First, a tribute to the web phenomenon that inspired the title of this post:

Admittedly, I’m a late adopter of Google Base and have only recently uploaded my Etsy shop products to the free service. Part of my excuse is that I didn’t think it’d be THAT quick and easy. (The other part was just procrastination/laziness/would-rather-be-doing-other-things-edness.)

But…I’ve finally done it! This post celebrates that accomplishment by giving you a few visuals of what your Etsy products can look like with Google Base and sharing the online tutorials I found helpful for showing how to set up Google Base for your Etsy shop. I’ll do a follow-up post on steps for taking your Google Base efforts to the next level.

What is Google Base, and what does it have to do with my Etsy shop?
Google Base is a free service that enables Etsy sellers to publish their shop’s products to the web, thereby making them searchable through Google’s shopping engine (Google Product Search) and/or their main web search. If you use it, you’re basically opening another channel through which potential customers can find your products online.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so here’s what it looks like!

From the Google Product Search page
After uploading my Etsy data to Google Base, I went to google.com/products and searched for “spring chickens pouch”. Voila! There’s my zipper pouch, complete with photo, direct link to the Etsy product page, short description (that I need to work on), price and shop name. Because I did such a specific search, both of my Spring Chickens products came up on the first page of results alongside, of course, a slew of other products not belonging to me.

From the main Google search page
It’s true that your products may show up in Google search results without loading them to Google Base, but using Google Base means that a bunch of other key data associated with your Etsy product listings — product photo, title, description and price for example — will also be displayed in the results. And on Google Product Search, the search results are formatted in a very shopper-friendly way.

Here’s what a search result for “spring chickens pouch” looks like from Google’s main web search page:

Then I wondered if any of my products could possibly show up on the first page of search results if I searched for something more generic. So this time I searched on “long zipper pouch”, and here’s what I got.

Google web search for “long zipper pouch”
I was really happy to see that one of my products shows up in the top three Shopping Results section at the top of the page:

Google product search for “long zipper pouch”
And if I clicked on the Shopping link this time to search “long zipper pouch” on Google Product Search, two of my products come up on the first page of results (in the 3rd and 13th positions).

I want that. How do I set up Google Base for my Etsy shop?
I followed one of the many fine tutorials out there on the web. I ended up setting up the automatically scheduled RSS update AND doing a one-time only manual upload of my XML file.

1. Sign up for a Google account to access Google Base
2. Follow one of these step-by-step tutorials.
   I used the first one for its easy-to-follow instructions with accompanying screenshots and its coverage of both methods for loading your products into Google Base (i.e. scheduled and manual).

• Beginner’s Guide to Let’s Ets & Google Base by TheJuneBride
• Feed Enhancements, Google Base and More from The Storque on Etsy
• Etsy RSS and Google Base by Go To Great Panes

I’m loaded, now what? Taking Google Base to the next level.
When the initial excitement of seeing your products in Google Product Search has worn off a little, you’ll probably ask yourself the same question.

I’ve been making a to-do list for myself to not only improve my product’s rankings in Google but also to increase my page ranks overall using some basic SEO (search engine optimization) tactics. If you’re interested, you can subscribe to my RSS feed for Part 2 of this post.

In the meantime, these are some of the sources I’ll be using for Part 2:

• How can I improve my products’ rankings?
• Optimizing your Etsy item description for GOOGLE Base
• Google PageRank Tips for Your Etsy Shop
• Why is SEO Important for My Shop?

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