Google Merchant Center Mistakes Killing Your Ecommerce Revenue

We are talking about Google Merchant Center. We're going to talk about what it is, best practices, common mistakes, maybe even some advanced tactics, and joining the show once again, Harpreet Singh, who just had a baby. Say Say congratulations to Harpreet, everybody. And to Mr. Gagan Arora. Thank you both for coming back on. Thank you for having me back on the show, man. Thank you for having us. For somebody who's never heard of Google Merchant Center, what is it? Why should anybody care? And who isn't it for? Is there anyone that it is not for? So, Merchant Center is just like Google Search Console, in which you can go and verify your domain, and but Merchant Center is just for e-commerce brands. So, if you just have a publisher website or a regular website, you cannot go there and verify or do some things about that. For example, like I cannot go there and submit my domain there and do some page optimization or anything like that. Merchant Center is just for e-commerce brands who have products or collection pages on their website. It's almost like Search Console, but completely different and is specific to just e-commerce brands only. So, in Search Console, you can submit your URL request indexing, submit your sitemap. Similar to that, in Merchant Center, you can submit your product feed. Product feed is also just like schema, where it's a structured data, like CSV file or it can be an XML file, where you share information about your product, titles, their images, and their descriptions, pricing, any promotion that you're running, and you submit that to your Merchant Center, so Google can pick it up. Now, why Google created this Merchant Center thing? So, what was happening is that whenever a e-commerce brand is updating their price on their product page, or they're changing the title, or they're saying that this product is out of stock now, Google would have to go to that page, crawl that, process all that information, and then Google will get to know that, "Oh, this product is out of stock now." That was becoming a crawling challenge for Google, where Google would have to spend a lot of money on crawling all the e-commerce brands. So, Google came up with this idea that, "Oh, why we are going to these brands and their domains, why why don't they are coming to us and giving us the information right away, so that we don't have to do too much crawling of these domains and have to spend a lot of money on that?" That's how the idea of like Merchant Center started, and the product feed, and how you can submit your information about titles and everything else to the Merchant Center, and therefore like Google update it across there, wherever the products are showing up. So, this is how Merchant Center actually started. The guy got nailed at um right there. Um in my opinion, Google Merchant Center is also their way of competing with Amazon. So, for people living in the USA, for example, this video is going to be way more beneficial than maybe someone living in Canada, just because the Google search results, they um they they lean into Merchant Center Merchant Center more. They got to go nail the technical side of things um very well. I think from a business point of view, this is just Google's way of, "Okay, how do we compete with Amazon?" So, if you search for Let's just take a 55-in TV in the in the US. So, I do that all the time. I change my VPN to see I don't know whatever, or when I drive across the border, um the results look completely different. So, 55-in TV, my first page of Google is just filled with products. And all of that information that I see is um Google pulls from um Google pulls from Merchant Center. But now, when you drive back across the border, I'm in Canada, and I type in 55-in TV, there's a very small product grid in Canada. So, Merchant Center is less important. So, actually, depending on the market you're in, um when you think about e-commerce SEO, you want to balance you want to balance your strategy. You will want to balance how much investment you um you put into this, just based on what the search results look like. But over time, um I think over the next 2 3 4 5 years, um Merchant Center is going to be really important. Even with some of the new advancements that have been coming in with UCP. So, UCP is going to be It's Agent Take the Agent Take Commerce and all of that. How do we get products seen in ChatGPT? How do we let agents purchase on our behalf and all of that stuff? Merchant Center's product feed is going to be the basically the grounding for that. That's what everything else is going to be based on. So, if you have an e-commerce store and you haven't set up Google Merchant Center, and if you think Google Shopping isn't, you know, in your country where it's not a big driver, it's still worth just getting things things set up and just knowing knowing what it is. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15- to 30-minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower." Compact keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO, and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. What does heavy investment Actually, better better question is First, like, how does Google decide which products to show? It So many So many e-commerce businesses are using Google Merchant Center. So, how do different products get prioritized? So, I whenever like you are doing any search, then Google looks through all the data that merchants are providing about a specific product or a product category or something like that. And then it comes down to like titles, reviews, what the overall merchant rating is, how other people are talking about those products on the on the web. All those like usual SEO things where you have your optimized title, optimized images, high-quality images, your description is properly set up. All those factors come into play and that's how Google actually decide like which get prioritized. But, the main factor in the prioritization is a brand authority. Like, the more known brand you are, the higher like the chances of you showing up in in in the product grid. Even if like you have bit of less optimized titles, but your authority is so high as David Kraid like like mentioned so many times that authority is all you need, that that's how Merchant Center also operate. You can do the optimization of titles, high-quality images, descriptions, and everything else, but at the end of the day it it again comes down to authority, which works for like usual SEO too outside of like e-commerce too. So, that's how like the rankings in the product grid is decided. Yeah, and with that, so for some smaller businesses, it is very difficult to compete in Google Merchant Center because yeah, the popular products, you know, the big brands big brands sell them. How do you compete with that? But, that said, you know, just make sure your product um there's stuff you can do. So, for example, your your price like there's basic mistakes that people do do make. Um you're already fighting an uphill battle. Why make that battle more tough? So, just you know, doing things like making sure the product on your page matches uh sorry, the price on your page matches the price in the Merchant Feed. There's so many mistakes that and people can make with this and um yeah, even though prioritizes bigger brands, there's stuff you can do to, you know, get get some visibility. Reviews are really important as Gagan mentioned. So, authority is important, but you know, authority can be measured in many different ways. If you're a business that has a terrible return