In recent years, Google has expanded the space dedicated to product features in its search results, aiming to draw searchers away from marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and eBay. 

This shift creates new opportunities for e-commerce brands to capture attention directly within Google’s SERPs, helping to drive more clicks and sales.

By uploading your product feed to Google Merchant Center, you equip Google with detailed, structured information that it can use to showcase your products in these prime spots — such as the Popular Product carousel, which has grown 65% year-over-year.

Let’s explore how you can fine-tune your product feed to tap into these valuable opportunities.

Table of Contents: 

 

The SEO Blindspot: Optimizing for Organic Google Shopping

In most companies, the shopping product feed required for Google Shopping results is managed by the paid search team. These teams rarely optimize the feed for organic visibility because their focus is on paid traffic. For them, driving traffic is as simple as turning on ads.

Organic shopping, however, operates differently. Google uses an algorithm to decide which products appear, as they don’t profit directly. This creates a blind spot: few companies have their SEO teams optimizing the product feed for shopping queries that are now so prevalent in the SERP.

Why This Matters:

Google’s web-ranking algorithms are incredibly sophisticated, built on decades of AI, NLP, and expertise frameworks. In contrast, the Google Shopping algorithm has less than four years of significant investment. It resembles early 2000s SEO—simple, yet effective when understood.

As such, optimizing is surprisingly straightforward, focusing on three key areas:

  1. Attributes: Google recommends uploading high-quality product data to make your campaigns as successful as possible. 
  2. Fundamentals: The foundational elements of product page optimization that many businesses overlook. These include clear product identification, rich descriptions, structured data, and targeted keywords—all essential for organic visibility.
  3. Alignment: Alignment ensures the information in your Google Shopping feed matches exactly with what appears on your product detail pages. This step is unique to Google Shopping and doesn’t exist in traditional organic web rankings.

By addressing this blind spot and leveraging these straightforward strategies, brands can tap into an underutilized avenue for driving organic traffic. Below, we’ll dive into more specific actions you can take.

 

Key Attributes of a Well-Optimized Google Shopping Product Feed

Attributes are the specific columns of data included in the product feed you send to Google. Google uses this product feed data to show your shopping ads and listings across its properties. 

But because paid search teams typically manage product feeds, they often focus only on the basics, assuming that's sufficient. As such, many businesses overlook the additional Merchant Center attributes that drive organic shopping success.

Here are some of the most important.

 

1. Product Title

To optimize your product title in the Google Merchant Center, include the brand name, product/model name, and the product type.

While the Merchant Center will give you 150 characters for the product title, keep it to 30-35 characters to avoid truncation in the SERPs.

Also, avoid adding production options at the end of the product name. For example, “Bella Pro Series 3-Qt. Analog Air Fryer” is better optimized than “Bella Pro Series Analog Air Fryer, 3-Qt.”

Here’s an example of a fully visible product name:

 

And a truncated product name:

2. Product Categories


Products in the Merchant Center are assigned a category from a predefined list from Google. Google says that to ensure your products are categorized correctly, provide high-quality product information like the title, description, pricing, brand, and GTIN information (more on this below). 

You can also use this attribute to override Google’s automatic categorization method, in some cases. There are four cases where you can submit an override for Google to review:

    • Calculating taxes: You can override Google’s categorization to ensure the correct tax rate is used 
  • Category-specific attribute requirements: Some product categories have additional requirements, so if Google lumps your product into one of these categories and you can’t supply the additional information, you can override the selection.
  • Targeting of Google Ads campaigns: If an ad campaign is related to a product category, you can override the category if you feel it’s not in sync with your ads campaign. 
  • Alcohol: Override the automatic category if it mis-assigns your alcohol product, a class of goods that Google says must be categorized correctly. 

 

3. Product Identifiers: Brand, GTIN, MPN 

There are three product identifiers you can add to your Merchant Center listing that define your products. Including these values enhances the user experience, and can boost your ads’ and free listings’ performance. 

