Google’s 6 new SEO tips for e-Commerce sites through Merchant Center
Managing an e-commerce site is not an easy task and there are many aspects to be taken into account, especially if we intend to win visits and customers via search engines, where competition is constantly growing and increasingly fierce. This is also why we rely on Google’s official advice and, in particular, on the lessons coming from the YouTube series Ecommerce Essentials, in which we find useful hints to optimize some of the main critical points of our site: in particular, the last episode (which also concludes the series) takes us to discover six SEO tips that combine structured data and Google Merchant Center to get the most out of the e-Commerce presence in search results.
E-Commerce sites, the SEO benefits of using Merchant Center and structured data
Right from the start of the video, Google’s Alan Kent advocates the use of Merchant Center, which he describes as “a great way to share data about your ecommerce business with Google”, and indeed the entire episode is about how to get the most out of Merchant Center for our presence in search results.
Google Merchant Center is a platform that has been active since 2010, which initially served primarily to upload data of products that the user wanted to promote to Google’s paid services, such as product ads in Google Search, ads in the Google Display Network and the Google Shopping tab. Since 2020, however, this system has evolved into a broader tool to manage the way the inventory of products available online and in-store is displayed on Google, allowing retailers to upload product data via structured feeds – although its data continues to be used for experiences other than Search, such as Google Ads.
The first advantage of Merchant Center is that its data is designed to be read by computers, and is therefore extracted more reliably than the classic Googlebot site scan or data extraction from webpage markup. Moreover, we can further improve communication and understanding of this data by using structured data on product pages, and it is precisely the combined approach – Google Merchant Centre feeds and appropriate structured data – that Google recommends.
On this point, however, Kent emphasises that Google could cross-check the feed data against the website, also pointing out that if we have shops with a physical point of sale, we can likewise share inventory location data with Google, which can use this information when responding to ‘products near me’ queries; moreover, there are also other product feeds unrelated to e-commerce, and for instance a company that creates goods can provide authoritative product data via a manufacture center.
How to use Merchant Center to improve presence in SERP
After these premises, the video comes into focus and Kent lists Google’s six SEO tips for e-commerce sites, which essentially revolve around getting the most out of both tools, Merchant Centre feeds and specific structured data.
- Check product indexing
Basically, we entrust the discovery of pages (and thus also of e-Commerce-specific product pages) to Googlebot, the web crawler that attempts to locate all products on the site by following links between pages. However, under certain circumstances the bot may miss pages if they are not linked or if there are other problems: for instance, there may be some products that can only be reached from internal search results and ‘Google generally does not enter search terms in your on-site search box to discover new pages’.
To check whether products are actually indexed on Google, we have the usual Search Console tools at our disposal, such as URL Inspection, or analysis with the advanced search operator site:, and creating an XML sitemap file to list the important pages of the site is one way to ensure that indexing is less problematic and does not rely solely on links between pages.
Even safer, however, according to Kent, is the use of Google Merchant Center and the creation of a product feed, which will help Google discover all the products on our website: product page URLs are shared with Googlebot, which potentially uses them as starting points for crawling additional pages.
- Check the correspondence of prices shown in search results
The second tip is to check the accuracy of the product price data used by Google: if Google incorrectly extracts price data from our product pages, it might for instance show the original price instead of the discounted and actual price in the search results.
The way to find out if there is a correspondence of information (or if, on the contrary, there is an inconsistency of data) is to make a sample check of some product pages of our site in Google’s results, checking whether the crawler extracts price data accurately and shows them as rich results.
The recommended strategy to more accurately and definitely provide product information, such as list price, discounts and net price, is to add structured data to the product pages and provide Google Merchant Centre with structured feeds of product data, which will help Google to correctly interpret the prices shown on the site.
- Minimizing price and availability lags
Kent’s next suggestion is to minimise potential inconsistencies in price and product availability data between the website and Google (or rather, what Google understands about the site) due to time lags.
For instance, explains the Developer Advocate, Google scans the web pages of a site according to its own schedule: thus, changes made may not be noticed until the next Googlebot scan. On the other hand, Merchant Center feeds may be updated according to a more constant schedule, such as once a day or even once an hour: these delays may result in Merchant Center and Search falling behind site changes, such as when a product is out of stock.
In addition, Merchant Center may identify products with different price data based on what is on the website due to processing delays: this can have a negative impact on the relevant products in the search results until the discrepancy is resolved.
Again, Merchant Center also allows us to download all price data in bulk, if we want to do a more comprehensive reconciliation of price data in Merchant Center against the website.
However, to reduce lag we can request more frequent processing of our feeds in Merchant Center, which can precisely reduce the lag between the product data changing on the website and Google’s awareness.
Another approach is to enable automated item updates in Merchant Center: in this way, the feed automatically updates price and stock level data based on web page content when discrepancies are detected. Clearly, this is based on the assumption that our website is updated in real time when prices or product availability change.
- Check that products are suitable for Rich Product Results
The fourth useful tip is to check that our products appear in SERPs with rich results, the multimedia results that are displayed at Google’s discretion, assuming there is rich product data.
In order to obtain the special product presentation format, Kent invites us to use the already mentioned combined strategy, and thus use the structured data in the product pages and also the product feed in the Merchant Centre: in this way, it will be more likely that Google can correctly extract the product data from our pages and also use it for the multimedia results.
- Sharing local product inventory data
The next point particularly concerns owners of physical shops (as well as online sites), who should try to ensure that their products are found by people entering queries with the phrase ‘near me’.
To check whether the location data is processed correctly, it may be necessary to be physically close to the physical location and then search for our product by adding ‘near me’ or something similar to the query.
The way to appear in these searches starts with registering physical shop locations in Google Business Profile (the former Google My Business), and goes through sending a local inventory feed to Merchant Center; the local inventory feed includes product identifiers and shop codes, so that Google knows where the inventory is physically located.
Another useful tool is Pointy, a Google device that connects to our in-store system and automatically informs Google of the location’s inventory data.
- Appearing in the Google Shopping tab
The final tip concerns the Shopping tab in Google: in some cases, products might be available in the search results but not appear in the specific Shopping tab, because it is not enough to use structured data and product feeds for inclusion in this section.
In fact, an additional step is needed, i.e. activating Surfaces Across Google, which makes our product pages eligible to appear in the free tabs and thus to be displayed among the product results on various Google platforms, including YouTube, Google Images, the Shopping tab, and Google Lens.