policy, for example, um that's going to affect your that's going to affect your score. Um shipping, if you're consistently if your product is consistently arriving late to um to consumers, you know, that's bad for business. Um getting more reviews. So, even though yeah, it's good Merchant Center does prioritize the bigger brands, there's still a lot you can do on on your end um to to improve your visibility within like feed optimization, like within like web optimization, and also out web optimi outside web op- optimization, which is your logistics, shipping, and all and all of that stuff. Yeah. And also like the experience checkout experience also uh comes into play there. Like like for example, like sometimes you go on a product page, you add it into the cart, and then you go to the cart, and it has already added like two or three additional items to it. For example, like you go to uh like happens to the protein powders. Like you add like $100 of protein powder, then it adds like some other like buy the the shirt from our brand or buy the scoop or or bottles or or something like that. Those are like auto added to your cart, not like by your choice. That's like a really really bad experience from Merchant Center perspective. Like if Google managed to catch that, then you're going to lose like all the visibility in your in your product listings. And I've seen like many known brands, especially in like um where there is an option to like do consistent addition to the product, small value where you add $100 product and the overall order become like 150. It sounds good to make money, but from Merchant Center perspective, that can be really, really troubling experience. And if you Google catches that, then you might end up losing all the visibility in the in the product listings in the search results. So, just be careful around that. Yeah, I can make say good point there. And just on that, when you're browsing Google itself when you're shopping, sometimes you see the little call outs. So, for example, available nearby or free shipping or you know, available in a store 25 km away or whatever. So, when you are a smaller business and maybe you're in a bigger city, one way you can compete with e-commerce giants is like in store pickup or available nearby. So, making sure all your attributes are attributes are properly properly um properly set up. Properly set up. And also like you need to make sure that your attributes in the product feed, you are actually delivering on them. So, if in in your product feed you are saying that you are doing free shipping throughout the US. So, anyone who is searching from US from New York to San Francisco to Texas or anywhere else, they are going to see like free shipping label in the search results. But when they are coming to the page, then you are saying that oh, you are not in New York, you are in Texas. Your IP is from Texas, so you will you will have to pay like $20 more. That's also a negative factor. If in the product feed you are telling that it's free shipping, you will have to deliver on that. If you are not delivering, then Merchant Center might catch that factor and that's going to like push you to towards the negative side. How bad is it if the information that's on Google Merchant Center is different or is yeah, different from what's on your website? Maybe it's just accidental, but how problematic is that? Uh the account get suspended for a while. So, Merchant Center will disqualify all your products. So, if you have like 500 uh products in your feed and you're doing this thing for like half of them, 250, then Merchant Center is going to disqualify all your whole domain. But, you will get a notification in Merchant Center for that. It's not like an algorithm where you don't know what happened with your your free listing rankings. Merchant Center will send you a notification and an email to that "Too many of your uh products feeds are in incorrect. Please correct them." or something like that. And also to add on that, like Merchant Center is really good in terms of giving you recommendations. Like any any day of the week, if you go to your notifications tab in Merchant Center, there are like tips, growth tabs there. And in that, like it's specifically curated information to your feeds. Like it it may say that last week or in last 10 days, this particular product is doing really well. Maybe you should consider like running a discount offer or something like that for it. So, just keep an eye on those things as well. And if you're running it uh Merchant Center at like large scale where you have a lot of SAQs and a lot of products, then it's like your responsibility to keep on checking Merchant Center and see like what notifications Merchant Center is sending you every day. Because there might come a notification where it it's it's a problem or maybe an opportunity that you you can take like handle at on the same day, you What What would one of those opportunities look like? Opportunities are around like like a discount offer. Like if if any products go viral on like TikTok and a lot of people start searching, then Merchant Center is going to send you a notification that oh, there is so much volume spike for this particular product. And then you can leverage that. Maybe that product is like $100, but you you go on TikTok and you search through the internet and see that oh, there is actually it's demand surge sudden. So, maybe instead of like $100, I can do it at like 70 or maybe 50 50% discount at the same day. And you can update your Merchant Center feed with that information and discount offer. And it's going to reflect everywhere in Google within like minutes. It's not like you would have to wait for crawling and everything else to go up. You update now, and in 5 minutes, everywhere in search results, in Gemini, in AI mode, it's going to reflect your offer. But, you talked about investing in Google Merchant Center, like depending on the amount of investment you put. What does investing in Google Merchant Center mean? Um again, it's going to be different for different people in different countries. Um let's just take the US for example. I think you do need someone who's actively managing your feed on a regular on a regular basis, whether it's a merchandising person, whether it's an SEO person. It doesn't matter. Someone needs to be looking at this looking at this stuff because you know, it does account for 10, 20, 30% of any commerce store's revenue. Okay, it can account for it can't account for a significant portion of revenue. So, you need someone managing managing your feed. You need someone to make sure that um you have sufficient um inventory levels for your product. Like when you when So, in my opinion, so the businesses I've worked with, when we look at Merchant Center, it's not just an SEO problem. It's the wider problem that ties into like our inventory team and tries and ties into just the wider wider e-commerce um What's the word? Like the wider e-commerce um ecosystem operations Yeah, ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah, it ties it ties into that. Um because as Yiannis said, like Okay, so in a web point of view, for example, then the SEO person might be interested in uh Merchant Center because do they have this Do we have this specific policy on our website? Um for example, a return policy. If your return policy is not on your website, you're going to get a notification in Merchant Center. So, you're not going to expect the merchandising person or someone responsible for inventory to um to to care about that. As the web person, you know, that's that's your job to kind of make