Do you sell products over the internet to customers in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany, or hope to? If yes, then you should try listing the items you flog on Google Base.

Google Base is an expert encyclopaedia that Google trawls when picking up information for its search results. As well as scanning the world wide web, Google populates its search results with the most relevant information from Google Base items. Products and services that are sold over the internet can be listed on the database, then are included in the search results for relevant keywords. Our favourite part about this traffic increasing feature is that it’s all free.

A large shoe and accessory company in the United States, Zappos, used Google Base and found a huge increase in their online sales. Customers had found the company through searching in the Product Search function – the results of which come from the Google Base. The manager of their online marketing initiatives, Darrin Shamo, discovered that after listing items on the database, their website had an increase of traffic of 400%.

"(Google Base) brought in an average of 380,000 visitors a month during the vital holiday shopping season of November-December 2007. And the conversion rate was higher than all other comparison shopping engines in our portfolio," Shamo told Google staff.

How Can Google Base Help Me?

If your business sells something within the Google Base guidelines, you can list items in the database by their category for accurate keyword placement. The service is international so search results are localised to your area, driving relevant traffic to your website.

How Do I Get Listed?

First, you’ll need a Google account.

When describing items, you can include the brand name of the product/service, an image, and details about the condition. As in any instance where you are selling products online, we recommend including an image (from several views if appropriate) and information about the size dimensions of the product.

The required product information is:

- description
- id
- link
- price
- title

If you have ten or fewer items to load in to the Google Base, you can fill out their web form. If your product range exceeds that number, you can upload a spreadsheet with all the product information following the format shown here. There is more help available here.

Once the information is uploaded, you can go to the Edit Item page, and there are options to alter the existing information for Title, Attributes, Labels, Description, Contact and Images fields.

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