How to Optimize Your Product Pages for Google Merchant Listing Experiences

If you’re an online retailer, optimizing your website to include structured data and product feeds can help you get more visibility and traffic through Google search results. Google’s Merchant Listing Experiences include product snippets, popular products, shopping knowledge panels, and image search, all of which can provide additional details about your products and make them more attractive to potential customers. However, to participate in these experiences, your website needs to provide rich product data.

Here are some tips on how to optimize your product pages for Google’s Merchant Listing Experiences:

1. Provide Rich Product Data

To be eligible for Google’s Merchant Listing Experiences, your website needs to provide rich product data. This can be done by providing your product data via structured data on web pages, Google Merchant Center feed, or both. It’s recommended to do both if possible. If starting out, start with structured data on web pages, then add a Google Merchant Center auto feed, which creates a feed from your web page content, and then grow into providing a direct, high-quality product data feed.

2. Check for Existing Structured Data

To check if your product pages have existing structured data, look for structured data with type product in your website’s source code. Consult with your technical team to determine if you have a Google Merchant Center feed because it cannot be detected from web page content.

3. Add Structured Data to Web Pages

If you’re using a platform, refer to your platform documentation to see if you have any control over structured data embedded on web pages. Also, check if there's any built-in support for Google Merchant Center feeds. If you're developing your own site, you can check out the online technical documentation on both adding product structure data to web pages and creating Google Merchant Center feeds.

4. Use Google Search Console

Google Search Console includes a merchant listing report that shows issues found with your product structure data relevant to merchant listing experiences. Fixing your structured data is dependent upon how it is provided. After making a correction, you can use the URL inspection tool in Search Console to check if all issues have been addressed.

5. Simplify Pricing Data

Product pricing can be complex. While Google supports an increasing range of options, your site may still use a form of pricing that’s not supported by Google Search. To overcome this issue, you may need to simplify the pricing data you provide to Google. For example, provide Google the price of a quantity of 1 even if you offer discounts for purchases with higher quantities. This is to avoid frustrating customers who may be expecting a lower price when they view the product on Google’s search results, only to see a higher price when they click through to your website.

6. Simplify Shipping Information

Shipping information is also popular in search results, such as shipping costs. To check if your product listings have been correctly annotated with shipping costs, use a site query so you can see your products and search results. Shipping costs can be influenced by many factors, so you may need to simplify the shipping information you provide to match what Google supports.

7. Provide Strong Product Identifiers

To be eligible for many merchant listing experiences, you need to provide product identifiers, such as a GTIN number, an MPN number, or a brand and product name. The more you can provide, the better. A SKU, or Stock Keeping Unit, is not an acceptable product identifier, as it is not consistent across merchants. To ensure a reliable matching of your products with Google’s knowledge panel and other experiences, strong product identifiers should be present on your product pages.

8. Keep Up with Future Directions

While structured data currently supports fewer features than a Google Merchant Center feed, the gap is closing as new capabilities are added over time. To keep up with possible future directions, you may also want to check out the schema.org site for the broader set of structured data for e-commerce sites. Schema.org markup is used by search engines beyond Google.

By using these tips to optimize your product pages for Google’s Merchant Listing Experiences, you can improve the visibility and attractiveness of your products to potential customers. Keep up with the current features and future directions to maximize the benefits of these experiences.