SEO for ecommerce - Google Search Console Training (from home)

Summary

In this video, Daniel Waisberg, a Google Search Advocate, shares essential SEO tips for e-commerce websites to succeed in Google Search. He emphasizes creating detailed Product Detail Pages (PDPs) with product descriptions, images, and customer reviews, while implementing structured data to improve search visibility. Waisberg also highlights the benefits of using Google Merchant Center to upload inventory and Google Analytics for tracking user behavior. The video covers using Search Console to monitor performance and address issues with structured data, helping e-commerce businesses optimize their online presence.

Takeaways

• 🔍 Ensure basic SEO is implemented on your e-commerce website so Google can properly find and display your site in search results.
• 🛍️ Publish all your products clearly, both online and in-store, to help Google index them and serve them to users searching for products.
• 📸 Create product detail pages (PDP) with high-quality images (muted or transparent backgrounds) and include multiple angles of the product.
• 📝 Provide detailed product descriptions, including features and specifications, to improve search visibility on both Google and your internal search.
• 💵 Include key purchase information, such as price, availability, shipping, and taxes, to help users make informed decisions.
• ⭐ Add customer ratings and reviews to assist users in their purchase research and improve overall product visibility.
• 🔧 Implement structured data on product pages to enable enhanced search results, such as showing price, availability, and reviews directly in Google search.
• 📈 Consider using Google Merchant Center to upload and manage product inventory, offering faster updates and better control over product data.
• 📊 Set up Google Analytics e-commerce tracking to monitor key metrics like average order value and conversion rates for better user behavior insights.
• 🔗 Use Google Search Console to monitor structured data performance, identify issues, and ensure your pages are eligible for rich search results.

Q & A

What is the first step for e-commerce websites to succeed in search?

The first step is to clearly publish all the products you sell, whether online, in-store, or both, by creating Product Detail Pages (PDPs) that explain the product to sell.

What are some tips for creating good content on Product Detail Pages (PDPs)?

Some tips include adding product features with clear images from different angles, a detailed product description, information on purchase details like price and availability, and customer ratings or reviews.

How does structured data benefit an e-commerce website?

Structured data enables Google to provide enhanced search and image results, such as showing price, availability, and review ratings directly in search results, which helps attract more users.

What is Google Merchant Center, and why is it important for e-commerce sites?

Google Merchant Center allows businesses to upload their product inventory, update prices and stock levels faster, and supply richer data, giving them more control over product information in Google searches.

How can Google Analytics e-commerce tracking help website owners?

Google Analytics e-commerce tracking helps website owners understand user behavior by providing insights into metrics like average order value, conversion rates, and time to purchase.

What does the Search Console 'Products' report show?

The 'Products' report in Search Console summarizes errors, warnings, and issues related to product structured data. It provides details about items that need fixing to ensure rich results appear properly in Google search.

What happens if product structured data contains errors?

Errors in structured data disqualify the product from being shown in rich results, although the page can still appear in search as a plain blue link. Missing fields like price, currency, or rating value trigger errors.

What are examples of warnings in structured data?

Warnings in structured data include missing details like product descriptions, review URLs, or brand information. These warnings reduce the quality of rich results but don't entirely disqualify the product from rich results.

What should be done after fixing errors in structured data?

After fixing errors, you can validate the fix using the 'Validate Fix' button in Search Console. This tells Google to recheck the structured data and update the status.

How can the 'Performance Report' in Search Console be used for e-commerce optimization?

The Performance Report shows traffic patterns, queries driving traffic, and click-through rates (CTR) for Product Detail Pages. It helps identify opportunities to improve content, structured data, and SEO performance for e-commerce sites.

Outlines

00:00

🔍 SEO Basics for E-commerce Websites

Daniel Waisberg introduces the video, which focuses on key SEO questions for e-commerce website owners. He asks whether basic SEO is implemented, if Google can display the site properly, and how the content performs in search results. He offers a few best practices, like clearly listing all products sold and creating Product Detail Pages (PDPs). Suggestions include adding detailed product descriptions, transparent product images, and structured data for richer search results. He also recommends uploading product data to Google Merchant Center for better control and visibility.

