- Traditional Shopping Comparison Engines
- Hybrid Shopping Engines
- Optimizing Your Feeds
- Summary
Optimizing Your Feeds
In order to get the most of your shopping feeds, it is important that you optimize it. Just placing a product number in as a title and having small and uninformative descriptions will not get your products noticed in the shopping comparison engines any better than with a regular search engine. Optimizing your product titles is imperative to shopping comparison engines, as the users of these engines tend to be experienced shoppers looking for specific product names, types, or categories. Unless you're a company like QVC that has conditioned its customers to search on their product numbers, it's best to leave product numbers or SKUs for the description area and leave them out of the title.
Use your description to include specifics about height, weight, size, and the more "flowery" type of content that describes the product. This is a great place to include slang or jargon-type words that can be associated with the product or service. A great example of this would be something as simple as a hooded sweatshirt—the term "hoody" or "hoodie" is slang for this product. Working those words into your description could help the product rank for it within a shopping comparison engine.
You might also want to make sure your spelling is correct for your product titles and descriptions, as misspellings could place you in a wrong category or have you appearing in search results that have nothing to do with the product.
Lastly, make sure to include product images with your feed (see Figure 1). The images entice the users to click through and purchase the product, and it lets them know that this is the product they have been searching for. Including images with the listings increases the chance for shopping comparison engine users to click through and visit your site, if it is the product they want. Using images that have relevant product names will also help round out the optimization of the entire product listing in the feed.
Figure 1 Yahoo! shopping example listing search for "canned beets."