Watch along: how I would optimize any webshop for organic shopping

Most guides about organic shopping optimization are frustratingly abstract. They tell you to "optimize your product feed" and "track your rankings," but they rarely show you what that actually looks like when you're staring at a real Merchant Center account with real products.

So I recorded a watchalong video instead. No gated PDF, no theory. Just me sharing my screen for fifteen minutes, walking through the exact playbook I would use for any client who wants to rank higher in Google Shopping.

The test subject? A fake webshop selling three decorative items left over from my own wedding. Real product pages, a real product feed, a real Merchant Center account. The products aren't actually for sale (there's a disclaimer on every page), but Google doesn't seem to mind and is ranking them anyway.

The experiment: three wedding leftovers

The webshop sells three products I still have lying around from my wedding day:

• A champagne wall for 40 glasses
• A luxurious table skirt with eucalyptus branches
• BAR letters with LED lights

One quick note: this test webshop is in Dutch, and the products rank in Dutch search results. If you try to find them from outside the Netherlands, they won't show up.

Despite the simple setup, the champagne wall is ranking number one in the product carousel for its main keyword. That makes it a perfect demo environment, because the playbook I apply to it is exactly what I would do for a webshop with thousands of products.

Step 1: track the queries that matter

You can't optimize what you can't see. Google Search Console and Merchant Center give you very little insight into which queries your products rank for, let alone who you're competing against.

So the first step is tracking your most important queries daily. For this experiment, I track eleven queries and see exactly which products rank, what my competitors charge, what their titles look like, whether they run discounts, and how many reviews they have. All of these factors can influence your position in organic shopping.

Step 2: audit the product feed

Merchant Center only flags the big problems. Your products can be fully approved while the feed itself is barely optimized. In my test feed, the audit surfaced missing product categories, missing product types, short titles, thin descriptions, and a missing GTIN.

These are all issues that quietly hold rankings back, and you wouldn't know about them if you fully trusted Merchant Center. If you want to run this on your own feed, I wrote a full breakdown of how to audit your product feed for organic visibility.

Step 3: combine both in a query coverage report

This is where it clicks. The query coverage report combines your rank tracking data with your feed audit, so for every query you can see whether you're ranking AND whether your product data is optimized for it.

In my experiment, ten out of eleven queries were ranking but not optimized. That's ten concrete opportunities laid out in front of me. For example, the "luxurious table skirt" query appears in my product title, but not in the description. The report shows exactly which words are missing and where. I explain this report in more detail in this article about combining rank tracking with feed audits.

Step 4: fix it with supplemental feeds

Most SEOs never touch the product feed because it belongs to the paid team. That's fair. Many production feeds resemble a house of cards, and you don't want to be the one who sneezes.

Supplemental feeds solve this. They let you optimize product data without touching the primary source, and Productrise can generate them at scale using your search data, competitor data, and product pages as input. One of our users followed this exact playbook and saw a significant traffic increase from a supplemental feed.

Once your improved data is live, you measure the impact, and the loop closes.

Why this matters beyond the carousel

Everything in this playbook feeds into the Google Shopping Graph, the product database that powers Google's shopping results, AI Mode, and the Universal Commerce Protocol. Better product data doesn't just improve your carousel rankings today. It positions your products for wherever Google surfaces them next.

Try the playbook yourself

That's the whole playbook. Track your queries, audit your feed, combine both, and fix the gaps with supplemental feeds. Each step is simple on its own, but combined they give you an approach that goes far beyond what Merchant Center or any other tool shows you. And very few SEOs are working this way yet.

Want to see how your own products are doing? You can sign up for a free Productrise account and start tracking your most important queries without entering a credit card. You'll see exactly where you rank, who your competitors are, what they charge, and how their titles, reviews, and discounts develop over time. And when you're ready to close the loop with feed audits and supplemental feeds, the paid plans take it from there.