Welcome back rankers, or should I say welcome back to me because I have been away to Bali. It is good to be in Melbourne because it is 4 degrees after being in a climate that was 31 degrees yesterday. Getting back to the lights I still feel like I am in Bali because I have the flood lights on, nice and warm. Okay firstly, I want to quickly point out when I spoke at the Marketing Now conference in New Zealand it went so well that Siobhan is now running a series of workshops on SEO, which I will be doing, running, she is promoting. But if you are in New Zealand I think there are about five cities I think we are going to, from July 20-24 but run across to marketingnow.co.nz, if you are in New Zealand and you want to learn SEO. We are going to cover everything that you need to do in half day workshops in New Zealand, so they are booking up fast. I do know that, so get across to marketingnow.co.nz if you are in New Zealand.
Okay a lot of people have asked me this over previous months and it has been changing a bit but I thought we would have a look at it today because on the google webmaster central blog, they have actually got a good video up there on how to use the particular function that I am going to show you today. It is about shopping results that you may have seen in the google results, it’s actually called google product search and I have just done a search here which is ‘Camcorder 1000D SLR’ which I love, which is the camera here, which happens to be the camera that I own and some of you have seen the photos from. If you have a look up here some of the first results for ‘camera 1000D SLR’ now that is a really really qualified search in that I have told google exactly what it is that I am looking for. Google can then go have a look at it’s product search database and say we have a few of these camera 1000D SLR in our database. Interestingly though, there is nothing as a complete match for that particular search but how do you get your products or services up here? Well it’s actually only products not services so sorry about that for those of you have asked me.
Basically you have, this really really suits online retailers, so if you are an organization out there who has a large database of products and this can even be on an ebay store, if you have an existing ebay store or something like that where you are doing a large amount of products, google search is great for getting your products in the search results when someone does a search on a particular product that you might be selling. It is based on the old google base. Now some of you may have heard of the old google base which was basically like an old classified area that you used to be able to use in google. But it’s basically just structured information and what google does, it has if you go to google.com/products and go down to information for sellers you will see you can actually start a data feed. I won’t start a data feed, but what we will do is post a single item and what you do is you basically provide a fee to google if you have got a large amount of products. If you only have a dozen just try it with half a dozen, if that is all you have, but these listing will only remain live for thirty days so that is why I say it suites more for an online store where you have a large amount of products that are constantly changing and updating, if you have got a big store with lots of products that you might be changing everyday or every hour submit a feed, so it is submitting every time you update your particular database of products.
Basically there is a number of attributes for each product that they have in the search. Product type, you can see over here, UPC, size, model number over here and those sorts of things, you can actually start, you can create some of your own attributes. So that gets your products into google products search and you are actually getting them appearing in the search results. Well like everything that google does it is about relevancy, so if I am typing in ‘Camera SD1000 SLR’ probably if someone would have had a product in the google product search which basically says ’Camera SD1000 SLR’ allows the product name maybe the description started out with ‘Cannon SLR’. Once again it is about key words and key phrases, the frequency of that or the density of those phrases within a given product set. So it is like everything else they are going to do. Make sure, if you are going to do this, you are using the descriptive key words in, you know, where ever you can through out the feed that you are creating for google. I am not going to get into how you can create the feed and all those attributes and those sorts of things because that is a whole other area and I would suggest you speak to your web developer about that but when you are setting up these feeds make sure that you are using your key words in them, but use them especially in the description.
Google said basically the way they will rank sites in here if we go to this particular page here we see there is 137 stores here, the way that they will rank will be on reputation. Now, we know when google is talking about reputation they are usually talking about things like how many other things are linking to your site to get an idea of your reputation but also relevancy is really really important to google when it comes to this. But some of the top rating sellers have got all these different seller ratings where you can rate ‘I had a good experience, bad experience, all those sorts of things’. So that is one of the ways things will work out whether or not you have a good reputation online. But the key here is, if you are doing an online store this is another avenue for you to get your products out in front of people that may not actually know that you exist and very importantly at the moment, it is only available for google.com or the US market, google.uk, and also Germany. But if you are selling into those markets you should have your product’s search setup, and that is it for todays show.
Just before we go though, I just want to say congratulations to Keith Keller, long time viewer. Keith’s radio show Communique Radio has made it into the finals of Richard Branson’s piece of TV and you can go and vote for Keith’s show Korea Communique down here on entrepreneur.version.com I will put the link in the e-mail and hopefully you can see it there as well, nice and easy, but congratulations! Well done Keith and co. and everybody who has helped him get there. But basically go and have a look at that and vote for Keith and if he wins he will get his show on Virgins Atlantic TV. So that is it for today’s show, great to be back, see you next week, bye.
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