If you have an E-commerce store, or were thinking about creating one at some point, you should know that if you are planning on using internet marketing services to boost your online sales, then you should be aware that you have to put in a little more work with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts than a non E-commerce
website. This requires an E-commerce SEO focus, which takes a little more effort than SEO for other types of websites because online shopping carts come into the mix in the search engine result pages. Sometimes SEO for E-commerce isn’t the only form of internet marketing that has to be used in order to get people to buy your products online. You may have to use pay per click advertising, or a combination of each to see results.
Each of the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing, have merchant centers where people with e-commerce stores can add their product feed to each. Google and Bing are free, whereas Yahoo requires a small monthly fee to manage shopping cart information.
One reason why online shopping carts should matter to an E-commerce store interested in Internet Marketing, is because Google, Yahoo, and Bing tend to show online shopping carts at the top of the search engine result pages for sites that have submitted their product pages, more so than E-Commerce sites that have not.
E-Commerce webites that have submitted their product feed to Google Merchant Center that have plenty of reviews on their products for example, are even more likely to show up in the non-paid (organic) search results for their target keywords compared to online stores that do not.
And depending your audiences’ average screen resolution, they may end up seeing the first organic search result at the bottom of the page under the paid ad’s and shopping cart results.
Below, are three screenshots of the search result pages from Google, Yahoo, and Bing highlighting the online shopping carts in the search engine results :
In Google, the paid search results will show product reviews with each listing in the form of stars followed by the number of reviews they have.
You won’t really know what works best for your E-Commerce site until you perform a little trial and error. It’s essential that you check your analytics data to aid in your Internet Marketing decisions, as well as benchmark your results for each change that you make. Any changes in your product pages should be updated on a regular basis in each merchant center.
For more information about each of the top three search engines’ merchant/shopping centers visit: Google Merchant Center , Yahoo Merchant Center, Bing Merchant Center.
A great resource for information on Google’s and Bing’s Merchant Centers are the Google Merchant Blog and the Bing Merchant FAQ page. Similarly, another great resource for information on the latest on shopping, retail, and technology on Google is the Google Commerce Blog.
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