LoveYourFeed.com

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.

The shopping engines work just like search engines.  They looking for relevant data in your feed to inform shopping search engine result pages (sSERPS).  Yes, the algorithms look at a lot of information, but everyone who thinks about data quality knows that fine tuning product titles and product descriptions makes a big difference.

So I’m always shocked when I realize around this time of year that merchants haven’t taken the time to include holiday keywords in their product titles and product descriptions.  So run a quick test and see what happens.  There are so few search results when you search for ‘christmas present’ on the leading shopping engines that you can probably stand out really easily.   Smarter.com tipped me off to this strategy 3 years ago!

Don’t spam the engines, but if you have great potential Christmahanukwanzaakah presents, then go for it.

Here are some holiday keywords to consider: christmas/hanukkah present, christmas/hanukkah present for dad/mom/boyfriend/girlfriend.

For example, in the description for ‘Men’s Fleece Jacket’ test out something like:  Men’s Fleece Jacket makes a great christmas present for Dad.

From time to time we find merchant’s trying to include phrases that are not allowed by Google Product Search’s Content Policies. The one offense we see most often has to do with merchants trying to include “Free Shipping” or similar phrases in their product titles, descriptions, or custom attribute fields. Google’s Policies state “Do not include promotional or boilerplate text in your product data feed. All text should directly describe the product you are submitting. Text relating to shipping or store policies should not be included.” which is somewhat difficult to interpret. Merchants are only trying to include valid product information to please the shopper. We recommend that you avoid using the following in your feed’s titles and descriptions:

• Free Shipping, Free Gift, or other word with “Free” attached, 100% Satisfaction, 30 Day Money Back, Guarantee, etc.
• Excessive capitalization of words, unless it is proper brand spelling. Example – LEGO Building Blocks is correct, but KELLOG EGGO WAFFLES is not.
• Excessive punctuation characters or exclamation points and random symbols.
• Gimmicky words and superlatives such as  Best, Greatest, #1, or other subjective claims.
• Repetition of words

So be careful with the words being included in your products on Google Product Search or your products may be removed for violation of these guidelines.

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.