To compete against marketplaces like Amazon, Google’s search results page will now be showing organic “product listings.” About a year back, Google ditched its attempt at organic listings for shopping ads. However, the company seems to have ascertained that organic listings might benefit it more than product advertisements.
Organic product ads
“Searching for keywords such as ‘down jacket’ can produce popular product listings. So far, the listings only trigger on mobile devices in the U.S. and India and only for searches of clothing and accessories. Popular products usually appear on the second or third scroll down the page, below the ads and an organic result or two. Within the popular products card, clicking on a filter — such as ‘men’ or ‘puffer’ — narrows the selection of products dynamically without requesting a new search results page,” according to Practical Ecommerce.
Data shown in the product listings will be a mashup of information that Google finds on various sites. This includes stuff like photos of the product, customer reviews, and so on. The change will benefit small online shops since it will provide an equal platform for them to compete with the big e-commerce firms that usually have bigger budgets at their disposal.
You can influence organic product listings by focusing on three factors — provide real-time product information via the Merchant Center, ensure your website has Structured Data, and provide additional product feed through the Manufacturer Center.
The Merchant Center ensures that a given product feed appears in Google Search and Image results. (Image: via Pixabay)
The first thing you need to do is to “make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated. You can do this by using the Structured Data Testing Tool, along with the Products Report within Google Search Console… The key here is to make sure that Google can access your product information in order to display as snippets in various applications,” according to Search Engine Land.
Next, check the “Surfaces across Google” option in the Merchant Center. This will allow your website product feeds to appear in Google Search and Image results. Finally, set up a feed at the Manufacturer Center where you provide additional information about a product, like its description, the different versions of the product, high-quality videos, and so on.
Hitting a trillion dollars
Google’s parent company Alphabet recently hit a market capitalization of US$1 trillion, becoming the fourth American company to achieve the feat. Back in 2018, Apple and Amazon reached this mark. Microsoft crossed the line a year later in 2019. Saudi Aramco hit a US$2 trillion valuation when it debuted on the Riyadh Stock Exchange last December. Alphabet has multiple revenue streams. However, details about them are scarce.
Apple was the first trillion-dollar U.S. company. (Image: via Pixabay)
“Google search pages have been squeezing in more ad space, and the company is making untold sums from YouTube as well, though those numbers are never broken out for investors… It’s ‘probably’ between US$16 billion to US$25 billion per year, which would land it in the Fortune 500 if it were its own company,” according to SFIST.
Alphabet is due to report its Q4, 2019 earnings on February 3rd. Experts are expecting at least a 20 percent year-to-year increase in revenues. Many predict Facebook to be the next American company to be valued at a trillion dollars. At present, the firm is valued at about US$620 billion. Interestingly, all four trillion-dollar American companies operate in the tech industry.
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