Shopping search engines

Optimising product feeds for better search traffic

Shopping search engines, or price comparison websites, are becoming increasingly popular with the price conscious shopper, so that any retail website should consider adding their product listings to these tools in order to generate site visits directly to individual products. Some of these involve paid listings and although there are some shopping search engine and shopping directories where sites can list themselves and/or their products for free, these are becoming less common.

Froogle was the shopping search and price comparison site developed by Google and accessible from the main Google home page. It's more recently been renamed as simply Google Product Search and it's being integrated with the main Google results and with Google Base. This tool is also not yet available in Australia, but advertisers in the US or the UK can provide product information for free and results are displayed based on search criteria and product descriptions used. Searchers can sort by price and category or display more products from a selected retailer.

Getting your products ranking well within the Google Product Search results can be difficult in the more general product categories, as the results tend to be dominated by large established retailers. However, many of the principles of search engine optimisation apply to these results as well and therefore the product feed submitted to this search tool needs to include optimised product names and descriptions, plus the submission of listings must be updated on a frequent basis to ensure listings remain current and accessible.

My Shopping is the most prominent site in the Australian shopping search market. The next largest contender is Get Price, which offers a similar search or browse option across a range of categories.

Both of these sites list product information from a range of participating retailers, allowing users to sort and compare products by price and category. To get your products listed you need to set up a data-feed to each of these services with your product information and any images, although this is not as complicated as it sounds!

They both charge for this activity on a pay-per-click basis, which varies depending on the category of product you are offering. From our experience this cost tends to be similar or slightly higher than the PPC advertising offered by Google and Yahoo! Search Marketing, but conversion rates can be better. This is because visits that are received from these sources will be from people who are actively interested in making a purchase, although as you will tend to get many visits from people comparing your cost to your competitors, price is a key issue!

If you sell products online and would like to know more about using these comparison shopping sites, including adding products to the Google Product Search engine for free, please contact us for more information or you can request a FREE website assessment to see how well your website currently performs.