eCommerce Marketing: Google Shopping vs Google Organic Search

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 at 8:02 pm

GoogleProductSearch eCommerce Marketing: Google Shopping vs Google Organic Search Major differences exist between Google Organic Search and Google Shopping Search for your eCommerce website. You have to optimize your website for Google Organic Search and optimize your data feed for Google Shopping in order to rank high in both locations.

For example, searching the term “sheet metal roofing hammer” in Google Organic search will yield a different set of results than the same search performed in Google Shopping search. A merchant selling sheet metal roofing hammers could write a blog article on how to use a sheet metal roofing hammer to show up in Google Organic search and submit an optimized data feed to a Google merchant account in order to show up in Google Shopping.

GoogleOrganicSearch SheetMetalHammerExampleV3 resized 600 eCommerce Marketing: Google Shopping vs Google Organic Search

Factors contributing to rank in Google Organic:

Submission of sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools
- Go here to create an account and submit your website

Consistently publish remarkable, educational and valuable content with long-tail keywords
- Blogging is a good option for creating content on a consistent basis

Optimize webpages for On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
- Optimize your URL, Page Title, Header and content of your page around long-tail keywords for On-Page SEO
- Page rank, inbound links, organic site traffic, and age of website domain are contributing factors of Off-Page SEO

Creating remarkable content with long-tail keywords on a consistent basis will help improve your website’s visibility in Google Organic search. Writing a blog for your eCommerce store is a great option to increasing your visibility in Google Search.

Factors contributing to rank in Google Shopping:

Submission of data feed to Google Merchant Account
- Go here to create an account and submit your data feed

Accurately describe products in data feed with quality attributes
- Your data feed should include valid, accurate, factual, clear and appropriate information without promotion.

Obtain high seller-ratings and product ratings
- High seller and product ratings are essentially equal to high quality inbound links on Organic Search. The more you get, the higher your products will rank.

Although it is important to have a presence in Google Shopping, it is widely believed that Google Organic Search still dominates Google Shopping search. The belief is that the majority of buyers online are not searching for products the right way on Google, or at least the way Google and merchants would like them to. A recent report from a user on Auction Bytes, an Independent Trade Publication for Online Merchants, reported that 58% of her store traffic came from Google Organic Search while only 5% came from Google Shopping Search.

Major Takeaway:

Although it is important to have your store visible in both Organic and Shopping results, it may be more important for your store to be visible in Organic Search.

Follow the best practices of On-Page SEO while developing a blog focused on providing remarkable, educational and valuable content focused on long-tail keywords relevant to your products. The combination of both will help increase your store visibility in Google Organic Search.