05:03

🛠 Structured Data and Merchant Center Optimization

Waisberg explains the advantages of using structured data for e-commerce sites, such as enhanced search results showing product prices, availability, and reviews. He encourages site owners to upload their product inventories to Google Merchant Center, which allows faster updates for stock and price information. Merchant Center also enables businesses to push data to Google rather than waiting for crawling. Additionally, he suggests setting up Google Analytics for tracking important e-commerce metrics like conversion rates and order value.

🔧 Monitoring Structured Data in Search Console

The video shifts to the importance of monitoring structured data using Search Console. After adding structured data, site owners can see reports showing errors and warnings. Warnings may still allow rich search results, but errors disqualify structured data for rich results. Waisberg demonstrates how to inspect errors and warnings, explaining that issues like missing price or rating fields will prevent rich results. He advises fixing errors and validating changes through Search Console or using the rich results test tool for individual page checks.

📊 Search Performance Insights for E-commerce Sites

Waisberg provides specific advice for monitoring e-commerce site performance in Search Console. He suggests reviewing search queries driving traffic, focusing on improving low click-through rates (CTR), and enhancing structured data on pages underperforming in search. Additionally, he highlights how to analyze the appearance of rich product results and use Search Console’s performance report to view traffic based on queries, pages, countries, and devices. This helps site owners optimize their product detail pages for better search performance.

📈 Final SEO Tips and Recap

In the conclusion, Waisberg recaps the main points covered in the video, emphasizing the importance of SEO for product detail pages, uploading inventory to Google Merchant Center, implementing structured data, and using Search Console to monitor and fix issues. He encourages viewers to continue learning by subscribing to the Google Webmasters YouTube channel for upcoming videos on Search Console. The video ends with a reminder to analyze website performance and stay updated with SEO practices.

Keywords

💡SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a website to improve its visibility in search engine results. In the video, SEO is presented as a critical practice for e-commerce websites to ensure that their products and pages are easily found by users on Google. Implementing basic SEO strategies helps websites rank higher and attract more visitors.

💡Product Detail Pages (PDP)

Product Detail Pages (PDP) are web pages dedicated to providing detailed information about a specific product. In the video, Daniel Waisberg emphasizes the importance of well-structured PDPs for e-commerce sites, as they help Google index products and allow users to find the information they need to make a purchase. He suggests including product features, images, and customer reviews on these pages.

💡Structured Data

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the content. The video explains that by adding structured data to product pages, e-commerce websites can enable Google to display enhanced search results, such as showing product prices, availability, and ratings directly on the search results page. This improves user experience and boosts visibility in search.

💡Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center is a tool that allows businesses to upload their product inventory, both for online and offline stores. In the video, Waisberg mentions that uploading data to Merchant Center gives e-commerce businesses more control over how their products appear on Google. This also enables faster updates on pricing and stock levels, ensuring accurate information is displayed to potential buyers.

💡Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps website owners monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot their site's presence in Google Search results. In the video, Waisberg discusses how e-commerce site owners can use Search Console to check the performance of their website, track structured data issues, and validate fixes for errors. He emphasizes its importance in ensuring a website's visibility and functionality.

💡Rich Results

Rich results are enhanced search results that provide additional information beyond a standard blue link, such as product prices, ratings, or availability. Waisberg highlights the importance of implementing structured data to qualify for rich results, which can make product listings more appealing and informative to users on Google Search.

💡Customer Reviews and Ratings

Customer reviews and ratings are user-generated feedback on a product's quality and performance. In the video, Waisberg suggests adding these to product detail pages to help potential buyers with their research and decision-making process. Including reviews also enhances the chances of showing rich results with ratings in search listings.

💡Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of users who click on a search result after seeing it. In the video, Waisberg advises e-commerce site owners to monitor the CTR for important product pages in Search Console. A low CTR may indicate that the product titles or descriptions are not engaging enough, prompting the need for optimization to attract more clicks.

