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How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

With greater competition coming from marketplaces like Amazon, Google is adding more product discovery features to its search results pages.Here is everything you need to know about Google’s Popular Products section.

For now, this feature is only available for apparel and fashion products.

The Popular Products feature relies on tools you may already be using for your Shopping campaigns and rich results: product feeds and product schema.

Ask open-ended questions like: Would you refer us to a friend?In your own words, how would you describe our [strongest attribute]?What obstacle would have prevented you from buying our product?What did you find as a result of buying the product?What feature did you like most about the product?

As Alan Kent of Google recently said on Twitter “a merchant’s product page with user reviews is not considered a “product review page” in this context.”

Identify product reviews. Google also recently clarified that structured data may help Google identify product review-type content, but it is one of many ways Google identifies such content. Danny Sullivan wrote, “as for structured data, it might help us better identify if something is a product review, but we do not solely depend on it.”

Please note that Google told us that this product reviews update will take approximately three weeks to roll out and we are only now in the start of week two. So, the data may change but generally when Google rolls out these updates, the bulk of the impact you would see from an update would be in the first few days of that rollout.

Data providers show December was bigger than April

Semrush did tell us that the November 2021 core update was bigger than the December product reviews update, but they are two different types of updates and that makes sense. In fact, The December product reviews update is not showing huge amounts of movement compared to the November core update, Semrush said

Automation driven by improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning will bring significant changes to how we manage pay-per-click (PPC) in 2018 and beyond.

there is no payment required and it’s not necessary to have a Google Ads campaign.As long as you have a Merchant Center account and sell products in the US, you can upload a product data feed directly to Google.

Google Manufacturer Center can be most valuable for brands that: Have a lot of collateral surrounding their products such as positive third-party reviews. Convert customers mainly via brick and mortar, letting their online retailers pick up the online demand for their products. Have products that are usually part of a bigger basket. Items that are expensive to ship relative to product cost sometimes do better at ecommerce retailers since they can become part of a bigger basket. Are retailer agnostic – don’t care who sells so long as the sale happens.

Shopify stores generally score 20 or less on Google’s mobile PageSpeed Insights, with first contentful paint taking about 3.5 seconds, he added

Duplicate product pages are also a facet of Shopify. As an inherent characteristic of the framework Shopify is built on, category pages link to duplicate product pages, and although they do canonical back to the correct landing page, this may dilute link equity and make it more difficult for search engines to determine which page from their index they should favor.

“The reason this is just a bit riskier . . . is you’re setting up your entire website architecture around duplicate pages,” said Long, “Basically, every single category page on the site . . . is going to push internal links to duplicate product pages, but all of the product pages that are getting internal links technically aren’t eligible to rank in the search engines.” A solution for this does exist, you can read about it in our guide to technical SEO for Shopify.