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While there may be no hard evidence or actual cases that prove the shopping engines don’t like excessive capitalization, we do know it definitely degrades the shoppers experience to a degree. Google Merchant Center’s Program Policies state “Use Standard Spelling and Grammar. Avoid any repeated and unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization or symbols.” We’ve seen merchants delivering product feeds to the shopping engines that have products in all capital letters.

Observe- The result from Amazon is listing a remote control Ferrari and the whole title is in caps. This is not a good idea. First, your listing stands out like a sore thumb in the results page.  I know that the words red and Ferarri may elicit extreme excitement and enthusiasm, but there is no need for all the characters to be capitalized.

There are exceptions where capitalization makes sense, like when dealing with model numbers, brands w/ all caps names, and other abbreviations or shorthand.  In this case, a search for “Kingston 1gb ddr2 ram” returns the following snippet of results. You can see that it makes sense to include capitalization on the GB, DDR2, RAM, and also the model numbers.  Pay attention that RitzCamera fails to capitalize their model number ktm28652g in the product title. When viewing all the results for this product search, you’ll see that the other merchants (like Geeks.com) use full capitalization for their model number.

In short, DON’T USE ALL  CAPS, and don’t use all lowercase either. Be sure to use proper spelling too!
A quick tip- In Microsoft Office Excel, you can use the formula “proper” to correct any text that needs fixing.

Recently we started working with a merchant who sells products on their site but they had not been including the type of product in the title/name of the item on the site or to the shopping engines. It was obvious at their website what they sell, but they weren’t conveying to the visitors, what the products were by their titles. Thus I was inspired to share and post.

If you sell mattresses, you better include the word mattress in your product title. If you sell electric toothbrushes, you better include the word “electric toothbrush” in the product title. If you sell Levi’s Jeans you better include “jeans” in the title. While you the merchant might think it is completely clear that AffordablePortableWidgets.com only sells a specific type widget, the shopper may not when searching on a comparison shopping engine. If you (the merchant) leave out the type of item, all a shopper is left with is a product result that leaves the shopper blind to the whole look, feel, and evidence of a theme on your website unless they click the listing and visit. Don’t just use a brand and a model number, but be sure to include the product “type” in the product name. By including the product type in the name, shoppers get confirmation that this indeed is the item they are looking for, and merchants get their products included more frequently in searches. I’m not going to go into the lengthy explanation of how search phrases and queries change and get more specific through the shopping/buying cycle online, but many merchants often miss out on being displayed for a product search simply by assuming the shopper knows what they want and are at the end of a search buying cycle. The CSE’s give you more of an opportunity to use “broad” type keywords that would typically cost much more than an exact match keyword in Google Adwords. Take the opportunity to include more generic keywords like the product type in the titles on the shopping engines.
Examples:

- a nameless merchant who sells only toothbrushes and teeth cleaning products has a “Oral-B Vitality Sonic” for sale, but they should be listing the product as “Oral-B Vitality Sonic Electric Toothbrush”

- another well known merchant who sells golfing equipment is listing a “Titleist Pro V1″ but doesn’t include the product type such as “Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls”.

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.