As a leading SEO agency in Manchester, we noted with interest Microsoft’s recent announcement about the replacement of Bing Shopping with Product Search, as part of the technology giant’s quest to help us all “search less and do more”. Soon, instead of selecting Bing ‘Shopping’ when searching for products, shopping results will instead be incorporated into the main display, sitting above and to the side of other listings.
So if you’re looking for a new toaster for example and are committed to locating the newest and most innovative bread warming apparatus out there, by entering the search term ‘toaster’, Bing will bring back a category snapshot of the most popular models, along with the rest of your results. Clicking on a specific product will then bring up a carousel with other related products close to your bread grilling needs in order to help you narrow down the options and home in on your dream purchase.
The inclusion of Bing’s Snapshot technology will also ensure that more specific product information is exposed with results, while new Product Ads will also come into play, distinguished from regular ads with the inclusion of an image and price information.
As part of the new launch, Microsoft will also be adding a new feature called Rich Captions, providing merchants with the ability to include pricing and availability information inside search results themselves. Bing will look at the results it returns for a particular query and if it sees that a particular page also matches the same page as provided in a product feed, it will then transform the web search result to add price and availability information.
As a leading SEO Agency in Manchester, this is where things get particularly interesting for us here at Jungle Media, as by using search-friendly URLs, merchants will give themselves far greater chance of being able to capitalise on the new Rich Captions functionality and see their products receive more prominent listings.
Rolling out from September, anyone looking to tap into Rich Captions will need to tick the box in the store settings page of the Bing Merchant Centre, while new accounts can be set up from Bing Ads, for those looking to get started with the platform.
The Bing Team themselves have warned people that it’s not going to be complete plain sailing over the coming weeks as they “Fine tune things and continue to improve the logic to determine when we show products”. As a specialist SEO agency in Manchester, we expect users will have to work through some mild irritations as products show when they’re not wanted and fail to appear when they’re sought after, but teething problems aside, it’s a move that makes sense for Microsoft as it strives to keep pace with Google’s shopping experience.
