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If you log into your Google Merchant Center today, you’ll see an alert at the top of your dashboard stating: “Best practices for the holiday season. Learn more…”, which points to their latest blog post. Heed this advice. These recommendations give clues as to what Google is focusing on now and in the future. The first recommendation is to inlclude the largest and highest quality image availabe, at least 300 x 300 pixels. This is sort of a no-brainer – without good images, you can’t expect good performance from ANY shopping engine, Google Product Search (GPS) or otherwise. At some point GPS may focus more on images, allowing users to enlarge images, compare images, or view multiple images for the same product.

The second and third recommendations are related to good old fashioned brick and mortar stores. If you sell your wares both online and in stores, you have to get in on this if you’re not already. Google has a separate service, called Google Local Business Center, that seamlessly ties into Google Product Search. Here’s how: Google Local Business Center asks, among other things, that you specify what geographical region your store serves. GPS users within that area will then be able to see that they can buy that item from you the old-fashioned way – by getting up and driving, bicyling, or walking to your store. Here’s an example. When I search for “Nike Plus” (a great Apple Ipod gizmo for runners), I find a number of stores with offers. The first listing is a “compare prices” listing that tells me there are 6 stores that sell the item, and it also tells me there are 6 nearby stores selling the item. Clicking through to the compare prices page, I see the six stores. One of the listings, Best Buy, indicates that there are 6 Best Buy stores nearby that sell the item. Right from this page Google allows me to pull up Google maps, with markers for each of the Best Buy stores in my area!

So if you have a brick and mortar presence, use Google Local Business Center and Google Product Search to let shoppers know that they can get instant shopping gratification by buying locally, from you.

We’ll post a few more last minute holiday optimization tips over the next couple weeks.

Towards the end of August, Google Base asked that merchants begin sending higher quality images. This is a great move forward for the user (shopper) experience when they can see higher resolution, larger images instead of tiny thumbnail sized ones. I wanted to take a moment to remind merchants that while images for Google Base may be optional, you should ALWAYS include them. Product images are also a field that is required with other comparison shopping engines, so if you are only on Google Product Search and want to be on Pricegrabber, Shopzilla, or Amazon Product Ads and don’t have images you won’t be able to list. Google is asking that images be at least 300×300 pixels, but we also suggest that you don’t submit images that are insanely large dimensions and file sizes. As for the file size, we recommend common file types such as .jpg or .gif. Formats such as .png or .tiff are larger in file size. The reason you want to keep file size down, is that it consumes your server bandwith when the shopping engines are showing your images. Remember that while on the comparison shopping engines this is the shopper’s first exposure to your website and the products you sell. If you have poor or no images, the shopper is likely to skip your listening and choose a competitor’s product.

If you want more resources about product images check out the following links:

• Get Elastic – How Top Retailers Show Product Images
• GrokDotCom – Changing Your Product Image Can Boost Sales by 147%
• Practical eCommerce – Optimizing Your Product Images