sure that's optimized. But, now if you're the SEO person or you're the person responsible for Merchant Center and you're consistently seeing that customers are receiving their products late, now you need to go to someone else in the ecosystem and be like, "Hey, this isn't good enough. Um whatever vendor we're using, they're not delivering products on time and now that's affecting us in as in as in Merchant Center." What Gagan mentioned about viral products, if you have a product, so if now you now you're the marketing team. So, now we're away from SEO and we're talking about wider marketing in general, okay? This product is hot right now cuz it's gone viral on TikTok and we're getting a notification in Merchant Center and you know what? This product's going to be hot for the next 3 to 4 months, but we don't have enough inventory. Then we're going to sell out. So, now it's your job as a marketing person to go to whoever's responsible for inventory and and, you know, just making sure that we have enough of this product and telling them that we need more we need to make we we cannot run out of this product because of this reason. So, for me investment it means different things to different people, but it's just tying it is getting the whole company together. Um different people are going to be responsible for different things. Your merchandising guy isn't going to care about the nitty-gritty, but what they do is going to have an impact on is going to have an impact on um on your role. So, long-winded answer, but I think everyone is every It's important for the entire business, but there should always be at least one person keeping a close eye on this and responsible for getting the team together. And you know, we've had other conversations about GEO and AEO in the in the past and it's kind of like that. I don't think it's one person is responsible. Like I said, multiple people are responsible. Yeah. And also like regarding operations, I have seen like some brands who have uh some sort of like custom-built system for their warehouse where they are doing like inventory tracking around like how many orders are going out, how many products are left in the warehouse, and what they can do. Some brands, I don't know for why, they have like 1 week delay in terms of like their actual inventory that they have and what they should are showing in their Shopify store on the website. That's also a problem. Like like why you have like one week delay like like you should be updating your Shopify inventory probably in like real time or with it within like hours of of your like availability of the products in in your warehouse. Because if if you keep on doing that, then the problem adds up over time where in your warehouse, you have like 100 products only, but in Shopify, you are still showing that you have like 1,000. So, you just need to make sure that the sync time between your reality of your inventory in your warehouse versus the Shopify is minimal maybe 1 to 2 hours and at the same time you need to make sure that the Shopify information is getting pushed to Merchant Center too and that's why like Harpreet mentioned that there need to be someone from SEO team who need to make sure that this particular chain is working all right and the feeds and the Shopify side itself and and the product pages are getting updated properly rather than there being like significant delay around like where the reality of the warehouse is not showing up on in in the feeds, you know. I'll give you an example um from product launches actually. So, PlayStation 5. Do you remember when the PlayStation 5 came out? There were delays and there were stock shortages and whatnot. Um some stores here in here in BC, they had free local pickup available through the through the product feed, but they were actually out of stock. So, when there's a product launch, so I know less people buy CDs now like games, but there are for example like, you know, game stores that sell physical physical games and um you know, someone might not have pre-ordered it pre-ordered the game and they want to go buy it on the day of. Like if if the Merchant Center product feed said in-store pickup available, make sure you have make sure you have the product. Um there's a um there's a I'm not going to name this name the store, but best and you can buy a lot of electrical stuff there electrical items there. And now their SEO team is great. They're uh They're Yeah, a lot of what they do is are you talking about, Harpreet? Yeah, what could I What could [laughter] I be What could I be talking about? Um you know, and they're fun funny enough they're based out of Vancouver, too. They've got They've got a marketing team here. But anyway, um I wanted to buy a EAFC 26. Um this was uh last last September. Um I saw it's available in store um thanks to the thanks to what I saw on the Google feed. Went in store and it it is not there. Right? So even now like people still make those mistakes. Just make sure your inventory's tied to like what you're actual what you're actually displaying on Merchant Center cuz otherwise you're going to get frustrated customers. I mean I'm not going to kick up a storm, but there's I'm sure if this happens on this on a bigger release or something or a product that's more in demand or a product that's viral, um if someone goes to a local store and sees that okay, that product's not there even though on Google and on your website it said that's there, that's not good for that's not good for your that's not good for your brand. Yeah. And also like a one more point about this a local inventory like I've seen like some big brands who have like many stores across cities, they don't have a picker on their product pages where you can enter your suburb and see the availability of the product nearby to you. I think that's really really useful and it's so easy to add on your product pages where if anyone from and you can whole country's coming to to your product page, they can just pick their location or suburb there and see if in the nearby to them their address or their area the product is available there or not. So that's something that you can add right away like if if you don't have uh that that functionality on your product pages. And there are like many Shopify apps to that that can just do it right away. Harpreet, can you uh talk more about building authority and how that plays into everything. [snorts] Authority is really tricky and really expensive to build nowadays like to start with that. And that's that's one of the reason that I stopped working with the really small companies because they don't have authority and they don't have the budget to build that authority right away. So, you would have to do extensive digital PR. That's the first point where you're reaching out to different large publishers and getting pages published about your brand, your product, or your services, or whatever that is. And at the same time you have or are trying to grow your overall web presence where you're posting across channels. So, your authority on other domains, other high publisher high-quality publishers, and your own social channels. That's the two things that need to play together. Now, both of these things cost a lot. If you if you are reaching out to different large publishers, it's a really really big campaign that you need a digital PR agency for to do that. And if you want to do social content, that's a big effort to hiring video editors, graphics, and everything else. So, you would have to plan it out in in the ROI cycle need to be like 2 years or 3 years. You cannot say that I will hire a digital PR agency or