A quality product feed is a critical component for a successful Shopify store. If you don’t have a good product feed, Google will penalize you, and visitors may never see your products in their search results.
In fact, Google has been cracking down on the poor quality of many eCommerce products feeds lately. It’s important to get your product feed right from the start because it takes a fair amount of effort to improve a bad one once it’s already in place.
Once you have launched your store, the next step is to market your products. But how can you promote your products? The two most effective ways are through search engine optimization and product feeds. This article will go over the basics of implementing product feeds into Shopify.
Table of Contents
What is a product feed?
Every product feed in Shopify stores provides text descriptions of each individual product in your store. What that means is you must have text-based descriptions for every product. If you’re using a file upload service then it will require adding images to each product too.
Adding a product feed is easy for Shopify stores. All you need to do is upload the files to the site, enter your description, and feed it to your feed provider. Shopify will add those images to the feed automatically. Every feed you are using in your store will load that content automatically. There are quite a few options for this in Shopify.
Why is a quality product feed so important?
Google depends on feed quality and reliability to give your website the best results. When people search for your products, they will do so with the highest quality possible. If a search query has hundreds of similar products, Google will naturally tend to only show you those which are unique, fresh, and relevant to your search.
With a poor feed, Google will display the most popular products in the search results. Which will bring your website traffic, but at a terrible cost: visibility. A good feed will help improve your search ranking by allowing Google to show you the most relevant results and giving your website the visibility that you deserve.
Implementing a product feed in Shopify
There are several ways to implement a product feed in Shopify. These include:
- Manual Feed Generation
- Automatic Feed Generation with Product Feed Generator
A good product feed is always generated manually, from a list of products you have. This is the most straightforward method, but it has some drawbacks. Manual feed generation is stressful and time-consuming and if your store has thousands of products then you will be mentally crushed. This adds a little extra work on your part, and you’re responsible for maintaining the feed.
To solve this problem we make use of some Shopify tools that help automate this stressful task. But before moving further and learning about these tools let’s first learn about some common mistakes of creating product feeds.
Common mistakes when creating a product feed
It’s important to understand how Google treats eCommerce store feeds before attempting to improve your feeds. Here are five common mistakes I see people make when improving feeds in eCommerce stores:
- Using a defective API and/or content delivery network Submitting duplicate product feeds is against Google’s developer guidelines. Google will penalize developers for such a practice, and penalized content delivery networks (CDNs) for serving bad feed and therefore creating an insecure store for consumers to visit.
- Lacking feed previews An easy way to improve a feed is to add product screenshots and images to previews
- Using YouTube YouTube’s subscription feed is not designed for product feeds. Use one of the other feed providers instead.
Product Feed Generator
There is a handful of available apps for generating product feeds on your Shopify store. It’s important to understand that Shopify’s system is like any other eCommerce platform. That being said, there is an app to help you create feeds that your store will function more smoothly.
Product Feed Generator is a revolutionary app that enables you to create, manage and optimize product feeds for Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and 30+ online shopping channels. The app allows users to control the latest feed items from different marketplaces, listings from multiple Amazon seller accounts, and even from different marketplace categories by mapping them all within one interface.
Product Feed Generator is a Shopify Rss Feed that can create product feeds (CSV, XML, TXT, RSS Feed Types) and bulk sync the product attributes (Price, Product Categories, Images, Size, Color, GTIN, ISBN, and more) to your shopping channel. Being an all-in-one solution will save you from a lot of hassle. It has a built-in price updater and bulk editor and supports all the major shopping. The app is equipped with features like Weight Conversion to easily convert weights, Google Custom Labels, Title Optimization, Product Mapping, and more.
The five reasons you should use a product feed generator are:
- You must have one. It’s important.
- It’s essential for a well-designed store.
- It helps you with SEO.
- They help you with analytics.
- It helps you improve your SEO.
A good product feed will: Help you improve your product experience, customer retention, and customer satisfaction. Keep your product prices and customer interest top-of-mind so that Google won’t penalize you. Develop an organized and competitive product offering on your website and Make your brand stand out among other merchants.
Conclusion
The creation of a product feed is the first step in improving the user experience. If you’re not on Shopify already, you will want to make sure that you create a product feed if you have products that aren’t already listed. This will increase the chances that people can find your products online and give them a chance to decide if they want to buy them or not. Visit Product Feed Generator
