star ratings increase trust in your brand
  3. Pricing and availability information allows shoppers to choose the best seller for their needs

With that in mind, Google’s Alan Kent then breaks down six ways to make your site more visible on the search engine.

1) Title Tags

As one of the first things any searcher will see, title tags are crucial for helping searchers understand your web pages. This is why site owners should take extra care when preparing the titles for their pages – especially product pages.

“A good title link can greatly help users understand your offering, bringing quality traffic to your site. … Low-quality title links can harm a users’ impression of your site.”

While Google will rewrite title tags if it believes the existing titles do not adequately describe the related page, it is better to deliver informative titles on your own.

Kent also advises against adding time-sensitive product details like pricing or availability in titles because they may be outdated by the time this information is updated in search results.

2) High-Quality Images

Improving the quality of your product images can make shoppers feel more confident about your products and their potential decision to purchase. 

As Kent says, “we’ve observed that users generally respond well to high-quality images and recommend that key images be at least 1200 pixels wide.”

Once these images are in place, Kent suggests checking the Max Image Preview metadata as that provides Google with guidance on how to handle images within search results.

Additionally, best practices indicate you should use product structured data to allow Google to pick the best images to display in search results.

Lastly, he provided some broad guidance for product photos, encouraging e-commerce brands to focus on creating product photos that best help shoppers understand their products. For example, you might highlight different angles or provide size comparisons within product photos.

3) Share Rich Product Data

Google uses structured data to more easily understand web pages and enable them to be shown as rich results or “special presentation treatments”. 

Specifically, Kent emphasizes that these details should always be included in structured product data:

  • Product Title
  • Description
  • Images
  • Ratings
  • Price
  • Availability

Kent also encourages brands to regularly use the Search Console URL Indexing tool and Rich Results Test tool to ensure you don’t have any issues with structured data on your site.

4) Share Price Drop Data

Google uses special price drop presentations to highlight special deals in search results. Still, e-commerce brands must share pricing information with the search engine and include the Offer property in the product structured data to be eligible.

However, there is no guarantee your listing will be shown in a special price drop presentation once you’ve provided these details.

5) Identify Products You Sell

Use accurate product identifiers – such as GTIN identifiers – along with Google Merchant Center data and structured product data to make your site eligible for product carousels.

6) Create a Business Profile Listing

Kent advises brands to create a Google Business Profile via the Google Business Profile Manager if their shop also has a brick-and-mortar location. 

This enables your site to be included in local search results which makes your physical locations more visible in search.

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Instagram Announces New Feature To Collect “Payments In Chat”

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Instagram is launching a new feature called “Payments in Chat”, though the name undersells the actual capabilities of the feature.

As announced via Meta’s Newsroom, the Payments in Chat feature will allow online businesses to collect payments directly from customers through the chat tool. But, more than that, the tool will enable companies to completely handle the sales process through chat – including answering customers’ questions, creating new purchase orders, managing payments, and even tracking product shipments.

As the announcement explains:

“We want to help people start conversations with businesses they care about and help them find and buy products they love in an easy, seamless experience, right from the chat thread.”

How It Works

To make Payments in Chat possible, the new feature uses Meta Pay – the company’s first-party payment processing service. This keeps the process streamlined, allowing shoppers to make purchases in just a few taps while providing secure data transmission and purchase protection.

Using this service, customers are able to initiate a chat with a company representative to ask questions about a potential purchase, checkout, pay for the purchase, and track its shipment to your home without ever leaving Instagram’s chat.

When combined with Instagram Shops, the new Payment in Chat feature makes it possible for shoppers to go from discovering a new product to buying it with just a few taps or without the need to ever leave the platform.

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Pinterest Launches 4 New Features To Promote Products and Online Stores

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Pinterest is angling to make itself the leading social network for e-commerce activity with a slew of new features and advancements for shopping. 

As the announcement for the updates explains, Pinterest has seen a surge in the number of merchants listing their products on the platform (up 87% in Q1 of 2022 alone).

Now, the company is hoping to double down on this with a new Pinterest API for Shopping, Product Tagging for Pins, Videos in Shopping Catalogs, and the introduction of a Shop Tab on Business Profiles:

“At Pinterest, our goal is to turn inspiration into action, and our vision for shopping is to make it possible to buy anything Pinners are inspired by on the platform. In 2021, the number of Pinners engaging with shopping surfaces on Pinterest grew over 215%, and 89% of weekly Pinners use Pinterest for inspiration in their path to purchase. The new shopping features such as the API for Shopping allows brands and retailers to reach high-intent Pinners during the earliest stage of their shopping journey with the most updated catalog data.”