💡E-commerce Conversion Rate

E-commerce conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who make a purchase. Waisberg suggests using tools like Google Analytics to track this metric. Understanding conversion rates helps businesses assess how well their e-commerce site is performing in terms of turning visitors into customers, and it can guide improvements in the user experience and marketing efforts.

💡Performance Report

The Performance Report in Search Console provides detailed data on how a website is performing in Google Search. Waisberg recommends using this report to analyze key metrics like queries, CTR, and traffic sources. For e-commerce websites, this helps site owners identify which products are driving traffic and uncover opportunities for optimizing their search presence.

Highlights

Basic SEO implementation is critical for an e-commerce website's success in Google search results.

Ensure that Google can properly find and display your e-commerce website in search results.

Clearly publish all products you sell, whether in-store or online, for better indexing and visibility.

Create Product Detail Pages (PDPs) to showcase the products with detailed descriptions, specifications, and images from multiple angles.

Include product availability, pricing, shipping, and tax information to improve user experience and inform purchasing decisions.

Add customer ratings and reviews to help potential buyers in their research and decision-making process.

Use product structured data to enable enhanced search and image results, allowing users to see price, availability, and ratings directly in Google search.

Consider uploading your product inventory to Google Merchant Center for faster updates and more control over product data, like prices and stock levels.

Implement Google Analytics e-commerce tracking to analyze user behavior, conversion rates, and other key metrics to optimize your website.

Use Search Console to ensure that structured data is correctly implemented and to monitor for errors or warnings in product data.

Fix errors in structured data (e.g., missing price, currency, or rating) to avoid disqualification from rich search results.

Review product detail pages with low click-through rates (CTR) and optimize them by improving titles, descriptions, and adding structured data.

Check search appearance reports in Search Console to monitor traffic from rich product results and understand how users interact with your product pages.

Use the rich results test tool to validate the structured data of your pages and preview how they may appear in Google search results.

Subscribe to the GoogleWebmasters YouTube channel for more Search Console tutorials and tips for optimizing e-commerce websites.

Transcripts

DANIEL WAISBERG: Hi I'm Daniel Waisberg,

Search Advocate at Google.

And in this video, I'll discuss the main questions

you should be thinking about if you're

responsible for an e-commerce website.

Have you implemented basic SEO for your site?

Can Google find and show your website

properly in search results?

And how is your website content performing

in Google search results?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Before we get into Search Console,

I would like to give a few best practices

for e-commerce websites to succeed in Search.

Some of the tips here require changes to the website,

so you might need the help of a developer to implement them.

The first step to help people find and navigate

your e-commerce website is to clearly publish

all of the products you sell, whether in store, online,

or both.

These will help Google index that information

and serve it to users searching for products to buy.

Typically, this means creating pages

on your site that explain the product to sell.

These pages are commonly referred to

as Product Detail Pages, or PDP.

Here are some tips to create good content for those pages.

Add product features that clearly display the product,

with muted or transparent backgrounds

and from different angles.

This helps your website visitors decide what to buy

and may attract Google users searching for product images.

Add a detailed description of the products

and emphasize any features and specifications.

This helps users find your products

by searching for the details, both on your internal search

and on Google.

Add information on purchase details,

such as availability, price, shipment, and taxes.

These will inform users on how to pay

and when they can get the product delivered.

And add customer ratings and reviews

to help shoppers with their product research

and purchase decisions.

While working on your product detail pages,

we also recommend adding product structure data to them.

These will enable Google to provide enhanced search

and image results for your site.

If we implement the markup properly,

users can see price, availability, and review

ratings right in Google search results.

Read more about product structure data in the link

provided in the video description.

You may also want to upload your complete product inventory

to Google Merchant Center, both for products sold online

and offline.

This approach has a few advantages.

You can update data faster, like prices and stock levels.

You can supply richer data, like locality information

for inventory.

And you have more control over data

by pushing it to Google when it changes,

rather than waiting for Google to crawl your website.

In case you have implemented structured data

and uploaded a feed to Merchant Center,

Google will generally prioritize the data from the feed.

Check the link in the description

to learn more about Merchant Center

and to find the supported languages and currencies.

