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How You Can Get Google to Back Your Store

Google is possibly the most well-known and trusted company on the internet, and getting them to back your brand is a great advantage. With Google on your side, even the newest customers know you're a legitimate, trustworthy business guaranteed to be accountable. By connecting your online store with Google, you'll assume some of the trust and reputation the company has earned from online shoppers all over the world.

There are a few ways to integrate Google into your online store, both to reassure customers and for your own benefit. Take a look.

1. Sign up with Google Customer Reviews.
The original Google Trusted Stores program has been phased out in favor of Google Customer Reviews, a much more comprehensive program aimed at increasing the authenticity of its ratings. The service is free with your Google Merchant account.

Google Customer Reviews are not the same as the Google reviews you can see on a business when it appears in a search result. Instead, Google Customer Reviews are an eCommerce-only system in which Google acts as an arbiter for collecting and displaying customer feedback.

Once integrated with your online store, Google Customer Reviews displays an offer after checkout that encourages customers to rate their experience. Customers who opt in will receive a survey in their email.

You can display a Google Customer Reviews badge on your website that displays the 1-5 star rating from the reviews collected from customers who chose to opt in. You can place this badge anywhere, and it prominently shows the Google logo - immediately extending some of Google's trusted reputation to your online store.

2. Implement Google Pay for purchases.
Do you give your customers enough payment options? It's important to diversify payment portals so you can accommodate customers that are comfortable with different ways to pay. These days, people are more reluctant than ever to enter their credit card information directly into a website - not to mention the inconvenience of doing so on a mobile device. This is why digital wallets have become popular: they store customers' payment information for use at any participating retailer.

Google Pay is a powerful digital wallet and combines features of the old Google Wallet service with Android Pay. Any customer using an Android device or the Chrome desktop browser can use Google Pay to shop online, as long as it's implemented on the online store where they're currently shopping.

By connecting Google Pay to your online store, you give customers the option of paying with their saved information through one of the most trusted companies in the industry. You and the customer will both benefit. Plus, that's another instance of Google's good name backing up your brand.

3. Get listed in Google Shopping.
Google Shopping is a product comparison service geared toward helping customers find what they're looking for at the best price. Google Shopping was originally known as Froogle before being renamed to Google Product Search, then Google Products, and finally to its current name.

Google Shopping results often appear alongside regular search results when a shopper searches for products. Getting listed in Google Shopping helps your products be found by customers who haven't even come to your website yet! It's a fantastic method to draw in quality traffic and increase sales.

To get started listing your products in Google Shopping, you'll need to add them through your Merchant Center account. Shift4Shop greatly simplifies the process by allowing you to export your products directly to it rather than needing to add them manually.

4. Use Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is different from the previous Google services because it's not customer-facing. Instead, it provides valuable insight on your website's visitors, including where they came from and what led them to you. Learn visitors' geographic locations, whether they're first-time or repeat visitors, the search terms they used to find your website, and much more.

This knowledge will help you improve your targeting and overall marketing efforts, improving your ROI. You'll also gain insight into customer behavior that you can use to better optimize your online store for their typical buyer's journey.

You also have the ability to set up Google Analytics' Enhanced Ecommerce for advanced tracking of shoppers actity in your online store.

by Gonzalo Gil Google