How Can Google Base Help My Website?

If you have an ecommerce website, it is important to reach out to as many potential customers as possible.  More than that though, is that it is important that these customers really do have some potential – in other words that there is some likelihood that they will want to buy one or more of your products and services.

This is where search engine marketing is particularly helpful.  SEM helps source potential customers who are actively searching for your products and services.

Google Products (formerly Froogle) is a specific product search service offered by Google, which searches products uploaded to Google Base. Google Products appear not only in the Google Products website itself, but also in the main Google search listings where they match a user’s search closely enough.

Therefore, products that can be found in Google Base, match directly at the source of a user’s search in Google, giving your products a chance to strike while the iron is hot!

What is Google Base?

Google Base is described as a database (hence the name) of online and offline content, which is subsequently made searchable in Google.  In the context of ecommerce (where it is most frequently used) is describes a database of products from many suppliers, that Google makes searchable.

Such products appear in Google’s Product search, as well as in the main search results.

Webmasters with a Google Account can upload their own product catalogue for inclusion in Google Base.  When a user click on a product found in Google Products or in the main search, they end up at the website which has submitted the product.

Who Can Use Google Base?

Almost any website that sells products or services online will be able to use Google Base to insert their products into the Google Products search results.

However, before undertaking this activity it is worth understanding how to compete in Google Products results.  Google ranks products primarily on the uniqueness and relevance of the product information.  However, users can reorder the product results by price.  Therefore, to perform well in the Google Products results requires a mix of effort in product content writing, and price competitiveness.  At least one of these must be very good in order for Google Products to be an effective marketing channel at all.

The kinds of user that might use Google Products to search for products might generally be a consumer "bargain hunter" (although it is fair to suggest this is a generalisation), so high-end business services providers might not see much benefit from Google Products.

However, as products and services that have very engaging and unique content might appear in the normal search results also, it is often worth the effort to undertake Google Base submission for any area of business.  However, relying on the traditional search arena to generate traffic through Google Base will mean that the product content will need to be very relevant to the kinds of things people might search, and producing this content can be a full optimisation job in itself.

Business with the right target customer profile, and with sufficient skill in optimising content for the Google Base feed, might find that a significant proportion of their sales are sourced through Google Products search.

Find Out More

If you are interested in using  Google Base to sell your products or services online, call us during office hours on 0871 900 8407, or contact us now.