How to: Google Shopping Feed (PLA) With Magento

Let’s get started: PLAs/Google Shopping Feed for Magento

Okay let’s begin. We are going to setup Google Product Listing Ads within the Magento system. Here are the steps we will take and what we are going to need?

  • We are going to use Magento obviously.
  • Then we are going to purchase an extension through MagModules which works great.
  • Then we are going to install the extension through Magento Connect and
  • Finally we will configure the extension and test our work.

Here’s the Google Shopping Feed Video Tutorial

And here is the transcript of the video, which is a bit wordy, but it has all the information you need to get your Magento installation producing a Google Shopping Feed:

Okay let’s begin the tutorial here. We are going to take a Magento installation and we are going to make it generate automatically an XML feed that can then later be imported into Google Shopping. Google Shopping or Google Product Listing Ads it’s the same things are these ads here (see video). And so we done a query here for “Gorilla Masks”… A lot of companies have products in this feed. These tend to be fairly inexpensive ads. It’s long tail search. People, I don’t know who is searching this except me who is not looking for an actual mask. So the conversion rate on these ads is really good. Plus to be honest these are a little bit difficult to setup which sort of weeds out most people, all right? That’s why Google Text Ads … are so competitive because anybody can do it. This however is a little more tricky. So we are going to get this setup at least on Magento side.

Let’s Prepare Magento

And so start by logging in to Magento and then also Magento Connect Manager, within our Magento installation. Login there as well – it’s a separate login. We are going to be purchasing an extension and we are going to import it here, okay?

So through trial and error I found this product, okay? And I found it through Magento Connect, the Magentocommerce.com site where there is a library of extensions and the name is Google Shopping Feed and see other have searched with this. And it’s this product here and it’s from a company called MagModules. The price is 30 Euros. A couple of sales though should pay for that. And through a couple iterations it’s you know I wouldn’t write this is any kinda custom script to review this and there is a lot of plug-ins–extensions that don’t work. This one worked first time for me. I think it’s a sound product. It’s got good votes. It’s 5 out of 5 starts with 32 reviews. One of which I think is mine. So this worked really well for us.

Get MagModules’ Google Shopping Feed Extension

So once you, you know, you can go to this page if you wanna learn more about it. When you click get extension you are going to come over to the MagModules site. Create an account, buy the product here and you will get an Email with a license key and link to it to the product and you are going to download on this page for MagModules download version 1.5.5. Download it to your computer and then when you go back to Magento Connect Manager you are going to just you know chose file and upload in this way, okay?

Now once you installed the package you wanna go back to your Magento installation. Just log out, log back in and also over t0 System and go to Cache Management and then you wanna just flush these two – it’s just a good practice and it’s just a weird this about Magento that none of us get away from. And then I also just, you probably no need to do this, but I just have a habit of going to system Index Management, select all and then just reindexing the data. I just find everything goes more smoothly if you do those two things: Clear the cache and reindex the site.

Configuring the Google Shopping Feed Extension

So now that your program is installed and that’s the MagModules product listing extension. If you go to System Configuration where I am sure you are used to going a lot. You will have a new section and it’s MagModules and you have a Google Shopping link here and you click that.

And now we are in the final step which is configuring the extension. This part isn’t hard but you may have to spend some time in here. Magento obviously sells a wide variety of products. You may sell really weird stuff. Your system setup may be different than mine but as long as you can generate a file with this extension you can tweak this to the point where you can get a feed that Google will accept.

And by the way we will do a separate video for setting out the product for you on the Google site. So right here today though our goal for you in 15-20 minutes from now is to have your feed working. So scroll right to the bottom here and this how the file name is generated. And those are generic file name here. Google-Shopping.xml. I left that the way it is and you can see once you got all setup there is my feed and XML and it has in stock and it has the brand name the NPN, the Google Product Category which is a number and then it’s got a product type and small description so it’s working here.

So, the sections you wanna focus on for configuration are this:

  • ID Attribute
  • Name Attribute
  • Description Attribute

You map these over to these fields on your site. And I have done product ID, name and short description that’s going to work for 90% of people. We sell products so the condition is new. The GTIN we don’t use that so we gotta away without that because we are using a brand and our attribute in our system is called Manufacturer. That was done with some customization on our site. So if you don’t have that you might use GTIN just depends how you store is setup.

Tax customization – we forced including Tax according to the rules we setup in Magento which is Texas only. These I have completely left alone” price rules, identifier exists, and product type is “yes.”

The section that I deserve to mention is the shipping section and they warn you. MagModules says we recommend that you configure the shipping cost at your Google Merchant but in some cases you may wanna do this. Luckily we had a really easy setup with a shipping over at the Google Merchant Center where the product listing ads. They let you setup shipping rules over there and that is going to make your ads better. Because it will say “Free Shipping” more reliably in your ads which you are going to want.

Saving the Google Shopping Feed File

This section here I mean we can’t configure for all potential configurations which is now its pretty simple to setup. You just may have to tweak it a bit. If you don’t get to the point where you are generating the feed then you begin the process of importing your feed into the Google Merchant Center which then can lead you to the product listing ads. That’s a separate video. That’s a tasking itself. But once you get to here like you are 90% done.

If you get stuck…

If you’d rather get pro help with your Magento SEO or your Product Listing Ads Management, think about reaching out to Tastyplacement; we offer these services. Not convinced of our awesomeness? Check out our PPC case study, and you will be.

