We all know how important it is to include high-quality images of the products being sold on ecommerce sites, both for aesthetic reasons and because it helps the customer to better determine whether a product is right for them.
What some ecommerce merchants may not be aware of, however, is that there are other ways to use product images to help improve sales and drive traffic. One way to do this is to submit your product images in a data feed to Google Product Search.
Studies have shown that the human brain processes visual images much faster than it processes text. If someone is searching for an item in a hurry, an eye-catching image that appears in their search results is more likely to be clicked on than a product description without an image.
Google also links the images of your products directly to your site, allowing consumers to simply click on an image and be taken automatically to a page where they can find out more information and purchase the product.
In order to submit your product data to Google, you must first sign up for a free Google Merchant account. If you have an existing Google account, you can login here using your login credentials.
The next step is to provide basic company contact information, the URL of your website, and information about the types of products that you sell in order to create your product feed. This way, Google or a customer can contact your company directly if they have questions about your products, and Google can correctly categorize your products for search engine results.
Once you have provided all of the required information to create your product feed, you can add your products to it. This is the most crucial step of all, because failing to provide all required info can result in your products and/or product data feed being left out of Google’s search results. Recently, changes to these requirements were implemented. You must now include:
You can submit this information via an uploaded Excel spreadsheet, or through a data feed. You can find out more specific information about how to submit your products here.