Using Google Product Studio in eCommerce SEO - Expert Share Their Thoughts

Update: 03/11/2023 Charlie Bramble updated quote for clarity.

Running an eCommerce store means that you have to take care of several different aspects such as managing your product catalogues, promoting your store, and most importantly, keeping your website up and running at all times.

Amidst all these things, you also need to consider how your products are presented and promoted to potential customers. This can include taking care of the aesthetics, product placements, descriptions, image SEO, and how well these product pages are optimised.

While a lot of these tasks need to be carried out by trained and experienced personnel, Google has found a way to make it easier for you to have visually appealing and clean product images on your online store.

Enter: Google Product Studio.

What is this new tool all about? How can it help eCommerce businesses? Should you consider using this magical new tool?

We answer all these questions and more with insights from experts in this guide. Let’s get right into it.

What is Google Product Studio?

Google has always been at the forefront of the digital revolution and emerging technological trends, and the present is no different. eCommerce is one of the most thriving industries across the globe, and every online store/marketplace has to invest a lot of time and resources in outperforming competitors. Conduct a competitor analysis to know just how much ground you need to cover.

Generative AI thankfully has several solutions that can help simplify and expedite the process.

In a Google Marketing Live event that took place on May 23, 2023, Google announced the launch of its Product Studio. It is a helpful tool that lets brands utilise generative AI to create and enhance product imagery.

Google Merchant Center Next, the platform that lets users customise the way their products look and work on Google Shopping, can be enabled with new imagery using Product Studio. What’s more, merchants can create these imagery for free and save the cost that they would otherwise incur in terms of photoshoots.

Say, you run an online store selling clothes on a website created with the help of Wix. If you have specific products that you want to highlight for summers, you can easily edit the background and other aspects of the image using Google Product Studio. Similarly, you can also use the platform to edit and remove distracting backgrounds from the images.

You can also use Product Studio to increase the resolution of your product images and ensure that your visual assets are up to par from the quality standpoint. You will be able to utilise generative-AI models to elevate the image quality and create crisper alternatives for low-quality images. 

Emphasising on the fact that Google SEO prefers custom images,

“The likelihood is ai generated images will go undetected by google’s crawlers. Websites can use ai images as a way of establishing “experience” (part of EEAT). Although this is gaming the system, it is something which we have been doing in the past, just by altering the layout of images, such as flipping them and zooming in. It’s not something I would suggest relying on, but worth being aware of.”

Charlie Bramble, Founder at Digital Rainmaker Ltd.

Google Product Studio is backed by AI that has been trained on several product images online, making it a powerful image editing tool.

Features of Google Product Studio

Now that you know what Google Product Studio is, and all the various things you can accomplish using it, let us look at the primary features offered by the platform. 

1. Custom Product Scenes: With the help of this feature, merchants can customise the background of any product image. The feature utilises AI to generate appropriate backgrounds that you can choose from, based on what would fit the best contextually. More importantly, think about the endless possibilities that you have when you can simply upload a product image without background and let AI do the rest.

For instance, a plumbing product retail company based in Brisbane can highlight products tailored to addressing monsoon-related problems by customising the product backgrounds accordingly.

2. Background Removal: Backgrounds can make or break the message that you are trying to deliver with your products. This means that you will often have to pick and choose which backgrounds to keep, remove or edit, and this task can be significantly amplified when you have a lot of products to deal with. What’s more, you can use the Product Studio to flip or reverse your background images just as well.

This feature can work wonders for backgrounds that seem to be too distracting and do not contribute to the primary points that you are highlighting to sell the product. 

For instance, if your website sells products that may help with locksmith-related services in Melbourne, but a product of yours has elements that take away the spotlight of your product, you can remove or edit it using Product Studio.

3. Enhancement of Image Resolution: Don’t you just hate it when you have the right product, copy and selling point but the product images simply do not highlight the quality of your products? For an eCommerce seller, the quality of product images can play a crucial role in changing the way your customers perceive your brand as much as having optimised eCommerce content.

With that in mind, if you want to elevate the quality of your product images from a pixel standpoint, Google Product Studio can be a big help to you. Using the generative AI models that drive the platform and its features, retailers can create cleaner and crisper images from the low-resolution images for their products.

The images that you generate this way using AI will not carry any kind of watermark or symbol that might otherwise suggest that your image has been manipulated.

Let’s face it — these are no extraordinary features, but they are still pretty great and useful for eCommerce stores — small or big. Combine these with the features offered by some of the popular SEO tools out there and you have got yourself some powerful product and landing pages.

“Product Studio has a real opportunity to remove much of the admin around images, size, aspect ratio, scale, optimization. It would be great if it could automatically generate images in a range of sizes, with/without transparent backgrounds, and do things like optimize the image itself plus add descriptive file names.

Another big wishlist item would be for Product Studio to provide insights into increasing image performance. Which kind of images work best for click/conversion rates, what sorts of prompts may provide good inspiration and even where might the output images potentially cause copyright/legal issues?”

Chris Green, Senior SEO Consultant at Torque Partnership

How to Leverage Google Product Studio for eCommerce?

