For the past year I have overseen my companies shopping network strategy for multiple sites including my memory foam mattress site www.rockymountainmattress.com. Believe it or not, there is strategy that goes into getting ranked well in a shopping comparison site such as shopping.com, shopzilla.com, and the like. The reality is you have to treat your product rankings at these sites just like you treat your site rankings at Google. And it’s worth it!

Over 100 million shoppers visit the shopping comparison engines per month, yet only 1 in 4 merchants use these engines to market themselves. The best news is that over 84% of those merchants state that they find it to be an extremely effective method of marketing for them.

Here are the top 8 things you need to do well for SEO in a shopping comparison engine.

1. Your product title is the biggest factor that will help you rank in most all of the shopping networks online. You generally have about 200 characters to make use of so make sure you use a relevant title and get your main keyword in it. Good example would be something like this: 14″ Rendezvous Memory Foam Mattress with I.C.U.

2 . Your product description should be complete and include good info along with keyword repetition. This goes back to content being king. You need to use the 200-1000 characters provided before truncation and make it convert as well. The first 50 chars are by far the most important so get your keyword(s) in at the front and then let em’ know that you offer free shipping or any other promo.

3. Products that are missing a picture will not do well. Make sure you include a picture that works well as thumb nail size. That is all they will see at the comparison site.

4. Get your product category right! If you are selling kitchen accessories and your products are listed in the auto category, you have missed the boat and your conversion will be zero. Make sure to follow the individual shopping networks category taxonomy when listing your products on their engine.

5. Include the model number or SKU when inputting your product. 38% of people who use shopping comparison sites use them to compare the same product offered by multiple etailers. Make it easy for them to compare your products with others.

6. Get customer surveys. Getting positive feedback through the customer surveys provided by the network will help you become a trusted store and increase your rankings in that engine. You need to use them, no matter how annoying they are.

7. Set your PPC price high enough to get you ranked…and higher if you really need the help. Most comparison engines will tell you that setting your PPC high won’t get you ranked highly on it’s own. I believe them a little, but I have noticed that if I jack my price I jack my rankings…use the rest of my tips though to heg your costs so you rank well naturally as well.

8. If you want to show up in product results on Google search make sure you select the product type as “product” in Google Base when setting up your products there. Don’t create your own or use one of the other defaults…only select the type of “product”.

If you have any suggestions on things I left off let me know so I can keep this updated.