Pinterest API for Shopping

Pinterest wants to make it easy to manage your products no matter how large your inventory is. With the new API for Shopping, you can more accurately manage metadata for your products with early tests showing the tool was 97% accurate.

Product Tagging for Pins

Though the social network is leaning more heavily into the world of shopping, the main focus is still on Pins that users and brands share. With Product Tagging, you can make your pins a seamless part of your sales process. Once you have tagged your products in pins, shoppers can easily click on the tags to be immediately taken to a sales page.

Video in Catalog

The typically image-based social network is gradually integrating video. The latest move in this direction is the ability to use video assets in product catalogs to showcase your products in motion.

Shop Tab on Business Profiles

Make your online store a more prominent part of your business profile with a new tab dedicated to your shop. According to early tests, approximately 30% of Shopify merchants said they got their first attributed checkout directly from this high-intent shopping feature.

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Google Shares 8 SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

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Ecommerce websites have become a major part of the internet as online shopping has taken off in recent years. However, the unique nature and structure of these sites can make them uniquely tricky to optimize. 

Product variant pages, annual sales, and the need for lots of high-quality images may make it difficult to optimize these pages using some traditional SEO strategies, while other techniques remain essential for high rankings.

Thankfully, Google’s own Alan Kent has produced a short video full of SEO tips specifically for ecommerce sites. I’ll embed the full video at the bottom of the page, but we’ll also be sharing the highlights below:

8 Tips for Ecommerce SEO

  1. Cover the Basics: Basic technical SEO like allowing Google to crawl your site or using proper page titles is crucial for helping Google find and understand your website. For starters, make sure page titles feature your brand name and product details (such as color) and use structured data to make your product pages easy for Google to sort through your online store pages.
  2. Create Content for Every Stage of the Shopping Journey: Google knows that searchers are often looking for information rather than wanting to buy right now. This is why the search engine prioritizes sites with a wide array of content for every stage of the buyer’s journey. To help you get started brainstorming, Kent suggests providing gift ideas, highlighting reviews, and including detailed information about your products.
  3. Markup Product Variant Pages: To keep product variants well organized, ensure every variant has a unique URL and establish a canonical page.
  4. Reuse Regular Sale URLs: Preserve URLs from sales so they can be reused later. For example, you’ll want to use the same URLs every year for holiday sales.
  5. Performance: When shoppers are ready to buy, they want to do so as quickly as possible. When your page is competing against a similar product page for a spot in the search results, speed is often the tiebreaker that will help you come out ahead.
  6. Be Patient: SEO takes time to gain momentum. In many cases, it can take months for changes to impact your rankings. Don’t try to rush things or change strategies because you’re getting restless. Just keep working on improving your overall SEO.
  7. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Help: Every site is unique and may not benefit equally from Google’s broad advice. Don’t hesitate to ask SEO experts how to best optimize your site or how to adopt these strategies to your needs.
  8. Focus on Users: At the end of the day, Google wants to provide the best possible site for users. Be that site. 
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Do Out-of-Stock Product Pages Hurt Your Google Rankings?

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Product pages may receive a temporary reduction in their visibility in Google search results if the product is listed as out of stock, according to Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller during the most recent Google Search Central SEO Office Hours session.

Surprisingly, though, this is not always the case.

As Mueller answered questions about how product stock affects rankings, he explained that Google has a few ways of handling out-of-stock product pages.

How Google Handles Out-of-Stock Products

Mueller says that, in most cases, Google treats out-of-stock listings as a soft redirect or unavailable page:

“Out of stock – it’s possible. That’s kind of simplified like that. I think there are multiple things that come into play when it comes to products themselves in that they can be shown as a normal search result.

They can also be shown as an organic shopping result as well. If something is out of stock, I believe the organic shopping result might not be shown – I’m not 100% sure.

And when it comes to the normal search results, it can happen that we when see that something is out of stock, we will assume it’s more like a soft 404 error, where we will drop that URL from the search results as well.

Theoretically, it could affect the visibility in search if something goes out of stock.”

In some situations, though, Google will essentially override this decision and continue to show a page if it is considered particularly relevant for users.

For example, if the product page also includes helpful information about the product in general, it may still be worth keeping in search results despite the lack of stock.