I will hire a SEO and they can just build links for me and I will make money my products are going to rank. That's not going to happen, unfortunately. So, this is my opinion on that. But if you are really really small and you are starting out, then it's really really difficult for you now and with AI coming along and how AI has like big biased for the big brands because it's trained on their content already. You were not there when the training was happening. Yes, there is like some web search to it, but the training part is also important. So, it's going to become a really really difficult challenge for you to build authority now. So, if you are planning to build authority and planning to allocate resources for that, this is the This is probably the cheapest time to do do because over time it's going to become more and more difficult. I agree with him. I was going to say I agree with what Gagan said. And when we think about authority, yeah, it's not just promotions and you're trying to build the authority of your business. I think that's how companies should look at it rather than, "Okay, you know, they get requests all the time that, 'Hey, I'm looking to I need backlinks or I want to build my web web authority. I want to build my domain authority. Um what do I need to do? Like, can we just buy backlinks?" You know, back in the day, okay, you could or like a few years ago you could and you still you still can to an extent. Like, there's still stuff people can do. But, over the long run because new features are coming into the mix as Gagan said, AI mode, you know, chat GPT, they're going to be recommending products, too. There's no point taking that route. If you want to be a legitimate business over the next 5, 10, 15 years, if you want to build something proper, then yeah, you have to build your you have to build your brand and that's not that's not cheap. Whether you get brand ambassadors or as Gagan said, whether you do UGC, whether you do, you know, videos with videos yourself, um you really have to invest in that and I think a problem we have just in the SEO industry in general, like I said, people people think, "Oh, how do I build my domain authority?" Let's not look at it that way. Let's tie in our overall brand. Let's tie in the overall brand, um just brand with what we want to do on on web. Yeah, and I think we have the example like in front of us right now. Like, Edward, I think he has been posting of every day for almost like 2 and 1/2 years, yeah? Oh oh oh, I think, yeah. I think maybe even more than that at this point. This is actually 1,081 days in a row doing this podcast. But my social videos are at I think 1,000 like 350 days in a row. So, yeah, it's crazy. And that's that's that that much consistency consistency you need to build authority. Like Edward have authority in marketing and SEO space right now. Like but it did not get came from like 1 month of posting or 2 month of posting. It came from like over 2 years of posting every day on different channels and making the effort to show up every day, you know. And if any brand thinks that they can do similar thing in 1 month, no, it's not possible actually. What separates high-performing product feeds from average ones? Yes. So, high-performing product feed has like really good titles, high-quality images, and a great description. So, title in the title you can add some product features, the name, and what that product is for. That's the basic thing. And in the featured images you would need to have like variations. Some brands what they do is that they take the product one angle and they just like do bit of design of that and just add that in the feed like four images, but it's showing the product just from one angle. But if your product is something that need to be shown from different angle, for example, like let let's say it's a car. You need to show it from different angles, different seats, and different tires, wheels, and everything else. So, you need to have variations of images. Like you can't have like similar images for for the one product. That's one thing. And the description, just don't copy paste it. At least try to make sure that you have something unique in your description. Like I see like so many brands, they just copy paste description from ChatGPT or from Amazon and they are like our feeds are not performing and I'm like it it's not going to perform because it's that's what Google is seeing on Amazon on or that's what Google is seeing on other marketplaces, you would have to bring in something unique. So, the play is not on the title much because the title you can't like say a shirt is a is a pant, you know, you have you would have to say that a shirt is a shirt. You can add some features to it that it's like cotton shirt or something else, but the real play is in the quality of the images that you can add to your feed and the description that you can write for it. Yeah, just just on that. I'm trying to think back, Calvin. Um so, a few months ago I was shopping for like like dresses, just like baby dresser drawers. Um a lot of stores they actually have the same the same products. Um they carry this they carry the same brands. But, I was noticing the brands that uh showing up, you know, fast or are up in the in the shopping feed, they do them make those minor changes. Like they'll have some extra images. They'll be like, "This is what this looks like in this type of this type of room." So, whereas some companies, for example, they'll take the images from the manufacturer and they'll just paste them as is, but there's some websites out there. I can't remember the store names, but one did it really well. They placed the dresser in like different different backgrounds. It was like baby wallpaper, like baby-themed wallpaper, but it doesn't matter. They had images of that dresser in against different against different backdrops and they were showing up higher up. So, just making those smaller changes, yeah. So, if you are a local furniture store, so, you know, there's probably thousands of them across North America, across Europe. Um it's inevitable that they're going to like two it's inevitable that two stores are going to carry the same products. What can you do for your product on your website that's from the same manufacturer that differentiates your listing from a competitor's? And Calvin said descriptions one of them, images images another. And I think, you know, going back to what we talked about 10 minutes ago, when you have someone responsible for the product feed or if you have an SEO person or marketing person that has the Merchant Center or the Merchant Center under their job description, they will care about these things and that's how you get that extra 1% 2% 5% above your above your competition. Yeah. And just to add add on that, I think what many brands or many teams don't understand is that they think of SEO as something like like like a technical change that that you can move the dial left right. But the dial left right moving does not do much unless you're making content level changes because Google is trying to like understand images, trying to understand like descriptions. Some people say that it the Google is not like putting much effort into doing that, but there is some effort into like understanding like what what is there on the image, what is there in the description. So, if you're not making that content level changes and you're just thinking that oh, I will submit my feed to Merchant Center and whatever it's going to work. No, it's not going to work. You would have to make the content level changes and then the technical side of