I hope you save a ton of tweaking time like I did. I you know had to tweak this for hours and hours before I got to work. Hopefully it goes smoothly for you. As always visit us over tastyplacement.com and follow us on Facebook and that’s kinda cool. Thanks for watching.

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How to Make a Sitemap w/ Screaming Frog SEO Spider (+Video)

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Introduction (Video Below)

The following is a transcription of the video that appears below

Hi. This is Michael David from Tasty Placement. I’m the author of WordPress Search Engine Optimization, now out on 2nd Edition on Packt Publishing. My agency is a Google Marketing Platform (analytics) certified agency and Google Certified Adwords Partners.

 

What You’ll Need

For today’s tutorial, we are going to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to create a full sitemap of a website. First, what you’ll need. We’re using Screaming Frog version 5.1 which is current in October 2015 and a website. Let’s go. The video quality blows because I’m using CamStudio, but you’ll be able to get through it.

Let’s do the Screaming Frog tutorial on how to create a sitemap

Why do we want a sitemap? Well, we want to create an XML sitemap and I’m not talking about an HTML sitemap page that you put on your website with a link to all of your pages. I don’t think users really use those. Your site should be big enough, if you want to make money, that a page like that is going to be too huge anyways. We’re talking about an XML sitemap, a sitemap.xml file, that we can submit to Google Webmasters or Bing Webmasters to help search engines crawl our site and find what’s important. By the way, don’t use the free sitemap tools online. We have a huge client, 600 employees, and one of the IT guys there used one of the free sitemap programs online and posted the sitemap. Upon later investigation, it didn’t include all the pages on the site. Screaming Frog is a very pro way to do this. You’re going to get a deep crawl, a full crawl, and a very good sitemap out of this that is completely compliant with search engines. So this is the way to do it.

Create the XML Sitemap: Step 1

First step. We’ve opened Screaming Frog and I’m using version 5.1, which is current in October of 2015. Always set the mode, we want to make sure we’re in Spider mode. We’re going to spider a single site. We are going to use tastyplacement.com which is our website. I’m going to start it and then it takes about 3 1/2 minutes to crawl so I’ll start it and then pause the video and then just resume when it finishes. So we’ve started it and you can see it’s already chewing and moving pretty quickly. I’ll be back in a sec.

After Screaming Frog Completes the Website Crawl

Okay, Screaming Frog just completed its crawl of tastyplacement.com and you can tell when it’s finished because this bar will progress eventually to 100%. This is a good time to sorta look through what you’ve got here. How do we do that? We can go over here and you can see we’ve crawled 798 elements and that includes JavaScript HTML, CSS files, images, PDFs. If you click on HTML here, you’re going to see only HTML files in this window and you’ll see a count here, 304 pages. That’s the number of pages we’ve got and that’s including some 301s and no index pages. You can also see you images here if you’re into that. But we’re really interested in creating a XML site of our HTML pages. This is a good point, once you do just a basic spider basic crawl in Screaming Frog, from this window you’re able to see if maybe one of your pages is lacking a title tag. You’ll see blanks here if there’s no title tag. If you scroll to the right you can see whether there’s a better description of what the lengths of those are. You can see we’ve got 155s, 124s, and 138s. So we’re really up to that 155 character standard there. This gets pretty deep though so we will do another video about that at another time.

This is a 2 phase process. First we crawl the site and the second step is we generate the sitemap. We’re 70% done. This crawled effectively, we’ve got the proper page count, we know Screaming Frog crawled it properly, so we can move on from here. Now if you’re at this point and you know you’ve got more than 300 pages and Screaming Frog didn’t find them all, it means you have a crawl problem. Bingo! Another benefit of Screaming Frog because if Screaming Frog can’t find the pages on your site because there aren’t links to all those pages, then a search engine spider may not find them either. That indicates a problem.

Generating the Sitemap

So from here, we’ve done our crawl and Screaming Frog makes this very easy. We’re going to go up to the title bar here to sitemaps and we’re going to create an XML sitemap. You could also create an image of sitemap, we’ll do another video. We’re going to click this and we’re going to get a little menu here. You progress through these tabs before hitting next. We do not want to include no index pages. We’ve no indexed them for a reason. If you know what you’re doing, don’t include no index pages here. These we all leave blank except PDFs. We’ve got about two PDFs we want Google to find. Last modified we leave alone. This is very sound, so if priority. These are good priority numbers, change frequency, it’s totally fine. And images, we do not want to include images in our main XML sitemap. We click next, it’s prenamed sitemap.xml. We’ll overwrite the file I created in the test, save, and that’s it. Let’s take a look at that file to review it. Go over to our temp directory and we’ll open this with notepad ++, which is a great text editor for all kinds of files. There it is and it looks good. We’ve got nice priorities here, higher priorities on the key pages up front. We are set.

Next step would be just to use our XML sitemap wherever we want it. We upload it to Google Webmasters, which is now called Search Console, or Bing Webmaster.

Just another one of the many things that Screaming Frog can do and at Tasty Placement we use this for a couple dozen individual tasks. This is definitely one of the easier ones because they’ve included the sitemap creation right the menu here. It’s 99 a year for Screaming Frog, but when you learn about all the things it can do it’s definitely high level stuff that pros use. Anyway, if you have any questions you can email me at michael@tastyplacement.com. As always, visit our site or follow us on Facebook. We’re always doing super, super high level tips on everything from WordPress to high level SEO and a lot of really advanced Google Analytics and Adwords stuff. Thanks for watching. I hope this helps you.

Create an XML Sitemap With Screaming Frog SEO Spider from michael david on Vimeo.

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