Strategies to Optimize Your Google Shopping Feed

Selling your products online means making sure you are maximizing every opportunity to get your e-comm shop seen by your potential customers. Google Shopping campaigns allow you to position your shop for increased discoverability, better opportunities for awareness, and also allows you to stay competitive in your pricing to boost your sales conversions. When prospective customers are in the discovery phase, they often turn to search and shopping engines like Google to find out more information about a particular product, or to compare pricing for the best deals before making any purchase.

Whether you are a new or growing e-commerce business or a seller offering great product solutions, your main goal is to attract customers to your website and make users convert. Platforms like Shopping allow you to promote your available product catalog in order to send potential customers to your site once they click on your ad or enter key terms into the search query.

However, in order to get the most out of your listings, and attract more customers and conversions to your site, you need to fully optimize your feed. 

What is a Google Shopping Feed?

Google Shopping results that turn up in search help drive ROI on your Google Ad campaigns, and also increase organic traffic to your website. Your Google Shopping feed is essentially a .txt or .XML document that you create that organizes your e-comm store product catalog use data that allows Google to display your products in search results.

Your Google Shopping feed allows Google to show people more relevant results when responding to specific search queries. Google Shopping also allows you to increase the CTR and ROI of your Google Shopping campaign. The data represented in this spreadsheet include product titles, product descriptions, pricing, and more.

What makes Google Shopping unique is the results are not delivered in the same way as Google Ads show up in SERPs. With Google ads, your websites or landing pages show up for the specific keywords they are targeting. However, with Google Shopping, you don’t have direct control over which search queries cause your Shopping ads to be displayed.

Rather, Google determines the relevancy of your catalog to the user’s search query and displays the products accordingly. To ensure your products are being seen by the right users, you need to make sure that you have optimized your catalog for maximum visibility.

Following the best practices and focusing on the following optimizations will give your e-commerce brand the best shot at driving discovery and conversions.

Optimize Your Product Titles

Any type of content published online should have a proper title. Just as you title blog posts and website content, you want to consider how a user would search for the topic online. The same is true for Google Shopping. You want to keep your product titles simple and descriptive and include keywords that will help your product get seen for your desired search terms. For best results, try to keep your titles under 75 characters, and avoid adding too many keywords, as your titles should sound natural.

Running quick keyword research on tools like ahrefs, or soolve will help you filter out the best keywords according to what real people are looking for online and allow you to write your titles with the language that your prospects are using to describe the item. Add the key terms that you see will drive desired results for your listings and add those words you don’t want showing up as negative keywords.

Juice Up Your Product Descriptions

The hurdle most e-comm shops face is not being able to allow the customer to see, touch, or experience the product before purchase. Customers have to rely on their research and also the information provided by the online store to know what they are truly getting. Providing a good description of your product listing will provide in-depth details about your items that your prospective customers will take into account when making an informed purchase decision. Which helps you boost your conversion opportunities. So this step is extremely important.

When writing your descriptions, use keywords that didn’t make it to your product titles. You also want to include as many details and descriptive terms as possible without adding too much fluff. If you find yourself using too much text, break it up, and highlight the important points using line breaks, bullet points, and bold lettering.  

Google gives you a 5,000 character limit to use for your descriptions. This doesn’t mean you need to go on and on, but this gives you enough real estate to provide a lengthy, accurate, and natural phrasing that will entice users to click and also positively impact your products’ search results.

Add High-Quality Images

A picture is worth…well, a purchase. If you want to attract buyers to your product listings then you need to create high-quality imagery that will encourage them to click. A clear, clean product image is essential to your success with Google Shopping. While your images may not help with your signal boosting to Google as the text does, your images do in fact increase your click-through rates and ultimately reflect your conversion rates.

We shop and buy with our eyes, especially with e-comm. So the better your images are at enticing and attracting, the higher your product’s CTR, and the more favorable your products become with Google’s algorithm. The algorithm learns that your products are interesting to shoppers who have searched for these particular search terms, and will allow your product to surface more often, and in better positions on search results over time.

Be sure to keep your image at least 800×800 in size, and provide multiple shots and angles of the same product to give users more to see. If possible, keep all products on a seamless white background without logos, or text.

Get The Category Right

Google product categories are the categories you use to identify products in a product feed for your Google Shopping placements. These categories help Google’s algorithm choose which terms to display your product for in the Google Shopping placement. Without the correct category, your shopping listings can show for unrelated categories which can reduce impressions and lead to lower conversion rates.

With nearly 6,000 official categories available, it can be a lot to process. Since categories are how Google Shopping organizes products internally, you want to be sure to get as niche and specific as possible to get the correct placements for your products. The more relevant and specific the category, the more helpful it is.

Great news for e-comm owners, Google is now offering free product placements when launching on Google Shopping. So now is the perfect time to level up your business with a product shopping strategy. An optimized product feed is critical to your success on Google Shopping. Implementing these optimization practices will help you create a product feed that generates awareness, traffic, and conversions for your online shop.

To get started with some guidance from Idealgrowth, give us a call to schedule a time to chat about your Google Shopping strategy.