  • Brand: Include your product’s brand name if there is one. For generic items with no brand affiliation, leave this field blank. Provide the brand name of the product generally recognized by consumers.
  • GTIN: Including the GTIN, or Global Trade Item Number, leads to a better user experience. In fact, Google says that retailers who add the correct GTIN value have seen a 20% increase in clicks (on average). Note: Only include a correct GTIN — including an invalid value will cause your product to be disapproved. If you’re unsure of the value, leave it blank. 
  • MPN: The MPN, or Manufacturer Part Number, is assigned by the manufacturer. Similar to the GTIN, only submit an MPN if you’re sure it’s correct, or else you risk having your listing disapproved. 

 

4. Product Images

Choose high-quality, relevant images that comply with Google’s image guidelines. Remember this is what a user will see, so use an image that accurately reflects the product.

You can — and should — submit more than one product image. Doing so will create an image carousel that users can click through.

Google notes that non-apparel images should be square and a minimum of 100x100 pixels. Apparel images should be at least 250x250 pixels. The search engine also offers guidelines for file size: no images larger than 64 megapixels and no image file larger than 16mb. 

 

5. Product Link

The link to your product page is required. It’s best practice to match your product feed data with the information on this page. You don’t want to promise users one thing and deliver another. 

Google says to not link to an interstitial page unless legally required.

 

6. Image Link

You’ll need to enter the URL of your product’s image, one that can be crawled by Google — both Googlebot and Googlebot-image. 

 

7. Custom Labels

Custom labels let you classify products with a certain tag. For example, products may be labeled as seasonal, best-sellers, clearance, limited-edition, etc. Then, you can monitor and report on these labels in aggregate in the Merchant Center. 

 

Nail the Fundamentals: Best Practices for Optimizing Product Feeds

While category pages receive significant optimization efforts, product pages are frequently neglected. This limits their ability to rank for specific, high-intent queries. 

Here are some of the foundational elements, or “fundamentals,” of product page optimization that are essential for organic visibility:

 

Create Precise, Keyword-Rich Page Titles

Many product titles fail to specify the product type, leaving them vague and unoptimized.

The product page on your website should be well-structured and optimized for SEO and the user’s search journey — as should be the case for all pages on your site to cater to the search intent of people using Google search. 

Include important keywords that match the specific user search intent, and include a call-to-action and other attributes to increase CTR. For example, this could be a free shipping offer. 

 

Write Detailed Product Description

Product descriptions are often too brief and lack the detail needed to engage users or help search engines understand the product.

The Merchant Center gives you 5,000 characters for your product description. Use the available space to write a detailed, compelling description of your product. 

You not only want to provide value to searchers here, but you also want your copy to be optimized for search. This field is an opportunity to include relevant keywords — in a natural way. 

 

Implement Product Schema

While some businesses have ratings and reviews, they lack the structured data markup to ensure search engines can interpret and display this information effectively.

Add the product structured data to your website to feed more product information to Google. 

Doing so can enhance your product listing in the search results with additional information like star ratings, review, or price details in merchant listings across various Google properties: the shopping knowledge panel, Google Images, popular product results, and product snippets.

There are three required properties for product schema: 

  1. Name
  2. Image
  3. Offer

Other additional properties can feed the search engine more information about your product: aggregateRating, color, description, review, size, and others. 

Google offers two requirements for product structured data markup:

  1. Your landing page must stay consistent from customer to customer. For example, you can’t change prices based on a customers’ IP or browser. 
  2. The structured data must match the values shown to the customer. Providing inaccurate data is in violation of Google’s structured data guidelines.

Tip: User Schema Builder, a free Chrome extension, to build and deploy schema across your site with a point-and-click interface. 

 

Optimize for Product-Specific Keywords

Product pages often lack the necessary keywords to optimize for relevant searches, as clients focus on category pages (e.g., “Men’s Suits”) rather than individual product pages (e.g., “Ralph Lauren Men’s Suit”).

Shift focus to optimizing individual product pages, ensuring they align with the keywords customers use when searching for those specific items.

 

Keep Data Fresh and Up-to-Date

Double check your product information to make sure all necessary fields are accounted for, and that the information is correct. 

