Semalt SEO Advice On How To Optimize Your Product Feed

If you own a webshop or work with a customer's Google Shopping, you probably already know how important a part of your product feed is for your sales on Google Ads. After all, it is there that all your products can be found and sold online.

But often the feed is "forgotten" in the big work that is with Google Ads optimization and management because it already has all the most important things… or what else?

This is partly true because the feed already contains titles, prices of products, descriptions, pictures, etc. All the important, most basic elements are present. But we have experienced - no matter what the size of the shop has been - that there has been a lot of potential in working on optimizing the various product feeds to get more exposures, more relevant clicks, and thereby increase sales. 

The way you can start taking more control of your product feed is by working with the product titles. Here we will provide some tips, tricks, and ideas on how to start optimizing your feed.

As mentioned earlier, you can improve some absolutely essential results by optimizing your product flow. For example, you can get more exposure on products that you've previously failed to promote. You can also get more relevant clicks because products are better "mapped" to appear on relevant searches, which can lead to notable growth in product sales. 

Optimization on a product category - let's say roof racks as an example - can lift the category from the worst seller in your shop to being the top seller if you get to work in-depth with the potentials that lie in the feed. You can also get products that are already doing really well to drive even more sales home - both alone and as additional sales. It can significantly improve your ROAS / POAS for the entire shop's products if you put energy into optimizing your feed. 

In this blog post, we will go in-depth with how you can optimize the product titles, which, we would like to argue, is the absolute most important part of a product feed in relation to Google Shopping.

It goes without saying that the titles of your products are one of the stars of your feed, since this is where customers can get the short, quick narrative about the product they are looking at. 

It can e.g. be "Roof racks in steel, 2 pieces, 118 cm". The consumer understands this fairly quickly, and if the title contains enough information, the sale can already take place before the energy is used to do further research or read the product description. Another aspect of product titles that you may not always think about as an online store owner is that they act as keywords. 

If we continue with the roof rack example, "Roof racks in steel, 2 pieces, 118 cm", the product can right now be found on searches such as:

And other varieties in the same style.

The reason is, as mentioned earlier, that all the words in the title act as keywords that are put in context by each other. Each part of the title is a "keyword", which brings together a context about the individual product. That is why it is important that we include as much relevant information about the product in our titles so that our product can be displayed on as many searches as possible. This tool can help you: Semalt's Dedicated SEO Dashboard. You can therefore also spend time thinking that some products are not necessarily searched for what they are called - e.g., roof bracket could be load rail. Consider researching possible synonyms for your products that might be more relevant. 

In this case, not all products are suitable for all types of cars. They may be too short / long, have the wrong type of grip, etc. Therefore, a potential customer who is not very early in his / her shopping journey will search more specifically for exactly the product he / she is looking for - and there it is important that we make sure our titles are optimized so we get the searches and potential sales. 

If you know that your product - the roof rack - fits a Ford Focus, there is a good chance that the buyer will look for this. Therefore, it should be included in your title. You can create rules in your feed optimization, which make sure to include e.g. Ford Focus in your title. 

It's important that you have as much relevant information about your products in your feed as possible so that you can easily make a rule that only applies to relevant products. In this case, I have a product category called "roof rack". The product is made for Ford, and I wrote in my product description that the product can be used for the Ford Focus. I, therefore, make a rule to add a suffix with "for Ford Focus" to this information. 

And then our product title from earlier will look like this:

In short: the titles are your keywords in the Shopping universe. If you have not included the key elements of your products that are relevant to your potential customers, you will not be found in the searches they make. 

Only the imagination sets limits to what you can put in your product titles, but you are limited to some degree. Google has a maximum of 150 characters per page title, and often you will only be able to see 70 characters in total - e.g., on mobile results related to your product. Therefore, you need to be aware that your most important information comes first in your project titles. A good title length could e.g., be "Roof brackets in steel, 2 pieces, 118cm, Modula, Automatic fastening, Semi-fit for Ford Focus" of 87 characters. 

Text in "all caps" is also not allowed, unless it is for abbreviations or single words. You have a little more room to move in relation to text ads, where all-caps titles will be rejected immediately. I.e. if I wrote "ROOF BRACKETS FOR FORD FOCUS", my product would either be rejected or significantly restricted. 

If you can tell about the variants of your products, e.g., the roof rack, which may be made of steel, in black or pink matt, so include it in your titles! It makes your product much more relevant to the potential user, who is further in the buying journey and knows (more or less) exactly what he / she wants. 

Brand names on the products are also good to have. We all know the examples of Nike shoes. Again, the idea is that users are that long in the journey and know which brand they would like products from.

We recommend our customers to give us as much information as possible to make cool, catchy titles. Often small things like size and colors are missing, but it can make a really big difference to the number of searches you can participate in, and thus the potential sales you could get by just including that this roof rack that you sell, is pink. Because everyone wants to buy it. ?

One of our smaller shops got its first feed optimizations, including a lot of work with title optimization, back in late August 2020. The following month, it experienced the following growth alone on its Shopping campaign:

That client is still with us today, and we continue to optimize new product categories, test relevant and new synonyms for products in their titles, and perform ongoing Google product category mapping, which we'll cover in the next blog post. 

We hope this has given you some new blood about the potential of title optimization. If you have any questions about the potential of your product feed, or would like help with your Google Shopping efforts, please use this tool: the DSD or contact us. Then we will be glad to help you further.