New tools from Google to better handle eCommerce products in Google search

“Your Products feeds just went into Organic Search”

Feb 2019

Google released a new set of features across three of its tools on the 22/2/2019 which is really important for eCommerce. So if you are doing Direct to Consumer (DTC) eCommerce, like our clients, here’s the place to catch up on all the new options.

Search and Google Images provide shoppers now with rich snippets like product description, ratings, and price to help guide purchase decisions.

To improve the ability for potential customers to judge which product is best for them, there are three upgrades for tools in Organic Search. Now, this is the important bit, this isn’t just products in Google Ads but now impacting Organic Search!

These tools are:

• Search Console
• Merchant Center
• Manufacturer Center

Search Console

• A new report for ‘Products’ is now available in the New Search Console
• This report works for sites that use schema.org structured data markup to annotate product information (rich snippets)
• The report shows pending issues for markup on your site in the normal format:
  • Errors
  • Valid with Warnings
  • Valid
• As with other reports in the New Search Console, once an issue is fixed, you can re-crawl the affected page and validate if the issues were resolved

Merchant Center

• The update takes the data already used by Google Ads Shopping Campaigns
• It now allows DTC eCommerce brands to directly provide up-to-date product information to Google in real-time
• Product data feeds uploaded to Google Merchant Center will now be eligible for display in results on “surfaces” (interesting new term) like Search and Google Images
• This means product information which was only used for Paid Ads, will be ranked in Organic Search based only on relevance to users’ queries
• Starts with the US, with support for other countries later in the year
• Access your Account@Google Merchant Center for the updates

Manufacturer Center

• New features to improve your brand’s product visibility in Google Search Results
• Great news for DTC brands as you are the “Manufacturer” and so the Manufacturer Center is for your brand
• Provides authoritative and up-to-date product information through Google Manufacturer Center on these attributes:
  • product description
  • variants
  • high-quality images – always great in SERPs
  • videos – this gets interesting to have product videos in the SERPs
• This information is now to be displayed in the product’s knowledge panel
• Updates are now live in Google Manufacturers Center