Google Shopping is known by a number of different names to industry professionals, such as Google Merchant, Google Product Search, and the original name for Google shopping Froogle.

The way Google Shopping is used has changed over the past few years, since Google has changed the way it displays the shopping results in the natural SEO results. This means that Google now displays the top 3 results based on authority and relevance in the natural results. The shopping results will generally be displayed on the first page, out ranking the search results, giving your site instant visibility.

In the last 6 months Google has made it possible to integrate the Google Shopping results into your PPC results, allowing you to also increase the visibility of your PPC results. It is now possible to track your PPC results through Google Shopping by creating a field within your product feed "adwords_redirect" using a PPC tracking code.

Research shows that Google Shopping feed should account for 10% of the total traffic to your website. When you first install your product feed, traffic levels to your site may be low for the first six months but will increase every month until the 10% traffic is achieved.

It is important that your product feed is set up correctly with the following fields that are required for your product to not only be visible in the search results but also to meet Google’s guidelines. The fields include id,condition, title, mpn, quantity, availability, description, link, image_link, product_type, price, brand, currency, price_type, shipping, and EAN Code.

Each of these fields must be optimised for your product using your target keywords to ensure your site has maximum visibility in Google Shopping results. In September 2011 Google is making the product_type a standard field for the retail sector and Google taxonomy rules must be followed to the letter or the feed will be rejected.

Earlier this year Google also made it possible to create multiple product feeds from different countries allowing companies to reach new markets and finance streams, providing the feed is targeted to that country.

These above factors mean that it is more important than ever to have an optimised Google product feed. Make sure that your SEO agency or e-commerce website design company understands that a product feed not only needs to be created, but needs to optimised to appear in the natural search results.