Merchant Center comes in to amplify that and then you start to show up in free listings. Talk a little more about what great product titles like how should merchants write product titles and what makes a great product description? I think I heart rate should go go go on this one because uh it's a case-by-case case example like like there is no like great title or great description. Some people try to add like their brand name to it. For example, like cotton black shirt {dash} Best Buy or something like that. And some people try to not add like brand name. It's just a case-by-case example like where you would have to see like what your competitors are doing in the listings when you search for the product and what their titles are and can you make your title bit more catchy or bit more interesting than than that than them. There is no like standard template that that can work for everyone, you know. But in in description, you you you should try to add as much information as possible about the product like what are the pros, what are the cons and what the product is made of, and who is it beneficial for. Yeah, Gavin um said quite well there. I think one thing you'll notice um you know, just just make some Google searches for um products that you're interested in. And you'll notice that the big stores, so like search for one thing uh big stores, so maybe like Nike Air Force ones. Um you'll notice that a lot of the big stores, every product they have just has the same structure. Maybe cuz they're using an API or maybe cuz they automate how they create titles. Now, if you're a small, let's just say um shoe retailer, um and you know Foot Locker, JD Sports, Champs, and all of these other sports stores, they have the same they have the same product title for Air Force ones. What can you do to stand out? What can you do to stand out in in in that? First of all, you're going to as we mentioned in the call earlier on, you're going to find it hard to compete with you're going to find it hard to compete with these major national chains that have a lot of brand authority, but what can you do in your title that can just try and make your product stand out? Because yeah, Foot Locker, Champs, um JD Sports, they're all going to have the same title, but maybe the fourth product or the fifth product, you can have like white Nike Air Force ones. Whereas the other brands, because they've automated the entire process, they've they front-loaded Nike Air Force ones {dash} white. Maybe that's what they've done. So, what can you do to grab the users user attention? So, kind of just thinking outside of the box and playing around with it, trying to see what other people are calling, what what are the titles of the products showing up in the product feed right now, and just try and experiment to get that extra edge. How important are are GTINs, MPNs, and brand data? Uh it's really important, I think. When when you're telling exactly Google like what the GTIN number is, um then Google sort of like clearly knows that what a product it need to compare your product against when a search is happening. So, if GTN is not set up properly, then Google is bit of like confused around like who you are competing against in the knowledge graph. So, it's just like better to configure those properly, and in Shopify, like there is like not much effort to do any of these things like like you can suddenly pick up some app or maybe do it manually if you want to. You were if you inherent if you inherited a brand new This is a fun question. If you inherited a brand new Merchant Center account, what are the first three things that you would do? I'm going to start with you, Harpreet. First three things I do. Okay, so and I'd audit the I'd audit the product feed. Um so, though this kind of ties in with three things, but audit the entire product feed, I would say. Um you know, look at pricing. Just try and set up some sort of workflow where I can quickly see other prices in the product feed matching the prices on the website. Um there's obviously stuff you can do in the account like look at any policy violations, look at any notices, but I'd jump into the I'd jump Let's just say everything is um perfect. Um I'd jump into the product feed. Um product images, so high-performing products. Okay, so I'm looking at the top 10 high-performing products. Um how can we make these even more high-performing? Do we need to add some images? I'm trying to get stuff like that under right away. So, the first one like I said, audit audit the product feed, and then from the product feed um look at the high-performing products. Um look at the titles, look at the descriptions, look at the images. Is there anything we can do to optimize? Because if there is, um you're not going to get those tomorrow as the marketing person. Like I said, this whole Merchant Center thing, um it's it's a much bigger process. You're in a wider ecosystem. It might take you a while to get better images of a dress or or pair of shoes or whatever it is whatever it is you're selling. Um once I've looked at the top-selling products, um I'm just going to go down the list. Um look at some uh look at the middle of the pack, what's going wrong there, comparing our products against some our competitors. Okay, what are we missing out on? Then same type of thing and but just having those optimizations at a bit of a lower priority than the high-performing ones because the high-performing ones because they're already high-performing, we're more likely to um we're more likely to see results results faster. And then lastly, I'm going to look at the bottom of the product feed, what's not getting any traction at all. Why? And then those products that at the end of my product feed, I'm going to experiment more than than the rest. So maybe those ones you know, I'll try like more outlandish titles maybe, more more creative titles, more creative descriptions and just using those products as like my testing base. But okay, then if we can go from zero to 10, okay, we know we have something to work with and then we can continue optimizing that way. So yeah. More than three things that just looking at the product feed and going from going from there. And I think that's a pretty much what I would do. [laughter] And after that you can start looking looking into the store rating tab where Google is showing like how was the experience of users over last 30 day for like shipping and delivery time and some information about like taxes or something like that. If there Google is showing any warning or any notification, then you you should try to address that as soon as possible. And then I'll go into like the reviews tab in Merchant Center and I'll try to connect as many platforms as possible where I'm collecting reviews. So I can try to connect my Google account and say that this this is the Google Business Profile or some some other platform that I'm using to collect customer reviews so that those can like go directly into the Merchant Center. So some brands in Sho in some brands in Shopify, yeah, some brands in Shopify like they use third-party apps to collect the reviews which shows shows up on the product page. You can directly feed those reviews to Merchant Center too from the uh in the reviews tab in Merchant Center. So, that connection also is important. And as Gagan was talking about reviews, um one more thing um I'd like to add is again, as the if you're responsible for for this, you might feel like you're stepping on toes, but for example, what's email marketing doing? Are we actually even collecting Are we collecting reviews? Are we asking for reviews? Um so, sometimes