More From Searchology: Google Squared

Yesterday’s post about Rich Snippets has gotten some great responses from our customers. My inbox is full of people asking how to make this work on their Yahoo store, and the short answer is that we’re working with our crack team of Yahoo Store developers to make this happen.

The next Searchology announcement I’m going to look at more closely is Google Squared.

G² isn’t going to affect ecommerce much, but it’s certainly interesting. It’s an information engine, a close cousin to Wikipedia and Google’s Knol service and (perhaps) a more direct competitor to the much-hyped Wolfram|Alpha, which is set to launch on Friday. Like WA, Squared is attempting to provide context-rich data, not a list of websites, in response to queries.

The example of Squared that was shown at the event was a query for “small dogs.” The results were displayed in a grid – rows are various breeds of small dogs like chihuahua or bichon frise, and the columns are vital data about each breed.

Google Squared is mostly an informational tool, but it has lots of potential for product comparisons and other comparative research that might lead people into your store.

The best way for your small business to take advantage of Google Squared is going to come down to the keywords you’re optimizing for and bidding on. After researching in Squared, shoppers will come back to Google to look for a place to buy, this time with a specific long-tail keyword in mind. If you tailor the copy on your site and your title and description tags to target these terms (and it helps to be selective instead of trying to do everything). In fact, you should already be focusing on long-tail keywords anyway.