As Mueller explains”

“It doesn’t have to be the case. In particular, if you have a lot of information about that product anyway on those pages, then that page can still be quite relevant for people who are searching for a specific product. So it’s not necessarily that something goes out of stock, and that page disappears from search.”

Out-of-Stock Products Don’t Hurt Your Entire Site

While it is true that listing one product as unavailable can keep that specific page from appearing in search results, Mueller is sure to reassure you that this should not impact the rest of your website:

“The other thing that’s also important to note here is that even if one product goes out of stock, the rest of the site’s rankings are not affected by that.

So even if we were to drop that one specific product because we think it’s more like a soft 404 page, then people searching for other products on the site, we would still show those normally. It’s not that there would be any kind of negative effect that swaps over into the other parts of the site.”

You can watch the entire discussion with Google’s John Mueller in a recording of the SEO Office Hours session below:

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Provide Google-Quality Search Results On Your E-Commerce Site

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Google is offering a new solution for e-commerce brands interested in improving their site’s search capabilities. 

With the release of Retail Search, Google Cloud is making it possible for online retailers to provide Google-quality search results on their own websites. This means it will be faster and easier for customers to find the products they are looking for on your site, making them more likely to complete thor transaction instead of abandoning your site. 

How Poor Search Experiences Hurt Online Retailers

According to a 2021 survey from The Harris Poll and Google Cloud, at least 94% of American consumers have abandoned a shopping session because of poor quality or irrelevant search results and 76% of shoppers said that an unsuccessful search led to a lost sale for a retail website. 

Based on this, the report estimates retailers lose $300 billion each year solely because of this phenomenon known as search abandonment. 

Understanding Intent To Deliver Better Search Results

The biggest hurdle to delivering successful search results has always been understanding search intent. 

Most basic search engines struggle to identify user intent and deliver the most relevant search results quickly. Google’s systems, however, are constantly being updated with the specific goal of better understanding user intent and delivering the best results quickly.

With Retail Search, retailers can now deliver that same quality search experience on their own site. 

Customizable For Your Needs

Retail Search is fully customizable to suit the needs of almost any e-commerce site. 

As the announcement says:

“Our site search solution builds upon decades of Google’s experience and innovation in search indexing, retrieval, and ranking. Retailers can make product discovery even easier for shoppers, while optimizing for their business goals with advanced capabilities.”

These capabilities include:

  • Advanced query understanding that produces better results from even the broadest queries, including non-product searches. 
  • Semantic search to effectively match product attributes with website content for fast, relevant product discovery. 
  • Optimized results that leverage user interaction and ranking models to meet specific business goals.
  • State-of-the-art security and privacy practices that ensure retailer data is isolated with strong access controls and is only used to deliver relevant search results on their own properties.

For more information, read the full announcement here or visit Google’s Discovery Solutions for Retail.

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Twitter Tests Dedicated Shopping Pages For Brands

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Twitter is signaling its plans to let brands establish dedicated shops on the platform through a limited test.

The company revealed it is introducing dedicated shopping pages including up to 50 products to a handful of brands as an experiment ahead of plans to roll out the feature to more retailers later this year. 

The feature allows a brand or business to add a simple “View shop” button to its profile page, which will link to a Twitter-hosted e-commerce page. When clicked, the button will then take users to your actual online store or website, where the transaction can be completed. 

As Twitter described the new feature in its blog post announcement:

“People are already talking about products on Twitter. We want Twitter Shops to be the home for merchants on Twitter where they can intentionally curate a catalog of products for their Twitter audience and build upon the product discussions already happening on our service by giving shoppers a point of action where a conversation can become a purchase.”

Only Available to a Select Few

As Twitter Shops are currently considered a beta test, the feature is only available to a small number of brands in the U.S. Specifically, the announcement only mentioned five brands that have utilized the feature so far – Verizon, Arden Cover, the Latinx In Power podcast, Gay Pride Apparel, and All I Do Is Cook.

Additionally, only iPhone users are currently able to view or interact with the shops, though the company plans to roll the feature out to other devices in the future.

Social Stores Are Becoming The Norm

The new feature underscores the increasingly blurry line between social media and online shopping. Several other platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have rolled out their own shopping tools to brands on their platform, though the most obvious comparison is Pinterest’s current shopping system where users can discover brands and shop their products on the platform before finalizing their purchase through retailer’s own sites.

For more, read Twitter’s full announcement here.

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