Ask an Seo Expert - Product pricing - Slingshot seo

{\rtf1\ansi\deff0\deftab360 {\fonttbl {\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial} {\f1\froman\fcharset0 Times New Roman} {\f2\fswiss\fcharset0 Verdana} {\f3\froman\fcharset2 Symbol} } {\colortbl; \red0\green0\blue0; } \f0\fs24 \paperw11907\paperh16839 \pgncont\pgndec\pgnstarts1\pgnrestart I noticed that Google requires products to have a price. What should I do if many of our products can't display pricing due to vendor contracts?\par \par So this is a pretty common problem actually, where you have maybe a bricks and mortar type situation, where you have stores and you want to send traffic to the stores. It could be that you have brokers, distributors, or retailers who want to sell your product and you're trying to keep all these parties happy, right. Sometimes it's really difficult because there's only so much traffic and you want to funnel it to the places and you want to keep your profit margins in mind, but you want to keep everybody happy. A fairly common problem for really, really big brands.\par \par So I first want to talk about the rich snippet part. Google doesn't necessarily require you to have a price. The more information that you can provide, the better, because they want to see as much of that as they can. It's not going to be a huge detriment if you can't show a price, but the flipside of that is that maybe your competitors that can show prices might be beating you out.\par \par On that note, I actually want to explore that thought a little bit more because I think that that's more important than the actual rich snippet question. So maybe some of your competitors are beating you out because you can't show prices. If you can't show prices, usually it's because of a decision that the company has made, right? They want to send more traffic to the brokers or they want to send more traffic in-store. I just want to illustrate this really quick.\par \par So if this is all the traffic in the world that's searching for what you sell, your product or your service. Let's say that this is your website and let's just call this all of your competitors' websites. Some of it goes to yours and some of it goes to your competitors. Now, what traffic is coming to yours, you can increase that a little bit. You can do things to increase it a lot even. But once that hits your website, it's up to you what you do with it. If your organization has made the decision that, "You know, online retail really isn't that important to us. We really want to drive this to our stores," there's a tradeoff there, because there are other websites out there that do want to sell it online.\par \par So, when a searcher comes to Google or comes to Bing or Yahoo and they say, "Look, I'm on the Internet. I'm telling you that I want your product right now. Can you just show me a price for it," if I'm a search engine, maybe I do want to rank the website that's serving that up and has a really good e- commerce experience. That might be a better result than the company that's made the conscious decision, which right or wrong doesn't matter, that they really don't want to show the prices or they don't want to sell online.\par \par So I'd encourage you that if e-commerce is really important to you, just go all the way. Find the prices. Show them online. Do whatever you have to do to actually become a really good e-commerce site so that you're organizing your traffic in ways that's actually important to your company.}