E-commerce SEO: From Merchant Feed To Product Knowledge Graph

Table of content:

• What Is A Product Knowledge Graph 
• How To Build A Product Knowledge Graph 
• How To Get Your Products In Google Shopping Graph
• Sale Price Annotation Google Updates

What Is A Product Knowledge Graph

Product Knowledge Graph is an additional map that you can provide to search engines and assistants to allow them to better understand your products, their characteristics, and their intended use.

In this way, you can boost the visibility and ranking of your products on Google and the search engines and get your products listed in Google Shopping for free. 

At the same time, you can improve the user experience by providing customers with relevant information for their search. They not only have more detailed information at their fingertips, making the buying process easier, but they can also discover new products that match their interests. This can really make a difference for your e-commerce and have a positive impact on both organic traffic and sales. 

Read our e-commerce SEO case study to learn more about the results you can achieve by building a Product Knowledge Graph for your website.

How To Build A Product Knowledge Graph

SEO has always been important for e-commerce websites, but today the use of structured data is really crucial to get the best visibility on Google and other search engines.

WordLift lets you add structured data to your product feed to improve your visibility in search engines and Google Shopping. And not only that. With the help of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Generation (NLG), you can create product descriptions and FAQs that are both up-to-date and engaging. 

You can list your products in Google Shopping for free. Find out how in our web story about Google Shopping Graph.

Let us start with the data you have about your products in your e-commerce. Maybe you have a product information management system where you store all the product attributes. Maybe you already share some of this data in the form of Google or Bing Merchant Feed or Amazon Seller Central Feed. These are XML files that allow these platforms to showcase your product on their interfaces. Or you may decide to crawl the site to extract additional attributes that will help us build the Knowledge Graph.

Here are three key challenges:

1. Data Sparsity. Identify attributes of products and focus on attributes that are important to customers when making a search. Product identifiers, color, material, product type, brand, etc. 
2. Data Completion. Ensure that the data (structured and unstructured) is comprehensive and coherent. Adding multiple formats for each product image is a good example. Another example is checking if the freeform description contains any information missing in the graph.
3. Data Quality. Check the reliability of the data. In SEO it is important to ensure that data presented as structured data matches data submitted via XML feeds (e.g., Google Merchant Feed). It also helps to prevent product descriptions from conflicting with structured data.

The result of WordLift is the curation and connection of data. Namely, we not only enrich the available information about your products with structured data to make it readable for Google and search engines, but we also link your data to other data sources such as Wikidata, DBpedia.

Data Harmonization And Data Reconciliation

Data synchronization is essential. A lack can be confusing and cause your products to not rank well on Google for one or more specific search queries. 

Therefore, you need to ensure that the information comes from and matches that in the Merchant Feed to avoid errors. 

At the same time, with data reconciliation you ensure that there are no duplicates that will lead to rejections from Google, which may decide not to display your products in the free listings. This is achieved by assigning a unique product identifier (UPI) for every single product in your e-commerce.

It does not matter which CMS you use. We have developed a solution that works with any CMS. You can see our implementation on a large website running on a proprietary CMS, or on an e-commerce platform using Shopify or Magento. We are platform independent because we start with the product data. That’s sent to WordLift, and that’s how we create the Product Knowledge Graph. We can then run additional workflows  before importing the data in the Product Knowledge Graph and enhance it to add more metadata. 

We do this with images (when we create multiple versions of the same image or when we upscale it), we do this with text (when we generate new product descriptions of FAQ content).

How To Get Your Products In Google Shopping Graph

Since 2020, Google has offered a number of free e-commerce listings. First, it is free to participate in the Google Shopping tab. This allows you to list your products for free and increase the visibility of your products to buyers. 

However, for this to be possible, your data must be accurate. Extracting information from web pages can be less reliable. Using structured data is one way to ensure that Google correctly understands all the product details provided by a web page.

You can provide product information to Google through the Merchant Center or the Manufacturer Center and get your products into the Google Shopping Graph to influence what might appear in search results.

“Building on the Knowledge Graph, the Shopping Graph brings together information from websites, pricing, reviews, videos and, most importantly, product data we receive directly from brands and retailers,” said Billy Ready. The AI-enhanced model works in real-time and shows users relevant listings as they shop on Google.

WordLift lets you add structured data to your product feed to improve your visibility in search engines and Google Shopping. We add structured data to your catalog and manage it automatically and at scale. Give us access to your source data from your product management system, Google Merchant Feed, or both. We will take care of the rest.

Learn more about product structured data and how to build a multilingual product knowledge graph for your e-commerce website by reading our article.

Sale Price Annotation Google Updates

The visibility of your products in search results and Google Shopping is becoming more important than ever to ensure an effective sales strategy, especially in times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Promote your products and draw attention to your ads and free listings by showing sales. In particular, when you display your products with sale price annotations, your sales stand out and potential customers see how much they can save.

How can you display the discounted price of your e-commerce products on Google?

The first thing you need to do is to update the prices of the products in your Merchant Feed. When Google detects that the average price of a product has dropped, it will display the “Price Drop” rich result, indicated by the word “typically” in the snippet.

There are a few additional aspects to consider to showcase items on sale using the Merchant feed. You can add, in addition to the [price], also:

• [sale_price] attribute and
• [sale_price_effective_date] attribute

In Structured Data, the equivalent information can be provided using the https://schema.org/SalePrice markup property. Implementation is still pending, although Google already supports it, as you can see in the image below👇

If you want to learn more about the Google updates and the new rich snippets for e-commerce that can impact your CTR, we recommend this conversation from Brodie Clark on Twitter.

If you work in eCommerce SEO, there have been some recent Google updates that can impact your CTR.

In particular, there are new rich result types (beyond pricing, 'in stock' etc.) that can appear automatically for your pages.

Here's 4 little-known types that can appear 🧵👇

— Brodie Clark (@brodieseo) October 21, 2022

Other Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between manufacturer feed and merchant feed?

The Merchant Feed is used by merchants to sell products. It contains all the product information that can help sell products and is available to anyone who wants to use Google to promote the products they sell. 

The Manufacturer Feed is used by brand manufacturers to share all information about their products, regardless of whether they sell directly to consumers, and is used to enrich Google’s general product catalog.

A manufacturer can use both feeds, while this does not apply to retailers. 

Google uses the data from the manufacturer feed to improve the products available to consumers. In addition, this information helps improve the quality of the shopping ads we show to customers based on their searches in the Google ecosystem.

How do I get Google prices to drop?

To get the price drop rich result on Google, there are two attributes you can give your product category page, and they are:

• ‘Average‘, marked as avg;
• ‘Typically‘, which indicates the normal price at which the products are offered.

The attributes “Average” and “Typical” usually appear when product pages are using the ‘Offer’ schema markup to automatically add snippet variations.

To find out more about the new e-commerce rich result types, read the article on our blog.