This post first ran on Sept. 19, 2020 but was updated to include new information.
Before the holiday shopping season approaches, online retailers should be readying and refreshing content, category and product pages to maximize search visibility as interest surges, and auditing their sites to ensure a smooth user experience.
While there may only be a few weeks left before Black Friday, there is still plenty of time to implement the tips and techniques below to ensure that you’re getting the most out of the work your teams have already put in and that you’re not committing errors that could potentially hurt your business during this critical season.
Take advantage of free product listings
Google opened up its Shopping search results to unpaid, organic listings in April 2020, and Bing followed suit in August. Getting your products into these results can mean free exposure to the millions of people that use Google and Bing Shopping to look for holiday gifts.
To be eligible to show up in Shopping results, you’ll need to upload product feeds into Google and Microsoft Merchant Center, respectively. If you operate a physical store, there is a separate program in Google Merchant Center (GMC) called “Local surfaces across Google,” which can be used to show product availability in Google search, Google Images, Google Shopping, Google Maps and Google Lens.
Plus, on November 1, 2021, Bing implemented new shopping tabs to help customers find exactly what they’re looking for (and maybe some things they didn’t know they needed) in time for the holiday shopping season. “Shoppers can start their search when by browsing our Departments, with over 1,000 categories – such as Home Furnishings and Electronics – to choose from. These pages highlight trends, price drops, and coupons available in each department,” according to the announcement. Other tabs include Stores, Editors Picks, Deals, Trending Products, and Prices Drop.
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Keep track of campaign performance. Tracking your campaigns can enable you to make more strategic decisions in the future. Unfortunately, reporting for these organic listings isn’t as sophisticated as paid campaigns.
Reporting was not available when Bing’s free product listings launched, but the company rolled out basic metrics (clicks and impressions) later last year.