Get your products found on google!
Learn how our products went from being nowhere in a Google search to multiple entries on the front page!
As we support more people build their own businesses, we aim to keep improving how we get products in front of potential customers. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been experimenting to see what does and doesn’t work when it comes to promoting products - so what did we learn?
For niche products like our Euroloft motor cover which gives Winnebago Revel owners more headroom in the back of the their RV’s, we are the only supplier of this product so if Customers are Googling, they should be able to rapidly find us - or will they? We found that to be partly true, but we did some work to improve the product discoverability that we will talk about later. One of the lessons worth noting is from some experience a local business shared with us - they are also in a niche market with only one other supplier. In 2024 they spent $23K with Google ads and found that it achieved almost zero increase in sales, despite Google claiming they had delivered. After some investigation, they found that the Meta ad campaign was once again their source of attracting customers, but not everybody made a purchase immediately, so when they did come to make the purchase, they would look for the product through a Google search, making it look like Google had generated the income. The lesson here is if you have very few competitors, you probably do not need Google paid ads, just ensure Google is setup properly, which does not cost anything, and Customers will easily find you.
We recently released another niche product, the Kawasaki KRX high power alternator kit, this is where many lessons were learnt about Google discoverability and other methods of getting your products in front of Customers. Facebook has a few KRX groups, one of which has over 30,000 members, so we used this to give us some indication about the interest in us developing this new product; the indications were good. When we launched the product we had an unprecedented amount of clicks on the product in our store, in one day we saw twice as much traffic as we had seen in our best month! The lesson hear is if you have a product with a group of potential customers all in one place, use that space to share what you are doing and announce the products release. The local company we talked about earlier does not have this advantage, there customers are very diverse so they had to spend a lot of time and effort experimenting with different target group settings in Meta ads to achieve sales of $400K for their excellent 3D printed roll cage fabrication tool.
So what did we learn about Google discoverability? There’s the more obvious things like ensuring your site and product pages are setup with keywords that you expect people to use when they Google your product, but it doesn’t end there. The most impactful tool we found was Google Search Console This allowed us to understand what Google had discovered about our website and products, initially it knew very little, so we went through a few simple steps -
Ensure the sitemap for your website is setup by selecting ‘Sitemaps’ from the “indexing’ options. If your sitemap is not submitted, then follow the instructions from your website host to obtain your Sitemap and add it to the Google settings.
Now establish the status of Google’s attempts to index your pages - Under ‘Indexing’, select ‘Pages’ - the chart will show you what pages are indexed and not indexed. It’s likely that some will be showing as not indexed which needs to be fixed.
Why are your pages ‘Not indexed’ - Click on ‘Not indexed’ above the table and then scroll down to the table at the bottom that shows 'Why pages aren’t indexed’. You will likely see multiple reasons, we focused on the ‘Discovered - currently not indexed’ as this seemed to be the most critical problem, but it may be different for you.
Fix the problem - Select ‘Discovered - currently not indexed’, then select one of the URL’s shown in the examples list. Select the option to ‘Inspect URL’ and it will show a detail report on the status of the page. If it reports ‘URL is not on Google’ then select ‘Request Indexing’ and it will start the indexing process which can take a few days to complete so regularly check back in to see the status. TIP: once you have the URL you want to track, you can enter it into the search bar at the top see below).
Now Customers should be able to find your products, the next challenge is inspiring them to make a purchase, but that’s whole other subject we can discuss in future.
