Birbahadur Singh August 6, 2021 The holidays are just around the corner. It is that time of year that brings you more sales than any other month or occasion does. What is your marketing and sales strategy for the upcoming holiday season?
To boost your traffic, sales, and revenue during holidays this year, you could consider introducing a strategic addition in your digital marketing approach that involves optimizing your website and pages for Google Search Features.
Google Search Feature
When you perform a search on Google, you see different types of searches and ads on the Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP). What you see on that page apart from (the list of) websites is called search features.
Below is a screenshot to help you understand Google Search Feature. We searched for Justin Bieber, and we got about 22,20,00,000 results in 0.68 seconds. What else we saw there was this snippet of information about Justin Bieber on the sidebar –
The snippet gives details about the pop singer. Google fetches this information from a reliable, high-traffic website and assembles it in an easy-to-digest section on the search page.
But why does Google do that? They want to help their users easily find the products and information they are looking for.
Sometimes, you may see images, product recommendations, similar questions or queries, and many other pieces of visual and textual information on the search page.
Search features are custom-designed interactive sections on the search engine ranking page. Here, the term custom-designed means that Google’s search mechanism shows unique search features for every search performed by users.
Imagine your website getting showcased in one of the search features on Google! The traffic on your website will skyrocket. And with that, your online reputation and sales too!
Ecommerce and Google Search Features
Ecommerce businesses can optimize their products for Google Search Features.
If you start optimizing your ecommerce website now, you will need to have some patience while Google evaluates your website and content for search features. So, to prepare your ecommerce product pages for the peak season at the year end, this is the right time to get started.
And To get started and succeed here, you will need to work on these three aspects –
- Your product page SEO and content
- Schema Markup or Structure data
- Google Ads
One thing you should remember is – just like SEO, SMO, PPC, and other digital marketing techniques, there is no guarantee of success with these strategic implementations also.
Here are some of the ways you can choose to optimize your website and display your products on Google Search Feature –
Advertising Feature –
When a user wants to buy a product, say a mobile online, and searches for it on Google, he/she might be shown a list of featured products from different ecommerce websites in sidebar like below –
You can optimize your products to be a part of this recommended shopping list from Google.
It might look different on different devices. Getting your products in this list is simple. However, it could be a bit expensive, as it is a part of Google Ads and Google Shopping Ads.
Rich Reviews Snippets & Local Features–
You can make Your Google My Business page work as a rich and welcoming feature during the holiday season. For this, you will need to work on your Google listing.
Don’t have a Google My Business Page? Thinking why you should get it?
Because, it gives you customer engagement directly on SERP. It is a free and easy to manage page from Google. It increases the visibility of your brand on Google and Google Maps.
And also because, when your customers and prospects search for your business locations around them, it is shown on the search page.
The user can also see a snippet of reviews and ratings for your products and services. If most of your reviews are positive, they will automatically attract new customers.
And if there are negative reviews, then you might want to provide resolution to the unsatisfied customers on your Google My Business page itself; this will convince and bring you more customers during the peak time.
Here are a few ways to get reviews from customers –
- Connect with your previous buyers and request them to share their experience
- Offer product samples
- If you are an ecommerce reseller, you could ask the manufacturer or suppliers to provide you with the reviews they received earlier.
Image Search Feature –
Some search queries show images above the basic search listings. This is called image search feature. You can optimize your product images to get a space in this Google Search Feature.
Google shows images on main search page when it realizes that the user wants to know how something looks like. The image feature can sometimes be found on top. However, it could be placed somewhere in the middle of the search page as well.
If you want your products to be part of this search feature, you should optimize the images on your website for Google Image Search – this is where Google fetches the images for the image feature.
People Also Ask –
People Also Ask (PAA) is a search feature that lists down frequently asked questions or queries from users. The feature aims to answer the commonly searched or asked for queries, fetching short, informative, authentic descriptions from different URLs.
The user has the option to reach the source URL by clicking the link at the end of the answer.
If you want your website link to be featured on this Search Feature, you will need to create keyword-optimized, informative, and high-quality content with rich heading tags. Try to keep the content in interactive style and keywords in long-tail.
“Refine By” Feature –
When a user searches for a product that could be available in different segments such as for different age groups, genders, materials, and types – the search feature gives the user an option to refine his/her search with the help of “Refine By” tool.
You can have your products or lines listed here using Google Shopping Ads and Google Ads. Getting featured here could be difficult, but not impossible. You will need to work and make shift in your digital marketing implementations, specifically product keywords, to find a space here.
Bottom Line –
Before you optimize your website and pages for Google Search Feature, you will need to make sure that you have sufficient inventory available to meet the sudden rise in demand during the holiday season.
Moving forward, did you know that at $ 284 billion, mobile commerce makes almost half of the US ecommerce market? So, along with the aforementioned implementations, you will also need to make certain that your ecommerce store is well optimized for mobile.
That includes, your website should look good, load fast and work smoothly on any mobile device. It also involves that you follow and implement mobile SEO best practices; so your website and pages rank in top search results.
In an age when people spend more time on mobile, mobile SEO and marketing looks promisingly essential for every marketer out there. So, if you do not have mobile SEO optimization in your digital marketing process, this is the best time to get started before the holiday season appears.
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