Google Shopping’s Impact on SEO

Everyone has heard about Google Products Search, Google Products and Froogle. Now this market place launched by Google is known as Google Shopping which was invented by Craig Nevill-Manning. Its interface provides a form where user can input the product queries and get the list of vendors dealing in that particular product along with the pricing information.

Till few months back the Google Product Search was a free service provided by Google. Now with that service being transformed to Google Shopping, the service will start costing e-commerce sites. The vendors would have to pay handsome amount to Google for submitting their products on Google for selling. It is first instant when Google has converted a free service to pay-for-placement model.

Product type ads

The new feature which Google has been adding to Google shopping is listing of product types and not images of the product which is searched. These ads turn the related links into visual cues which leads the searcher deeper into Google shopping. When a user searches for a single word query, Google’s product-type ads help in determining the intent of the user. Like if someone searches for “shoes”, how can Google decides whether the user wants to know which shoes to buy or where to buy shoes from. Thus if the user wants to buy any product online using Google shopping the product type ads which display icons and navigational tools draw user inside Google Shopping and away from organic search.

Visual Cues

Google shopping apart from using icon based cues has also started using visual linking cues for drawing users eye towards there results.these visual cues include images and videos. Google uses eye catching contrast colored images for drawing attention. Once users are attracted clicks are likely to follow. At the same time organic searches use smaller visual cues which can be rich snippets to catch attention.

Effect on SEO

Since the initialization of monetizing Google Shopping campaign the placement of search results which are related to Google shopping are finding new positions of being displayed in the SERPs. According to the analysis of London based SEO Agency initially when Google Shopping was in the initial stages the search results of Google shopping were placed immediately after the paid results. However now these results of Google shopping are placed in the top right side of the window. Still the proper placement of these results is in flux. So in the coming months we can expect to see different positions of these results in the SERPs.

Due to these Google Search results the organic results are affected. But the exact impact on these organic results can not be found unless the position for Google Search results are fixed.

During this transition period there might be larger and smaller modules of these results coming up on the result page, different formats might also be seen. Most of the people in the SEO field would see this as downside rather than upside because the organic visibility of results would be countered with decrease in real estate which is dedicated for paid ads.

Google believes that once the payment comes into play companies will better manage their data feeds. Organizations will keep upto date the prices or the latest offers. All this would mean better shopping results for users. Effect on low resource e-commerce site would be high because Google shopping would end the free source of traffic for them.

Summary: With Google Shopping coming to play the improvement in organic results is even more important because the competition for getting the space in the first page would grow stronger.