One thing you may not know about me is that, although I’m a branding and design wizard by night, I’m actually a desk jockey search and social media specialist by day. For e-commerce clients, the only thing more important than ranking organically in the top 10 results of Google for important keywords is ranking in Google’s product search for important keywords. The fact that Google displays a product image, full product title, and a price in line with other search results makes this the most important space to be in the search engine results page in most cases where the “Shopping results for…” module appears.

Creating a product feed is simple if you have a e-commerce site. If you don’t have one yet, I’ve seen Yahoo stores do well in Google product search, but I imagine most e-commerce platforms are suitable. It helps to have a unique URL for each product; like quality score in paid search, the level of similarity between your product information and the page on which the user lands is an important factor for determining product search ranking.

I’ll walk you through the creation of a tab-delimited feed to upload to your site and enable data input to Google’s Product Search. To create a feed, use your Google account to access Google Merchant Center.

Then use Excel or another spreadsheet program to begin creating a product feed with the following specifications set up as column headers. Use the exact specification as header, i.e. copy and paste the text that appears in brackets on this feed specifications page.

Required

• id – an internal code to identify items. This could align with your e-com platform and product database or could be a made up number (i.e., just autofill these cells with 1, 2, 3 or 0001, 0002, 0003) as long as it is an alphanumeric code unique to each product.
• title – the title of your product. Be short and sweet here while including keywords where possible. The biggest mistakes here are to go over the 70 character limit or to attempt to over-standardize your product listings. Remember to write for the users, not the search engines. For example:
  • Bad: Medic Bracelet Jewelry – Premier Stainless Steel | American Medical ID
  • Good: Medical Bracelet – Premier Stainless Steel
  • Best: Premier Stainless Steel Medical Bracelet
• link – Google states URLs must link directly to pages about your product with no popups and redirects.  What Google finds when crawling this URL is likely the most important aspect of determining product rankings. You’ve got to land the user on the most relevant page, preferably one with a title tag that includes the title you provide in your product feed. I’ve seen clients show up in product search using a landing page that directs users to more than one product, but they did not rank very well with this strategy, most likely because the title tag of the landing page could not accurately reflect the titles of the listings themselves.
• price – the lower, the better; however, it must be accurate. Thus, items with variable prices don’t qualify for inclusion into the product feed. Sorry currency exchangers, gold traders, and ticket resellers – you’ll have to hock your variably priced wares somewhere else. For bulk quantities, include the smallest quantity available as a way to compete in price. I’ve got a client who sells custom temporary tattoos who is decreasing their minimum order quantity in order to compete in Google Product Search.
• description – remove all mention of “free” anything from the descriptions. Your descriptions should be accurate to the individual product and should not include any boilerplate sales information.  Err on the side of descriptive rather than sales-y; that is, include factual physical descriptions like color, size, material, and leave out less quantifiable adjectives like “perfect,” “pristine,” and “best.”
  • Bad: Classic medical ID alert bracelets offered in 14Kt gold. Personalized engraving is free; add all of your medical information.
  • Good: Classic style bracelet, with flat plate and curb style chain, in 14kt gold. Designed to contain critical medical information of the wearer. The bracelet’s plate comes engraved with a Star of Life to denote that it is a medical bracelet.
• condition – values are new, used, or refurbished, but you’ve gotta include one of them for each item.

Not required but recommended

• gtin – can be a UPC, EAN (European), JAN (Japanese), ISBN (for books). If you resell products from a manufacturer, you can contact that manufacturer for a UPC. Unfortunately, Google leans on this data point quite heavily; previous experience shows me that product feeds with UPC values rank better in Product Search than those without. A UPC or other identifier helps Google group your products for price comparison.
• image_link – use images. You will not rank as the top result without an image. Use an image bigger than 400 x 400 so Google can make decent looking thumbnails. I recommend that this is the same image you use on the URL provided in the ‘link’ column.
• product_type – include the category closest to your own in Google’s taxonomy. It only recommends multiple categories for rare situations; in most cases, it’s probably better to create your own category:
  “Clothing & Accessories > Jewelry > Necklaces > Medical Identification” where only medical identification is custom and all else is within Google’s standard taxonomy
• quantity – if you can somehow automatically update this to reflect data from your product database, it will be helpful for ranking your products in search.
• availability – in the same vein, this also helps Google ensure that you’ve got something available. Include “in stock” as the value here if you want to compete in Product Search. I can think of rare occasions where you would use the “limited availability” option, like for a rare book, but you’re probably not going to have trouble competing in product search if your inventory is actually that rare. If you’ve set up the quantity field to automatically reflect your product database, you should set up this field to change to “out of stock” as soon as quantity reaches 0.
• shipping – four sub-fields here represent a shipping estimate for the product: country, region, service, and fixed shipping price. You can leave out region if you have a fixed price for shipping as such:
  US::First Class Mail:7.00,US::Priority Mail:12.00,US::Express Mail:24.00
• tax – tax works similarly to shipping except your quantitative field is a percentage of the item price rather than a fixed rate. The sub-fields are country, region, tax rate, and a ‘y’ or ‘n’ for whether tax is charged on the price of shipping. If you don’t charge tax, you’ll still want to include ‘::0:’ in this field. If you charge tax only in one state, like many US e-com companies, you’ll have ‘US:TX:8.25:n, US::0:’ in this field.
• shipping_weight and size – two separate fields that you’ll want to include if you have this information available.

That covers most items. There are more fields available at the Feed Specification page that will be specific to certain product categories like electronics or clothing. There are also fields available for on-site product review data if you’re using something for that.

Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet, save it as Text Tab Delimited and upload it to your web server. Go back to Google Merchant Center and let Google know where your product feeds lives.

Outside of filling up all the fields in that spreadsheet, the quantity and quality of shopping site reviews associated with your domain name come into play as well. Tom Critchlow wrote an article for YouMOZ that does a pretty good job explaining where and how to get these reviews: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-rank-well-in-google-products-search-a-big-list-of-places-to-get-reviews One strategy is to encourage users to rate their site experiences at one of a few sites from that list; to keep it fresh, it could be auto-rotating a short list of links from a longer set of these site review sources.

Coming soon: how to get into Yahoo and Bing product searches (hint: it’s more confusing but less competitive)