Google Base is another one of the hidden gems in Google’s magic box. You don’t hear about on a daily basis but it appears to provide a new way for publishers to distribute and promote content.

What is it?

Google Base is a free online database where you can post any information free of cost as long as it follows Google’s program policies. Products and services, recipes, classified ads, you can post almost anything you can think of. However it is a dream land for those who have a list of good stuff to sell and no forum to market.

How does it work?

It’s really very simple. Just open an account or use an existing account if you have one. Choose to submit a feed and look at the various options for feed types. If you already have an RSS feed for your product, you can submit this, but some information will still be missing, so it is advisable to construct a text file as per Google’s field pattern. This allows you to think and include keywords and key phrases for appropriate searches. After the content is ready, submit it.

What’s amazing is that you can register up to 10 data feeds in your Google Base account and almost one million items equally distributed between 10 feeds.

Google Base and SEO

Submitting your content to Google Base actually helps you get additional organic search engine traffic.

Algorithm for ranking Google Base products is more literal in Google Base. It is not as sophisticated as the algorithm for Google search. This should be taken into account while preparing your product feed. Points such as including factors relevant to your product especially the product name, model etc in your product title and description, become crucial. The keywords you are targeting should also appear in the title and description. The first 10- 15 words are quite significant, so must be used wisely. But beware; do not stuff the description with a whole lot of keywords as this could lead to your listing to be penalized.

Adding relevant images to your feed can increase your click-through rates. This is another important optimisation tip you can use. It will help you rank well in Google Base. Finally, Google product search uses seller ratings; customers leave feedback about their purchase experience with a company as on any online purchasing portal. So try and get as good a rating as possible as this will only positively impact your rating in Google Base.

Contributed By Shruti Kekre

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Quality Score is based on the relevance to users search query and user experience in your website or landing page. As per Google bid price policy, the higher your quality score is, the lower you pay for your clicks and the higher you can get in position in PPC ads.

Below are the ways to improve the quality score

• Increase your click-through rates. Always try testing your ads to improve click through rates. Always keep the ad settings to rotate while you are testing ads. This will allow the search engines not to show well-performing ad over the other, but instead they will rotate ads 50/50. As a result you will know the better performing ad which increases click-through rate, which means a higher quality score.

• One way to achieve a higher click-though rate is to have fewer keywords in each ad group. This will allow your text ad to display the actual keyword in your ad group, which results to be more relevant to the target user. This will help you to increase your click through rates.  It’s never late to organize your ad groups to improve your quality score. It’s okay to only have 5 or 10 keywords in each ad group. Adwords Editor will help us in this process to cluster the keywords easily and faster.

• Delete or pause non-performing keywords and ads. By doing this, your quality score improves as your account have only high CTR keywords and ads, all your non-performing ads & keywords are not active.

• Always check your keywords. As quality score depends on how well your keywords relate to your ads, and how your keywords and ads relate to your landing pages. Always try to use your keyword on your landing page.

• Landing page load times do matter. As quality score was implemented to have a great user experience.  Having a slow landing page load time can influence your quality scores. It’s very important to load your landing page within 3 seconds in all browsers, personal computers and Mac systems.

All your keywords in Google will have a quality score associated to them. If you have a quality score fewer than 7 then it’s time to change or test your ads to improve your quality score.  Always try to change keywords in to a different ad group or try changing ad messaging.

These changes will take time to get effect in your account. Might take couple of weeks to build history & improve the quality score.

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