I've had cases where the product is late and this year I've had I've had this case. The product has not arrived yet, but the customer has received an email to leave a review because email marketing has set up a um set up a workflow where they're going to ask for a review like 7 days after order is placed, but that's kind of you're asking for trouble if they're getting that email before they receive receive their product. So, just talking to email marketing and saying, "Do we have Do we have certain flows set up um to collect reviews?" And then explaining the importance of those reviews to the wider marketing team and just other people in your organization cuz yeah, that's going to help your Merchant Center, but then outside of Merchant Center, that's just going to help your business in general. And now we know the importance reviews have um on uh AI visibility, too. Yeah, and also like uh like Harpreet mentioned, a lot of like touch points need to happen for things to actually like move forward. So, the problem is not that the Merchant Center is not set up or anything like that. Problem is that you you need to have like crazy coordination between different teams and people so that everything is coming to Merchant Center and every all the information in the Merchant Center is also going out to other teams to collect it or fix the things, you know. How do you approach a SOP problem. How do you approach Merchant Center for like very large catalogs with thousands of SKUs? It's tricky. Maybe use Cloud Code for for doing the management of the product feeds. So, I've been testing Cloud uh to cluster the product feeds into different categories because you can do some uh custom categorization in your product feeds. For example, like let's say you have 10,000 products and based upon all the information, you can build some custom labels into into your feeds which you can use to manage the feed properly. So, that's something that you can try out using Cloud. But beyond that, it's just like raw data analysis that you would have to manage at such a large scale. If you want to see examples, I I always talk like they always say like let's look at examples of what other companies are doing. I think Fanatics um do do a good job of this. Um if you look for like the World Cup site, if you look for like any jersey, um just any any country's jersey, it's likely that within like the first five products or whatever of the shopping feed, you will see a Fanatics brand cuz they own so many brands. But then when you see one and you scroll down, you'll see some of the other sites, too. Um just trying to see how they approach it cuz they do manage thousands and thousands of products across many different many different websites. So, yeah, if you're getting into Merchant Center, you're just interested in learning more, to start searching for random products, maybe products you're interested in, and start looking at what the big stores are doing cuz they've probably got automations in in place. And like I said earlier on, you'll find that maybe a 55-in LG TV, the electronic stores that are really big, they're all going to have the same they're all going to have the same same title. But your local electronic store that's um just um that only operates in your state or your province or your city, but maybe they have two or three different um two or three different locations, um compare what they're doing to to the to these bigger brands for for ideas. How about using AI for images? Uh no. Totally a no-no for for me. I think it's it's really bad idea to use AI for product images because it's not even like optimization problem that that AI images don't perform well if you are doing like product but it's just like deceiving. I don't like that. Like like brands should not be deceiving their customers. how about using AI to put like images in different in different backgrounds kind of like Harpreet was talking about earlier? Yeah, editing is all right. Right. Like editing is all right, but if you're doing like proper photo shoot using AI like like for example, you have a model AI generated model who is wearing your dress or shirt or pants or shoes and you're using that then I think it's it's a really bad idea. Like instead like you should do like a proper photo shoot with bright model professionals and use those images rather than having like AI generated people wearing your clothes clothes, you know, and many brands are doing it right now and I I feel feel bad sometimes like like like recently there was a story of a guy like who created like 500 or more doctor accounts and he he was trying to sell something on Facebook by running ads like and all the ads were like fake doctors who were talking to the camera and explaining the product and I think there may come a legal challenge to that as well. Like if you're using just AI generated images or you're doing too much too heavy AI editing like background color or a little bit here and there is all right, but if you're doing too much then it might come to a legal problem too where you're just deceiving customers, you know. Yeah, I agree with what Gagan said there. I stick to real real images, but at the same time if yeah, if it's like financial or something like that I think having that's it's either edited or it's an AI generated image cuz like it doesn't is a there's a balance between that, but yeah, having a product against different background maybe different colors I think stuff like that I think is okay and it's going to help your product stand out. And even if it doesn't in the merchant feed, when a user comes to your website, it's going to help it's going to help the it's going to help the user make a decision anyway. So, that's helpful. But yeah, if it's using AI models and like fake AI doctors or maybe a fake AI fake doctor or fake model is holding like some pills, like I've seen that. I've seen that a lot with like sleep gummies. Um just random supplements, like they're these are AI AI-generated characters that are holding the pills and stuff like that. I think that is definitely a a no-no and you know, over time as more more regulation comes into into play, I think it's asking for asking for trouble. But yeah, if you're selling furniture and you want to have a dresser against a blue background, white background, pink background, I think that's that's okay. Yeah, it's a bad It's a bad idea to use to use heavy AI-looking images in YMYL niches. Yeah, of course. Of course, yeah. And also like regarding AI images, like there is an option to add a 3D version of your product, too. So, in your feed, you can add a 3D model of your product. There are some companies like who can do scanning of your products, like like your badge or maybe something else, where they create like a 3D version of your product and that shows up in the search results. So, if someone is searching for like let's say a car or something and you have a 3D model of car into your feed, then in the search results everyone in the listing is showing up as image, but your your is showing up as 3D model, which automatically rotates when a searcher is like passing by it. So, that's also like like really cool thing if if any brand want to like try it out. You can just do that with your phone. There are companies that Yeah. Yeah. Can you guys talk more about the biggest mistakes with Merchant Center that new e-commerce marketers make? I think many marketers don't understand that uh their rejected product feeds are also impacting their accepted product feeds. So, if you have like 500 products and Google is rejecting 300 out of those and 200 is accepted. My people think that oh, 