Make sure you have your Products in Google Base!

There will be some of you who can remember when Google decided it was going to enter into the shopping comparison market. That is when you search for a product and a list of results for that product are presented to you with price comparisons against all the stores that sell that product. Googles version of this was called Froogle - which was a hit in the states, but struggled to get off the ground in the UK. Well now Google has Google Base - which is pretty much the same thing but is integrated into Googles Universal Search (or click on the Shopping tab in Google if you only want to search Google base results).

So what do you have to do to get into Google Base? Firstly you need to be able to export all of your products in to a csv file or xml feed. The information in here will tell Google the name of you product, the category it sits in and most importantly the price you are selling it at. It then makes this available for searching.

So for example, one of our clients sells PA Systems to the general public, bands and businesses - they have around 300 products - so we integrated a Google Base export. If someone now searches for a specific product that is in the company online catalog then it is like to come up in the Google search WITH the price next to it.

So why is this different to normal search engine optimisation (SEO)? well if you think about the mind set of the person who is carrying out the search - if she knows the exact product name she is looking for and when she searches not only is there a link directly to that product but there is a price as well - how much more of a qualified lead do you get? Should get pretty good conversion rates as long as your prices are competitive.

Give Google Base a go and see how it improves your ecommerce store.