While not really related to Search,

you should consider setting up Google Analytics

e-commerce tracking to better understand

your users' behavior.

This will enable you to analyze your site's average order

value, e-commerce conversion rate, time to purchase,

and other interesting information.

These are just a few tips on ways

to optimize your e-commerce website,

but there is lots more to learn.

Check out the links in the description for more resources.

Now, let's talk about Search Console.

I'm assuming you have verified your website in Search Console

already.

If not, check out my video explaining all ways

to verify your website.

It is important to make sure that your structured data is

working as intended.

When Search Console detects a new structured data

type on your site, you'll see a report summarizing

errors, warnings, invalid items [INAUDIBLE]

in your Search Console [? properly. ?]

And site owners will get an email that Google detected

a new data type on your site.

After implementing product structured data,

as I mentioned a while ago, open the Products report

on Search Console.

By default, you will see the trends

for error items in the main chart.

But it can also [INAUDIBLE] valid with warnings, invalid,

to check their trends in the chart and more details

in the table.

Errors disqualify your structured data

from being used in rich results, but the page

can still be shown for relevant search results

as a plain blue link.

For example, if your markup is missing the Price, Currency,

or Rating Value fields, those will show up

as errors in Search Console, and you won't

get the fancy rich results.

But it can still get a plain blue link.

Warnings can provide a somewhat reduced experience for users.

But your products may still show up as rich results in search.

Examples of warnings would be missing description, review,

URL, or brand.

Check the link to the rich results status

reports in the description to learn more

about errors and warnings.

To get more details on a specific issue,

click an item in the table to open a detailed report.

Here you'll see the date when the issue was detected,

the number of affected instances over time,

and examples of pages where Google detected it.

You can click a simple URL to check instances

of the error in your HTML code.

Now that you know what needs to be fixed,

you have two options--

make the required code changes yourself, or share the details

with a developer that can perform

code changes to your website.

You can do that by creating a link using the Share button.

After you or your developer have fixed the error,

click Validate Fix, and Google will validate your changes.

In addition to the Search Console interface,

you can also use the rich results

test to check structured data validity

of a given page on your site.

This tool can check the syntax of your structured data,

and in some cases, provide a sample of what the result might

look like in Google Search.

After setting up your pages and seeing them get indexed,

your next step is to monitor their performance.

You can check out my previous video

on the Performance Report for a more comprehensive overview,

but I thought I'd give some e-commerce-specific tips

in this video.

First, open Search Console and navigate

to the Performance Report.

You'll find a series of tables and charts

showing how your website is performing on Search.

You should look for patterns in the data that

show how important a specific segment of traffic is.

Here are four ideas you can start with.

Check the queries driving traffic to your website.

Are people searching for your business name,

specific products, or the general kind of product you

offer?

Consider adding content to certain areas of your site

to optimize your performance on Search for queries

you want to focus on.

Check the Click-Through Rate, or CTR,

for your most important product detail pages.

If you see that the CTR is low for those pages,

meaning that users are not clicking on your search

results, consider writing better descriptions or titles

or adding structured data to those pages.

Check if a specific group of pages

are not driving product results, which

could uncover opportunities to enhance your structured data

implementation.

For example, you might find that some products are not

driving rich results, which could

point to a specific template that

is missing structured data.

And check search appearance to see in a glance

the volume of traffic coming to your website

through product rich results.

To understand your product rich result performance over time,

click Product Results in the table

to edit future including only these search result type.

These will update your performance charts

to show your product results traffic by queries, pages,

countries, and devices.

That's it.

I hope this video helped you understand

a little more about how to succeed on Search if you're

an e-commerce website.

In summary, make sure to check the SEO basics in your product

detail pages, consider uploading your complete product

inventory to Google Merchant Center,

implement product structured data

to be eligible to Google search rich results,

use Search Console to monitor structured data issues,

and analyze your website performance with rich results.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Don't forget-- subscribe to the GoogleWebmasters YouTube

channel to watch our upcoming Search Console videos.

Stay tuned.

[MUSIC PLAYING]