Organic search results come to Google Shopping

You’ve all seen the Shopping tab on Google, where product ads are served on a silver platter. Previously, these ads were only available to those who bought Shopping ads via Google Ads. But times have changed!

Google opens the Shopping tab for organic traffic

Google has announced that moving forward, the Shopping tab will include free, organic product listings. In fact, eventually, the majority of products will likely come from organic results.

Bill Ready, Google Commerce’s head honcho, wrote in his own blog post that they had long planned to make this change, but with the coronavirus crisis, they felt it was important to speed up the process.

The Shopping tab gives business owners the chance to reach millions of visitors. For smaller shops, it’s an opportunity to reach a much larger audience. And for users, this change means they’ll see a broader range of products, more variety, and organic results instead of only paid ones.

Paid Shopping ads will, according to Google, still remain but with reserved placement at the top and bottom of the pages. In other words, the Shopping tab will become more like the regular search results, with ads at the top and bottom. The core of the Shopping tab will be products that Google deems best match the search intent and from sites Google considers worthy of visibility (such as search-optimized sites).

The Shopping tab was dominated by the biggest players

One likely reason Google decided to allow free results is that the Shopping tab had been taken over by the largest companies—those who could afford to always appear on the first page. In the U.S., Amazon has dominated the online market, and in Sweden we also see big, recognizable brands and companies.

Google’s core idea is to show results that best match search intent and showcase the best products available. The best product doesn’t necessarily come from those who can afford the most visibility.

You still have time to start appearing in the Shopping tab

This change is brand new, and like most Google updates and changes, it will roll out in the U.S. first. Bill Ready says they aim for worldwide implementation before the end of the year. More information will certainly come during the summer and fall.

Create a Google Merchant Center account today

One thing you should do right now is set up a Google Merchant Center account. That’s where you upload your product data, and it’s through Merchant Center that Google can fetch information to display in search results. Google also partners with WooCommerce, Shopify & BigCommerce to make it easier for business owners to manage their products online.

Merchant Center is also useful for organic search results, since Google can use the information in, for example, Google Image Search. So if you don’t already have an account there, now is the time to get one!

Once your product information is in Merchant Center, Google gets real-time data about your products, sales items, and new arrivals. Otherwise, we’ve only been able to rely on structured data, which Google only picks up when crawling your site. With Merchant Center, they get the information directly!