What terms are your competitors ranking for and why? When videos are used on a site, they should have a transcript. Videos have a lot of content and search engines cannot read the video, but they can crawl the text under it. Make sure the video is above the fold and make it the focus on the page (instead of putting it under the fold, hoping your user scrolls down to view it).
It is also important to have a custom thumbnail that is clear, shows the content of the video and will encourage people to click through to it. As with images, titles play a key role as well as the description.
John Mueller recently explained how Google rank videos and images. If people show a preference for an image, then Google will show that. But clearly in the context of this next part of his answer, relevance means what the user is actually looking for (e.g. An answer, an image, a video, etc).
Mueller makes it clear that if people show preference for images, that’s what Google is going to show. And that act of showing people what they want to see, that’s the context of his use of the word, relevance.
Also, of interest is how all these different algorithms are working independently on answering the query and then labeling them with a relevance score which is used to determine where on the search result page to show these different kinds of results.
Google Product Search started off as Froogle back in December 2002. For nearly 10 years, there was no charge to be in the shopping search engine. Merchants could have their listings crawled by submitting a product feed in their Google Merchant Center account. However, this all changed in May 2012 when Google announced that they would be moving to a paid model in late 2012. The name also changed from Product Search to Google Shopping and it was meant to enhance the user experience. This move was seen as unprecedented as they had never never eliminated a search product that had free listings and moved to a paid model. They had also been completely against this before and even wrote in their IPO that “Because we do not charge merchants for inclusion in Froogle, our users can browse product categories or conduct product searches with confidence that the results we provide are relevant and unbiased.”
Perhaps Google had a change of heart earlier this year as in April 2020, Google opened up Google Shopping to free listings for US merchants. Then at the end of September, it announced it was expanding Google shopping listings globally and making it free from mid October. Google Shopping has come full circle in its 18 years, from free, to paid to free again. One thing is for certain, anyone with an ecommerce site should ensure they have their product listing to give them the best possible chance of appearing high in the Shopping Results.
