Google Merchant Center Optimisation

How to use Google Merchant Center

Selling online is becoming more competitive each day.

And for small online stores, it is even more important to ensure visibility for their products during peak sales season.

After Amazon, Google is the most popular search engine for searching for products online.

When a user searches for a particular product on Google, you want your product to appear at the top or even run ads if necessary.

But in order to do so, you need to learn how to use Google Merchant Center.

How to Use Google Merchant Center?

1. Creating an Account on Google

If you already have an existing Google Business Profile with a verified email address, you can continue with creating an account on Google Merchant Center. Log in to whichever Google account you use for your business and go to ​​g.co/merchantcentre

If you don’t have an existing Google Business account, you can create one. Go to ‘Sign in for free’ on Google Merchant Center. It will pose questions and ask you to add your online store link.

You will then need to add your business and country information. Include the business name, country, and time zone. More questions will follow once you fill in this information where you’ll be asked where you want the customers to check out your products. It can either be on your website, your local store, or on Google itself.

After you set up the account, Google will want to verify your website. It is where Google will check if your website is adhering to several Google guidelines. You can verify your site by an HTML tag or by uploading an HTML file. Make sure you have HTML access while setting up your account as both options require you to add something to the HTML of your website.

2. Upload your Products

Once you set up your account, you can start uploading your products. Google facilitates you to upload your products through Google Sheets, upload files, and schedule fetch. You can either upload them one product at a time or all at once. However, with multiple products, it’s very time-consuming for you to add all your products one by one. A wise thing to do would be to add them through Google Sheets.

Once you select Google Sheets as an option, select  “Create a New Google Spreadsheet from a Template.” A pop-up will ask you to authorise permission to create a Google sheet in your account. Once you click on ‘Allow’ Google sheet will launch fields for product uploads. It will have fields specifying what all information will go in each column.

Some of the must-dos while uploading products are:

• Product ID
• Product Title
• Description
• Link
• Image link
• Product Availability
• Price
• Category
• Brand name

Each product will be a new row and once Google Sheets have all the included information, you can go to Google Merchant Center and select ‘Fetch Now’. Google Merchant Center will automatically upload your data from Google.

3. Set up Shipping

Set up the shipping information such as selecting the country you’re operating from, the currency, the delivery location, and the shipping carrier method. If you already have a shipping system, you can go through the prompts or set it up from the options provided in Google Merchant Center (FedEx, UPS, and USPS). Add the maximum time that you’d be able to fulfil the order. Also, add how the shipping costs will be added to your customer purchases. (flat rate, free, free after a certain amount, etc).

4. Google Policies

While this may seem like a trivial action to follow after setting up your entire store in the merchant centre, it’s nevertheless important. Go through the policies before starting your operations on the Google Merchant Center to avoid troubles in the future. Since you’re still figuring out how to use Google Merchant Center, you can also avail help from an SEO agency that can help you with the setup while adhering to Google policies.

Best Practices for Using Google Merchant Center

1. Keep your Feed Up-to-date

Maintaining your Google Merchant Center feed is essential for its success. It is how shoppers discover relevant information and inventory. It lets you control the user experience by highlighting product details, and search values, and optimising the price according to the trends and inventory lists. Ensure that your products are in stock at the time of updating a product listing to avoid broken links or re-routes.

You can also showcase your best-selling products at the top and highlight the fastest-selling products to increase purchase speeds. Ultimately, the frequency with which you schedule updates will also depend on the size and activity of your business shops.

2. Follow the Best Practices for Landing Page

Optimising landing pages is easier said than done. Because most often you have thousands of products on a landing page. Naturally, it can face some crawling and loading issues. To address them in advance, read some of the best practices and configurations to ensure that your product pages are always accessible.

One way to do that is through structured data markup. It is a must for Automatic Item Updates and allows advertisers to gauge how the product data feed corresponds to the landing pages. Another practice is to check URLs for identifying any 404 errors. Lastly, let Google crawlers in your site’s robots.txt file. It is how Google reads data and includes not limiting the rate at which Google can crawl your site.

3. Add Missing Meta Fields

Another crucial landing page practice is to add missing meta fields to optimise product feeds. These things include

Colour

Product Type

Brand names

Shipping Cost

Sale Price

Additional Product Types

Custom Fields

4. Manage Feeds with Dedicated Software

Businesses with a wide range of products and those with serious marketing campaigns need external product data management software in order to send data to the Google Merchant Center. It helps you consolidate, organise, and optimise data before it’s exported.

And not just helpful for exporting data to Google Merchant Center but also to other platforms like Facebook and Amazon and other channels. It enables omnichannel marketing campaigns and makes advertising scalable.

5. Inclusive Product Titles and Descriptions

When you create Google Ads, product titles and descriptions are the key to matching the user query. Titles are the first thing your user sees when they come across your ad listing aside from the image. You need to optimise the title and description because it is important for the user and Google’s algorithm to find keywords within the product titles. Some things you cannot include in your titles are all capitals, adding promos like limited offers or putting the price in the headline.

Ensure that the titles are optimised according to your product type. If you have a fashion store, the title structure needs to be brand+gender+product type+attribute (size, material) or if its consumables follow the same pattern but attribute should include the weight and count.

If your business has a lot of parent products with multiple variants, you need to especially be careful about correctly presenting its variants. Without regular monitoring, you can easily run the risk of presenting incorrect data and hampering the user experience.

6. Choosing the Right and Clear Image

Apart from product titles, even the images are a decision-making factor for users. You want to make sure that the image you place is clear and looks great. Some tips for the same are:

Using high-quality images for mobile responsive devices, making sure the colour variants match the picture, and checking for any text over the picture (manufacturing or sales numbers, watermarks). You can also test product images vs lifestyle images. Find out which speaks more about your brand and go with that.

7. Adjust Filters for Specific Data

You can filter any Google Merchant Center issues between destination, country, or product feed in the diagnostics section in Google Merchant Center. It also provides you with a comprehensive view of the issues within each segment and a better chance of tackling all issues that tamper with your campaigns.