Merchant Listings – How to SEO Test for SERP Features

Merchant Listings are a SERP feature that can give your ecommerce products extra real estate in Google’s search results.

Merchant Listings are free. This is their most important and interesting feature! They differ from the sponsored product carousel that often appears at the top of the search results for product-type searches. In a world where Google is increasingly becoming pay-to-play, if there’s something free to take advantage of and increase your visibility in the search results, you should be doing it!

Here are two examples of Merchant Listing areas in the search results.

Popular Products Grid

Knowledge Panel

How to Appear in the Merchant Listing Areas

For your products to be eligible to appear in the merchant listing sections, your product display pages (PDPs) need to have product structured data added to them.

Google has a huge amount of documentation on how to implement structured data for your PDPs correctly. Product pages can also qualify for merchant listings by submitting a product feed in Merchant Center.

Why SEO Test for Merchant Listings

Adding structured data to product pages can be a time-consuming and expensive process.

Running a proof of concept project on a subset of pages and measuring results as part of an SEO test can help you show the impact this structured data can bring to organic SEO results and get buy-in for a whole project rollout.

With SEO tests in SEOTesting, you can use the Search Appearance filter to test whether a structured data implementation, with the aim of appearing in Merchant Listing SERP features, increases the visibility of your pages in the search results. This tracks whether there is an increase in clicks, impressions, and improves click-through rate.

This can be executed as a time-based test where you look at an individual page or group of pages before and after product structured data is added to a page:

The Search Appearance filter and Merchant Listing value can also be used as an SEO split test where a control and test group of pages is formed, with the structured data only added to the test group. You can then compare the performance of the control and test group of pages over the same time period.

If you already have existing structured data added to a page, SEO testing also allows you to experiment with how changes to the Product Snippets information around pricing, rating, and delivery policy impact organic performance.