How to Use Google Product Search

In this article I am sharing ideas and techniques I have used to get my products on Google Products listed on the first page as well as using it as a free method to get sales as well. This article will also explain step by step details of how to create a bulk file to post to Google Products.

What is Google Products? Google Products or Google base is a price comparison service provided by Google. The user interface is designed in a form field in which a person can do a search for a particular product and get a price comparison for that product.

What makes Google Products different than other price comparison services is for two reasons: 1. It does not charge for it services and 2. You do not have to pay to get your product listed first.

So how does one get their product to show up on the first page? Google Products sorts there products by relevance or best match in terms of the search and price order either ascending or descending.

The easiest method I discovered to get listed on the first page and even in the top (which helps with Google) is to do a search for the product you are looking to put into Google Products if there is over 500 product for a give product name, the name is too broad and you need to come up with something better. For example one of my products is Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos for the PC. The phrase warcraft 3 in and of itself comes up with over 9,000 results too high to get ranked with but how about Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos? Better, with around 360 results, How about Warcraft 3 Reign of Chaos PC Game? It comes up with just a little over a hundred results and my product comes up as the 4th item in the Google Products list. So having a very descriptive product title is vital to getting ranked high in Google Products.

Also having good keywords in the product description is a trick to getting ranked high as well. One such method I have use is putting the word buy in the product description, this helps rank my site higher for people searching for Buy Godfather video game then if they just typed Godfather video game. Also a perfect example of how this works is if you typed in a search in Google for Buy Warcraft 3 is listed second in the product search results for buy pc games.

The product search results will always be on the first page of Google so out of over 1 million results the term buy warcraft 3 brings up my game listed on the first page of Google.

Now the process of creating a Google products account and creating a bulk feed to upload to Google base.

1. Select an Item Type

The data feeds are classified under various different item types that you can select from. Each set of item types has it own set of attributes that are unique to itself in terms of creating the data feed, the most common and widely used item type is products.

2. Create the Data Feed

You will need some kind of spreadsheet program to create the data feed, the followings are tested and work: Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Works Spreadsheet, Open Office Calc (this one is free). There are several fields you have to have setup for your spreadsheet, this can be tricky so you can down a sample spreadsheet that have the fields you need and all you have to do is put in your information.

Download Sample Spreadsheet

When you create the data feed using the spreadsheet tool you will need to go to Save As and save the spreadsheet as a tab delimited txt file or else the data feed will not upload properly to Google Base.

3. Register the Data Feed

To create an account with Google Base you will need to go to base.google.com. Of course put in your contact information, username, password, etc. Once you are done, you need to set a file name for you data feed, the file name has to be the same as the data feed. For example: if the data feed file name is products.txt then the file name needs to be products.txt as well. To setup the feed click on the data feeds tab and register new data feed link. It will also ask you for the item type, you want this item type to be products.

4. Submit the Data Feed

This step is quite simple all you need to do is login to your Google Base account then click on the Data Feeds Tab then click on the link that says Upload File. This will bring a pop up window for you which has a browse button that opens another window out to your computer in which you select your data feed file and upload it to Google Base.

It may take several hours to process your data feed also if the data feed has errors in it, Google Base will tell you when you click on the Data Feeds Tab.

For additional instructions on how to create a bulk upload file and submit it to Google Products go to http://www.google.com/base/products.html or http://services.google.com/bulkupload/excel/, follow the 5 steps listed above on the web page.

So in conclusion Google Products is an excellent free tool to use as a back door to get recognized with Google and with customer looking to buy a product and not looking for just information.

by Kirk Jensen