200 is accepted. That means that those are going to perform really well in the search results. No, they are not going to perform well. You wouldn't You want to make sure that your maximum amount of the feed is accepted. So, almost like 99% of your feed is accepted. If you are sitting at like 60 accepted, 40 not accepted, that 40 not accepted is also impacting performance of your 60. So, just try to make sure that your maximum amount amount of the feed is accepted category. Yeah. Um Kagan made a point. And then just some of the stuff we also just talked about. Like, who's Like, I can't keep saying price. Like, who's comparing the price of the the website to your merchant feed? Um making sure things are just connected properly. Um not everyone's on Shopify. Some people are on WordPress. Um sometimes just getting things connected is a little bit more It's a little bit more technical, a little bit more janky than than than Shopify. Making sure things are connected properly. When there's a sale, for example, um just being on top of paying price that okay, the sale has ended and just making sure the product feed is um product feed is updated. And then maybe a marketer coming like a new marketer coming into a company um product titles. Sometimes the product title in the back end has just been created by whoever set up the store in the first place and it might not be optimized for the product feed. So, just taking a case to the business owner and being like, "Hey, we need to rename this product within our WooCommerce or we need to rename this product within Shopify because of uh because of this because of this reason." So, I think there's there's a lots of There's lots of like small small mistakes that can that can compound and I can give you a Merchant Center account that doesn't perform as well as it as well as it should. So, just trying to take care of all the the small small basic the basic things. Yep. And also like one more thing the product schema that you're using on your product pages and the feed information that you're submitting that need to be consistent too. So, if that goes out of line by one week. So, your product schema on the page is saying something else about title, description, price, or anything, but your feed is saying something else. That feed will get rejected. So, you just need to make sure that your product schema and the feed are updating like almost in sync. What role does Merchant Center have in Performance Max campaigns? It It plays a big role and I'll be honest. I don't run ads. I I just do SEO, but from whatever conversation I've heard from other people like other marketers like they It's really really important just in terms of the information that you're providing the title, description, images because what Google AI is doing is that looking at those things and trying to make sense of like how the ads or where the which user it should be targeted to. And that's where my knowledge of ads and you know Harpreet Yeah, I'd say same same as same as same as Gagan um ad knowledge isn't isn't great, but yeah, better product data is just going to give better better signals Performance Max campaigns. So, it kind of ties in where yeah, just make sure if your product feed's optimized um you probably get the best CPC possible or you're going to improve your chances of better performing ads if your product title is you know is is optimized versus versus not optimized. Um So, yeah, it does have a it does have an important role. It does have an important role, but because I'm SEO and we don't have that we don't have that knowledge we It's difficult to explain how important the role is, but yeah, just making sure just making sure things are things are well optimized. And that's good practice for businesses anyway. And I think again, we've talked about this in previous podcast with AI coming into the mix with Google and just traditional Google how that's changing. Yeah, it's just best practice to have everything optimized and accurate and helpful for the user. Um because all of Yeah, just just just That's just good practice. What about metrics? Are there are there metrics that merchants should monitor? Yes. Uh I think they should start with monitor monitoring uh how much feed is getting accepted and rejected. That's the first thing. The CTR of the listings uh that they can find in Google Search Console and and how many new reviews you are getting like each week or each month. You you want to get as many reviews as possible. So, those are like three things that you need to monitor. Where you product feed, how many are getting accepted and rejected, the CTR for for your listings. You want to maximize that. And for that you need to look into like title optimization or image optimization. And the last thing is the reviews. You want to get review consistently. So, if you are selling across like four countries, you want consistent reviews from each country every week or every month. It's not like you can just like focus on one country and try to get reviews from that and ignore everything else. You would have to do it in in more like granular and local way. Yeah. Calvin um said that quite well. And also just the free listing performance as well. So, just the free listings like um you know, Google being Google, um as products go more viral, as some products become more competitive, your free listing performance might might go down just because you're still being you're being you're being you're being stifled. So, that's something that's something to um that's something look out for. If that's happening, there's not really a lot a lot you can do, um, but yeah, it's worth it's worth worth monitoring. We were talking about this earlier, but what gets a merchant suspended most frequently? Uh, it's it's a surprising problem. Where you have different price in your feed, different in a product schema, and different in your on the on the page. So, if these three are not aligned, then you get get suspended. So, you you need to make sure that at scale your on-page price is what is there in the schema, and that's also there in in your feed. So, these three things need to be in sync. Yeah. And also say, um, the type of products you sell. So, this isn't going to be this isn't going to be for everybody, but I've worked on e-commerce sites in the past where they sell some items that are actually disapproved. Um, then we get notifications in your Merchant Center that this item is disapproved, but I've also seen that items maybe under the same product category or similar items that shouldn't be disapproved also get disapproved. So, just be careful of what products you sell, and just make sure they're actually, um, they're actually they're actually allowed to sell them through through Merchant Center. Yeah. And also, like, when you're trying to add a new category, just make sure that Merchant Center allows that category of products. So, if you you just go ahead, and uh, you have four categories, and you add the fifth, but fifth is not allowed, then your whole account may get suspended. So, you you will lose all the four categories, too. So, you just make sure that you're aligning with policies when you're deciding to add like a new category or a new product range. So, are there any common pieces of Merchant Center advice that both of you just strongly disagree with? Mm. I don't think so. I think, me and Harpreet are always in in in line. Like, we talk about SEO almost every day. There is not like much differences. So. No, no, not not between you two. I mean like just common just common wisdom with Merchant Center that that you that you see maybe on X or LinkedIn