Google as a tool is an excellent way to organize specific SEO tasks. Google Shopping is even more so because it gives us access to unparalleled granularity of information when it comes to consumer products.
I’m not going to hide it any longer, this article (and tool which results from it) is directly inspired by Erlé Alberton’s talk I mentioned in my previous article.
More sophisticated than Search for transactional searches, and so much better because it is its vocation, Google Shopping allows us to have access to exhaustive generic technical characteristics.
For a product category, take TVs for example, Google Shopping is able to give us the following information: features (smart tv, etc.), HDTV formats, display types, screen sizes, resolutions, etc..
This information can be used to structure our content (let’s imagine it as paragraphs) or simply to include terms in our editorial.
How the scraping tool works
Start by getting the archive “Google_shopping.zip“. You can then decompress it on your desktop, access will be even faster.
Before launching the tool, make sure you have the following libraries:
beautifulsoup
requests
re
pandas
excel
tkinter
Once your libraries are installed, simply run the following command :
cd Desktop/google_shopping
python filter.py
Always in the Terminal, you enter your search. In our example, you enter: tv.
A window opens, containing all the characteristics related to the product range.
You have two choices:
- You click directly on “Search”.
- You decide to filter more. For example, you choose to have only the features of Samsung TVs. Then again, you can filter more by choosing only HDTV 4K formats. And you can go even further in filtering. You still end up clicking on “Search”.
In the “data” subfolder, an Excel file has been created containing two tabs: “Products” and “Characteristics”.
The first tab, Products, retrieved product information directly: product labels, prices, ratings and associated merchants. In my opinion, this is useful marketing information to ensure that the prices at which your products are sold are consistent with the market, that the nomenclature of your products is also consistent. Logging can allow you, for example, to organize your list pages differently, by putting the products concerned back together if you have them in your catalog. Finally, knowing associated merchants allows you to have a view on your competitors but, in theory, you already knew it before. 🙂
The second tab, Characteristics, came to retrieve the generic information (left column on Shopping) relating to your sorting. Nothing could be simpler.
Feel free to give feedback on the use of the tool in comments, or directly to Pierre who developed it.
