Google used to offer a service called Google Base which has now morphed to Google’s service called Google Merchant Center. You can log in with the above link or if you have a Google Webmaster account (and you should if you sell online), you can access this service through the My Account link.
Through Google Merchant Center, you can give Google a list of all of your products directly to them. That’s cool. There are several ways to get your product feed to Google – from more sophisticated ways such as API and direct feeds to simple uploads of a Excel file. So anyone at any skill level should be able to do this. It is easy.
Google uses this product data feed several ways. The biggest current opportunity for free traffic from Google’s Merchant Center feed is when Google presents the product listings within their organic search results.
This is a true gift from Google. You can cut the proverbial SEO line to get to the first page of results immediately. I have seen this as a great source of traffic for several of my businesses. Google puts your products front-and-center to qualified customers (qualified by their search term) for FREE. You have got to love that!
There are many other ways Google uses these product feeds to get you more traffic. The traditional way is to let searchers click on the word “Shopping” at the top of Google.com. By doing this, searchers will just retrieve product results as opposed to the traditional Google search results which are a mix of site types.
One of the newer ways is to have products appear in Google AdWords results in the “Sponsored Links” section. This is called the Google Plus Box.
This is a big deal because of the high traffic opportunity and plus, it kicks out some of the competition from the first page of AdWords results.
To get your products to appear in Google AdWords results, you need to login to your Google Account and go to SETTING then AdWords and enter your AdWords Customer ID.
Here’s to your online success,
David
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