Product prices and information can change — it should change in your listing, too. If you stop selling a product, you’ll want to remove those sunset products from your feed to avoid redirects in your feed.

Not only will inaccurate data damage the user experience (they can bounce from your site if the information they see doesn’t match what they saw on the listing), but it can cause a disapproval from Google, too. Not to mention, your conversion rate will take a hit.

Set up automatic updates if possible. This can be done with automated feed delivery, the Content API, or structured data.

 

Leverage Product Variants

If your product has variations like color and size, optimize for these variations to maximize visibility. This will help searchers find your product if they use a long-tail query with more product detail or variation.  

 

Align Your Google Shopping Feed to Your Product Pages

Google Shopping has been inundated with scams and misinformation since opening its platform to all merchants. Two common issues highlight the need for strict alignment:

  1. Scammers: Fraudulent merchants list fake products (e.g., an iPhone for $100) to collect payments without delivering the goods.
  2. Bait-and-Switch Tactics: Some merchants list a product at a lower price in their feed to attract clicks (e.g., listing a $600 item as $100). When users visit the site, the actual price is far higher, leading to a poor user experience.

To combat these issues, Google crawls every product page submitted in the feed to verify that:

  • Titles, Descriptions, and Prices in the feed match the product detail page and structured data.
  • Pricing remains consistent from the feed to the product page to the shopping cart.

This verification process forms what can be called Google’s internal trust score for your feed. As such, the information in your Google Shopping feed should match what appears on your product detail pages, including structured data and even the shopping cart. 

Misalignment can harm your visibility and trustworthiness in Google Organic Shopping.

So how does misalignment happen? 

Paid search teams, who often manage shopping feeds, may unintentionally break alignment. For example, they might modify titles or descriptions in the feed file to add keywords, but fail to update the corresponding product pages. This creates discrepancies between the feed and the website, reducing Google’s trust in your feed.

To optimize for Google Organic Shopping, ensure absolute consistency between your shopping feed, product detail pages, and structured data. In addition, avoid altering feed content (e.g., titles or descriptions) without reflecting those changes on your website.

 

Advanced Strategies for Product Feed Optimization

Use a Supplemental Feed

If you manage a multi-client Merchant Center account, you can enhance your primary feed with additional data sources to make changes to multiple accounts at the same time.  

Supplemental product data sources allow you to apply your attribute rules and supplemental Content API feeds to multiple sub-accounts at the same time. This is done with the Content API. 

To add a supplemental data source, navigate to “Data Sources” in Merchant Center settings and click “Supplemental Data Sources.”

 

Feed Rules and Automation

To streamline your feed management, use attribute rules. This lets you match product data to Google’s requirements. 

To add attribute rules, you’ll need to enable the “Advances Data Source Management” add-on within the Merchant Center.  

From here, you’ll be able to add or edit attribute details before you save them. Once they’re saved in a draft, you can test them to make sure they work before you push them live. 

 

Our 5-Step Strategy for Google Shopping Success in 2025

Google Shopping is growing and it's here to stay. As such, organic teams need to get involved. 

That’s why we've outlined a five step strategy for clients:

    1. Assess Impact: Identify the highest ranking possibilities moving forward.
    2. Set Expectations: Educate internally on the changed search landscape.
    3. Identify Expansion Opportunities: Pinpoint what is currently under-indexed and what could improve in rankings.
    4. Improve CTR: Implement continuous testing to identify effective ways to improve CTR.
    5. Optimize for Google Shopping!

We have the only complete SEO platform to help clients with all of these 5 steps – from tracking and reporting to monitoring and execution. 

Schedule a Demo

For more detailed insights on how to carry out this 5-step strategy and how seoClarity can help you achieve success within Google Shopping, download the playbook and get a free custom report on how your site is performing in Google Shopping.

 

Conclusion

Adding your products to Google’s Merchant Center can lead to more visibility and clicks, but most importantly, sales. You can report on your success to show how SEO contributes directly to your company’s bottom line.