As you may have already realised, the features offered by Google Product Studio can make it possible for you to elevate the way you present your eCommerce brand to customers on Google. Let’s also not forget the many eCommerce SEO benefits that you can look forward to achieving from this.

Right from enhancing the quality of your pixelated product image, to giving it a tailored aesthetic background, it can truly amplify the brand messaging of your eCommerce store.
Of course, you need to consider that the implications of this tool go beyond its application for Google/Google Shopping Ads. About this,

The opportunity to generate & re-generate imagery with little-to-no cost really gives you the opportunity to experiment and test more gets me excited here. I would be tempted to use these images to merchandise my own products outside of Merchant Centre/Ads too.”

Chris Green, Senior SEO Consultant at Torque Partnership

eCommerce companies have to invest quite a few resources – monetary and otherwise, into creating high quality images that would best represent and showcase their products.

Moreover, since Google Product Studio is a free tool, you will be able to leverage all of its features more effectively, and improve the way your products look to the customers viewing them on Google. This eliminates the need for you to do time-consuming and expensive photoshoots. This means no more spending on extensive setups and product placements to represent your product right, as AI can generate the perfect background for them.

“Besides the opportunity for added creativity, you still need well-lit shots with either a white or transparent background. Imagine your image may be used in any context, so ensure you have a full range of shots, from the product-focus shot to others with more flavour and flair.”

Chris Green, Senior SEO Consultant at Torque Partnership

Google Product Studio is especially a boon in disguise for small and medium sized businesses, as they can often struggle to set aside the kind of budget that is required for the kind of product photography that will help them compete with more powerful players in the market.

“Google’s generative AI allows small businesses to overcome creative limitations caused by budget constraints, giving them more power and control. One of the biggest wins for these businesses is the ability to customise product images to align with seasons, trending events and campaign themes. By doing so, they can ensure their content remains fresh and relevant to consumers.”

Luce Rawlings, a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Consultant

There is some extra good news here for eCommerce stores built with or managed through Shopify. Apart from the many Shopify SEO features that the platform offers, with the introduction of Google Product Studio, you have one more major advantage. 

While other eCommerce merchants can access Product Studio using Merchant Center Next, Shopify customers can also access Product Studio features directly from Google and YouTube apps on Shopify. But this does not mean that eCommerce stores on other platforms would be unable to leverage the many features offered by Product Studio.

All in all, eCommerce companies can truly unleash their marketing potential and enhance their visual language by leveraging the many erstwhile features of Google Product Studio. The tool will be rolling out in the United States later this year, and in other countries shortly thereafter.

Google Product Studio vs. Existing AI-Powered Tools

If you feel like the features that you have read so far do not seem that impressive and make you think of a few existing tools that have similar capabilities — you are not wrong.

There are many tools that marketers and eCommerce stores have already been using to edit and enhance product images. We will talk about a couple of them, and give you a quick comparison with Google Product Studio so that you can decide the best way forward.

Take PhotoRoom, for example. This AI-powered photo studio tool enables online stores to edit product images the way they want. Like Product Studio, PhotoRoom allows you to edit or remove product image backgrounds, remove any unnecessary or distracting objects from the image, and retouch an entire batch of images for your listings in one go.

Another similar generative AI-powered tool that you should know about is Adobe Firefly. This tool has been around for quite some time, and allows you to retouch and transform your product images as per your requirements. 

For starters, you can utilise the Generative Fill feature of the tool to remove and fill in any image you want with different kinds of objects and textures. Additionally, the integration of the tool with popular image editing software such as Photoshop and Illustrator enables you to create beautiful and unique product images.

“Regardless of whether you use Google Product Studio or any other AI-powered image editing tool, you will always need to keep image SEO in mind. Your perfectly curated images are of little use to bringing traffic to your website or ranking on Google, if you do not have all the technical SEO, and on-page SEO elements optimised and ready to go with them.”

Hardy, at Supple Digital

But when you are choosing a tool to leverage for your online store, you have quite a few factors to consider. The features that the tool offers is definitely important, however, other factors include budget, and the skill level required. In that regard, Google Product Studio does outperform these other tools by a large margin. 

However, you need to consider the downsides too. Talking about this

“The downside is that based on the quality of prompts, and the complexity of the source image, it may make images look more fake. However if this happens the business can just not use the images. The tool also doesn’t do more advanced things such as 3D rotations, but the way the tech is advancing, this may be possible in the future.”

Ben Foster, CEO at The SEO Works

Google Product Studio is a free tool whereas these other tools have a considerable amount of subscription fees associated with them. Additionally, while using tools like PhotoRoom or Adobe Firefly can require quite a bit of skills and resources, Google Product Studio is easy to use and beginner-friendly.

Should You Utilise Google Product Studio?

The question of the hour definitely is — should you use Google Product Studio or not?

The answer is not that simple, and will require a bit of decision making skills on your part. It is a good idea to analyse the image editing requirements you have, and weigh in the features, pros, and cons of the different tools that you have the option to use. It is also a good idea to evaluate the budget you are able to set aside for this function.

The Product Studio is undoubtedly one of the more useful tools that Google has introduced for eCommerce stores of all sizes and kinds. If you feel it is the right tool to help you edit and empower your images, you should go ahead. For the rest of your SEO requirements, get in touch with us and we will be happy to help.