Up until now, Google has been a pay-to-play for ad placements. But Google announced that they are opening up listings to include unpaid organic results in the shopping tab. E-commerce has suddenly taken on heightened importance and urgency for merchants, and this is free exposure for your business is especially important in the times we live right now. Are your products and services found on Google search?
Links in this episode: In major shift, Google Shopping opens up to free product listings
Transcript
Welcome to the Get Digital Marketing Results podcast where we give you information and actionable tips to grow your organization.
Bob: Hi, I’m Bob Clark.
Donna: And I’m Donna Botti. We’re with Delos Inc and we make the web work for you. In today’s Tech News Tuesday episode, we’re going to talk about how Google wants to be your source for online shopping. You may have noticed Google shopping results when you do a search. It’s a carousel of items with pictures, prices, and links to retailers at the top of the search results. There’s also a Google shopping tab to let you compare even more products.
Bob: Been there, done that Donna with the shopping. Up until now these have all been paid ad placements. But Google announced that they are opening up a listings to include unpaid organic results in the shopping tab. Paid ads are still going to appear at the top and bottom of the results.
Because of the coronavirus many brick-and-mortar retailers have had to close their physical shopping experience, and e-commerce has suddenly taken on heightened importance and urgency for merchants. So for our retailers out there, this is free exposure to millions of people who come to Google. And for shoppers, there’s going to be a lot more products and a lot more stores in one place making it easy to compare those products, and those retailers.
Donna: Right, like Google knows how much Amazon has taken over in the marketplace, and you can go on Amazon and find anything from an any number of retailers, and by opening up the Google shopping platform with free unpaid organic results, Google helps to expand how much is available on Google shopping and maybe have people come to Google instead of by default going to Amazon to look at new products and search for what they want to buy next. Now if you already have an e-commerce platform, you can get on board pretty easily through Google partnerships they have with PayPal, Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. These are the big e-commerce platforms that most small businesses use and there’s a way to get your feed into shopping through these products.
It is time to optimize your product listings however, you want to have a great description, keywords, titles, and most importantly, you should have good photos of your products. And if you aren’t offering your products online, it might be a good time to explore adding some online purchasing for your business. People are looking for convenience, and social distancing will probably be with us for a while in some form or another.
Bob: That’s it for today’s episode. You can find the link to the Search Engine Land article and a transcript of today’s podcast at DelosInc.com/134. And don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our actionable digital marketing tips to grow your organization.
