Google Merchant Center is designed to be read by computers, which means data extracted more reliably than Googlebot crawling your website. However it doesn’t mean that you should only rely on the Merchant Center. In fact, Google’s SEO recommendations revolve around getting the most out of both Merchant Center and structured data. Here Google shares 6 SEO tips combining structured data and Google Merchant Center to improve your website’s presence in search results.
(1) Ensure product are indexed
When Googlebot is crawling the site, it might miss a page which is not linked to other pages. On ecommerce sites, there are some product pages which are only reachable from on-site search results. Creating a Merchant Center product feed will allow Google to discover all the products on your website. The product page URLs are shared with the Googlebot crawler to use as starting points for crawls of additional pages potentially.
(2) Accuracy of product prices
If Google incorrectly extracts pricing data from your, instead of the discounted price, it may list your original price in search results. To provide product information accurately, it’s recommended to add structured data to your product page and provide Google Merchant Center with structured feeds of your product data. This will help Google to extract the correct price from product pages.
(3) Minimize delay of product price and availability
Googlebot crawls web pages according to its schedule, hence it might not notice changes on your site until the next crawl. These delays can lead to search results lagging behind site changes, such as when a product is out of stock. It will be best if you could minimize inconsistencies between your website and Google’s understanding of your site. Thus Google recommends you to utilize Merchant Center product feed to keep pages updated.
(4) Eligibility for rich product results
Eligibility for rich product results requires the use of product structured data. To get the special rich product presentation format, Google recommends providing structured data on your product pages and product feed in the Merchant Center. This will help Google to understand how to extract data to display rich results. However, rich results are still displayed at Google’s discretion.
(5) Share local product inventory data
You can ensure your in-store products are found by people entering queries with the phrase ‘near me’. To achieve this, you have to register your physical store location in your Google Business Profile, then provide a local inventory feed to the Merchant Center. The local inventory feed includes product identifiers and store codes, so Google knows where your inventory is physically located.
(6) Sign up for Google Shopping tab
You may find your products are available in search results, but not appearing in the Shopping tab. Structured data and product feeds alone aren’t sufficient to be included in the Shopping tab. To be eligible for the Shopping tab, provide product data feeds via Merchant Center and opt-in to ‘surface across Google’.
Conclusion
Google Merchant Center allows retailers to upload products via structured feeds. But don’t forget that structured data still remains essential even if you provide product data directly to Google through Merchant Center feed. Hope this article with the 6 tips on utilizing both tools will help you in ecommercing.
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