you're like that's not true. I've not seen seen like any sort of like uh There's not There's not the the dis- You don't see disinfo a lot of disinformation like you would see with Geo. I'll be controversial for a minute. It's not not controversial but it's there's less disinformation cuz it's more technical and more complicated. I think the people like with GEO and like AEO and you see like lots of disinformation and nonsense out there it's because they can get away with it. With Merchant Center um A, you can't get away with saying things that are wrong cuz it's directly tied to revenue. Whereas some of the other stuff like in just in the SEO space and marketing space is not directly tied to revenue. Like robots.txt file you How do you prove ROI for that? Like people can say whatever nonsense they want but when it comes to Merchant Center this is so highly tied to ROI, how much money you're making, clicks, um CTR, there's not room for mis- there's not room for much misinformation I personally feel. And that's why we're not seeing those like viral LinkedIn videos where I used Claude or I used I don't Gagan you mentioned like using AI and I recommend using AI where where possible. But we're not seeing those viral videos where it's like I used Claude to automate my entire product feed. Because they because they they didn't these people that usually spread the misinformation in marketing they're kind of quiet when it comes to um Merchant Center cuz it's cuz it's more complicated and because of how closely it's tied to business impact. I think people are trying to go with low-hanging fruits where where they can spread a rumor and there is not like actual much impact on the revenue or backlash. Like if someone come comes out and try to spread a geo-specific rumor about Merchant Center, we all like me, Edward, Harpreet, and David, and everyone else on XR, we are going to point it out, you know, because it has like direct impact on the revenue, you know. But if someone is coming out and saying that oh I l l m s dot t x t yeah yeah whatever. I These systems are not like like like considering it as if like it's a robots.txt file, but still like it it does not have like any impact on revenue, so who cares, you know. Yeah. And I just say one piece of advice um I would give though is just don't um just have someone looking at it. Have an expert or have not even an expert. Like have someone who kind of knows what they're doing with Merchant Center just look at your feed. Like if you have never if you have never done that cuz they might find things that you didn't that you weren't considering and that might give you a 5% 3% 10% whatever percent boost in in revenue. Mhm. Yeah. What do you think I guess if uh if an expert was looking at it just a common feed, what are the biggest things you think they would call out? Biggest things I'd call out it's all of the stuff we talked about, I think. Pricing mismatches um just misalignment in product descriptions um misalignment in product titles. Maybe they'll ask you to change the change the formatting of the title from front to back. Um product images. So I think yeah everything that we everything that we've spoke about in this in this call, I think. But yeah, some people like I said um like I know businesses like they've got a Woocommerce site for years and they're finally like okay, I want to be on Google Business Merchant Center. Now not everybody knows what Search Console is. Not everybody knows what Merchant Center is and that's completely fine because you know, that that's that's not that's not their job to know what it is. Um some people never had it set up in the first place, but the way they have the products in the back end of their website might not be suitable for for for Merchant Center. So, going in and just looking at um looking at things like that. Last question. If there is one cuz we we we've discussed so much, but if there is one high-impact quick win that listeners could implement this week, what would it be? They should go to notification tab in Merchant Center, then go to tips, and it's going to automatically show you show you tips about your specific account. So, Google AI is looking through like all the activity and giving you tips. Just try to look through the whole the whole list, and whatever is there, if you can action them, action them as soon as possible. Simple. Agree with that, and then I'll say um go get reviews. Like they're not just for Merchant Center, but for everything, for your entire marketing, for your entire business. Just go go source good good reviews. Like send an email to to happy customers. Um and then yeah, and then make sure that and then make sure your products are good, and make sure that your customers receive their products on time. So, yeah, those those three things. And also like in in Australia, like restaurants or other businesses, they don't put additional effort into getting reviews, but like right now I am in Thailand for some work. And here people put so much effort into into like getting the review. Like every shop I go to, like they have something free, which is against Google's policies, but still businesses do it. We all know that. Something free to get the review, you know. So, just try out try out something. Like like try to get uh attention of your customer. If they are coming to your shop, then try to give them something for free or maybe a voucher or something like that. Free food, maybe. Free item. Just try to get as many reviews as possible. This is off no off kind of off topic, but it's relevant for people that sell products. Um a few years ago I was working with a company. This is during during the pandemic, but they were selling a product and it was some sort of dog like I don't know, national dog day or something. It was a pet It was pet related, but it was a pet supplement, but we got people to take pictures. Um, it we we ran a competition where you get like a one year's worth of free product or whatever, but they took a picture with with their animal um taking take taking the product. And that company got so much like free content cuz it's in the terms that we can use your image on social media or whatever and we got like so many nice images. Yeah, so it's not really related to what we're talking about, but just think think outside the box when it comes to e-commerce. What can you do to move the needle like anywhere? And I thought that I thought that was just great because yeah, we got so much free content to use on um social media and some people they even posted it on their own social media. They boosted it on their own social media cuz whoever got the most likes or whatever like they did a whole they did a whole um competition. So yeah, just Yeah, what can you do to make your brand brand perceived in a better light. And I think, you know, that's one of the keys to Merchant Center, but just one of the keys to marketing in general as we you know, this year and as we move forward into next year, the year after, year after that. Gentlemen, thank you again. I hope we covered I hope we covered everything that uh that people would want to know with Google Merchant Center on this one. I And if there is a like any question, I'll jump into comments under this video. So, leave your uh question there. Thank you to Gog and Gochra and Harpreet Singh. Everybody, wish Harpreet Singh again congratulations on his newborn. I'll do it. Congratulations to Harpreet on the newborn. And uh yeah, this was this was great. This is episode 1,081 of the show. 1,081 days in a row doing this podcast. That's crazy. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.