We see lots of product feeds everyday. One field that we see and frequently scratch our heads over is the color field. We strongly recommend this field for all of our clients, but push even harder for clothing and apparel merchants include their product color. One problem with this is that merchant’s will have some uncommon color names for their products which people may not use when they search.

For example, a search on Google Product Search for “Nine West brown sandals” returns 415 results. Another search for “Nine West mocha sandals” returns only 55 results. One could argue its better to stand out and compete in a smaller list of results, but I argue that more people are searching for the common color “brown” than the synonym “mocha”. Evidence from a Google Trends search show no results for “mocha sandals”.

Some examples of the common color and their synonyms would be:

Red = rose, rouge, crimson, scarlet, sangria, burgundy
Orange = amber, tangerine, pumpkin, persimmon, rust
Yellow = lemon, chartreuse, gold, saffron
Pink = coral, magenta, rose, salmon, fuchsia
Green = jade, lime, olive, moss, hunter
Blue = cerulean, cyan, turquoise, teal, azure, periwinkle, cornflower, cobalt, sapphire
Purple = amethyst, eggplant, indigo, lavender, violet, mauve
Black = espresso, carbon, charcoal, ebony, onyx, obsidian
Brown = auburn, bronze, burnt umber, rust, sepia, sienna, tan, taupe, chocolate

We recommend testing the replacement of different synonyms in your product titles with more common color names. This testing is the only way to determine what is right for your products. You can also include additional keywords in your feed for the other color names, and some merchants may be able to take advantage of NRF color codes.