Google Merchant Center

Every month we measure the ranking of key pages against certain keyword searches on behalf of some of our national clients. This gives us a good overview of how search engine results are evolving and, over the course of time, we've seen Google putting more and more 'Shopping results' snippets within these search results. Google - driven by relevancy as always - does this when it guesses that the intent of your search might be to buy a product. So, if I was looking to buy an iPig iPod docking station (just for the record - I wasn't) then you might see the following block appear in the search results:

Appearing in this block offers another way to get into the search engine results which, even if you are ranking well organically, is an opportunity not to be missed!

These results are generated from entries in the Google Merchant Center which is a free service offered by Google. Once you have an account you just need to create a spreadsheet of your products (a good eCommerce system will generate this for you) and then remember to upload it every month - that's it. The appearance of shopping results can seem a bit random - but is becoming ever more common - so we'd highly recommend that ALL customers selling products online took the time out to get, and then keep, their products listed.

How to sign up for Google Merchant Center
You will need a Google account (if you haven't you can sign up for one here: https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount) and then you will need to join the Merchant Center programme (http://www.google.com/merchants/adbd). We have a special Merchant Center account that lets us manage listings on behalf of our clients - so if you need help with this aspect of online marketing then get in touch.