Google just published an advanced SEO guide featuring best practices for a successful ecommerce online presence.
Google’s set of guides, called Best practices for ecommerce in Google Search, are aimed at developers building websites and that want to ensure that the site works well with Google. These recommendations can be useful to site owners too, with some technical understanding.
The focus of these guides (split into seven key topics) is on online commerce sites (ecommerce), but many of the points are equally relevant to sites that list products that are only available at brick and mortar stores.
If you are into web building or if you are engaged in an ecommerce, I’d definitely recommend reading thoroughly these guidelines. At the end of the day, you must give your website and content/products all the chances you can in order for them to be discovered and distributed and promoted at the best by Google on what Google calls “surfaces”.
The concept of surfaces, explored in the first of the Google’s guides, is an interesting one.
A surface is basically a Google’s service which allows Google to show users products in contexts outside of the search engine, at the very moment that the consumers are interested in those products.
Did you think Google was just a search engine? You were wrong. Google lists six key surfaces:
- Google Search
- Google Images
- Google Lens
- Google Shopping tab
- Google My Business
- Google Maps
In addition to surfaces, there are other significant six sections.
These go deeper into technical aspects which range from how you should provide product information to Google (including structured data and product feeds to Google’s Merchant Center) to timing considerations in relation to when it’s best to register your ecommerce in Google, from the best practices for url structure, site navigation structure and internal linking, up to page loading and UX best practices.