Sometimes in the world of SEO, you can get too deep into the technical side of things. It can be very easy to concentrate too much on getting long term results in the organic results which means you can forget about the other ways of getting quality traffic to your website. Don't get me wrong - a long term SEO strategy is one of the best marketing tactics there is. However don't overlook the quick wins that can bring an increase in traffic in a shorter timescale.
So in light of this I thought I’d talk about some of the alternative ways of getting traffic to your website where the techniques are different to the usual ones you’d come across in regular SEO. This is the first in a series of blog posts on this topic, first we will look at Google Base, also known as Google Product search and known as Froogle many years ago.
Getting more Traffic using Google Base
Many ecommerce websites are taking advantage of the increasing first page real estate Google shopping results are getting, so things are getting more competitive. However compared to trying to rank highly for competitive terms on organic results, using Google Base can give you a better return on your time as it doesn’t take too long to implement.
How to use it
Firstly you will need to sign up to Google Base, to make things easier I’d recommend using the same login that you already use for Google Webmaster Tools. This is easier to keep things organised, but also as Google now require a link between both services to prove that you own the site you wish to use on Google Base.
You’ll need to generate a spreadsheet which is in the correct format to be uploaded to your account, Google give some pretty good guidelines on this. You can create this manually but if you have lots of products, this can be very time consuming. Ideally you want to be able to generate a spreadsheet from the CMS which is already in the correct format. Most good web development companies should be able to do this for you quite easily. Luckily the development team here make it very easy for me to do this for client sites :)
There are a few things you can bear in mind when looking to rank well in Google Product Search results –
Data Quality
The data in your spreadsheet needs to be accurate and not filled with irrelevant text or keywords. You also need to make sure it complies with Google Guidelines and is in the right format - .txt or .csv.
Feed Age
Similar to trust signals on organic SEO, the age of your feed can affect your listings. Unfortunately there isn’t much you can do about this one really!
Reviews
You’ll often see reviews listed under merchant names when you look at Google Product search results, clicking through to these will show reviews which are pulled from a number of sources. The number and quality of the reviews you receive can make a difference and is surely a signal of trust. SEOmoz have a good list of places to get reviews from.
Keyword Use
I’m not so sure about this one in competitive markets as I often see products ranking despite the keyword not being anywhere to be seen. However if it possible and doesn’t make your listing look spammy, it won’t hurt to put keywords in if possible. You should be trying to optimise your product titles for organic SEO anyway.
Additional Fields
Google give you a load of additional fields that you can add to your products if appropriate. For example if you are selling a product that can be searched on by size or weight, you have an option to include these. One that I’d highly recommend including is the product_type field which can be your product category. If you are optimising your category names for SEO anyway, this can be very effective in targeting slightly broader keywords.
Site Security
It would make sense for this to be a factor due to the security of buyers. Google will not want to send their users to a website that isn’t secure would they? So it would make sense for Google to try and run some kind of analysis on a site to check for potential security problems.
Image Quality
High quality images are very important not only in terms of ranking, but also getting the click from the search results. If you have an image that is blurry, then you’re not going to get a potential customer to come to your site anyway.
Data Freshness
With something like ecommerce, prices can constantly change. Therefore Google want to have the freshest possible data to display to their users. By default they stop displaying your feed if you haven’t updated it for a month, so this is the minimum you need to update. However I’d recommend uploading your feed as often as possible. You can automate this process using the FTP service as well if you have a developer on hand.
Although you can relate some of these factors to the ones you’d look at for organic SEO, you can see that this is a different method of getting traffic to your site that may be forgot about in the usual SEO process.
Make sure to check back next week or follow us on Twitter for the next blog post which will be getting traffic from Google Local results.