Orlando SEO Company
Are you taking advantage of the opportunity to have your online retail products appear in Google, with no paid advertising? Earlier this year, Google announced that retailers can now submit products to appear in Google Shopping results for free. In fact, they stated that the majority of product images and listings that appear in the Shopping tab search results will be free listings from now on. Additionally, Google most recently added a product panel to the main page of Google search results featuring free retail listings. The feature will be added in the coming months for users in the U.S., before becoming available globally.
The new product panel improves the shopper experience, since it provides a wider variety of products that users can see and compare right away in the main page of Google. Google says these changes are also intended to help small and medium-sized retail businesses. Google Ads are still relevant for retail, as they still featured in another section of the main Search results page and at the top of the Shopping tab.
This is how the new product panel appears in Google mobile results:
How to Add Products to Google Free Retail Listing
There are two ways for retailers to intentionally set their products up to appear in free retail listings on Google:
- Include the rich text markup from org for your products. This markup ensures that your product listings will output in Google Search with images and product information. Here is a guide from Google for adding the markup.
- Submit your product information directly to the Google Merchant Center.
How to Exclude Your Product from Google Results
In addition to products that are submitted directly, Google will also include product results from your website if they can be crawled and identified as retail listings. But maybe you have products on your website that are currently out of stock, are discontinued, or are otherwise unavailable for purchase, and you don’t want these items to appear in Shopping results. If you don’t want a product page or image to appear as a retail result, you can manage the snippet results with robots meta tags.
Please note that these tags will not hide products that you submitted using the schema.org markup or that you submitted to Google Merchant Circle. You will need to edit the markup or Merchant Circle listing to remove these products from Search results.
We hope you will take advantage of the Google free retail listings to access a wider online customer base. We would love to hear how these new features impact your ability to compete as an online retailer.
Orlando SEO Agency
At M5 Design Studio, we are happy to assist you in managing your retail product listings in Google Search. M5 Design Studio is a powerful local Orlando SEO Agency equipped to drive your Google rankings above and beyond your competitors. Get in touch for a free consultation by filling out our contact form, or call us at (407) 968-6296.
