Google Dominates Apparel Search Results [Research Included]

Why Is This Significant?

The latest iteration of the Popular Products pack looks something like this on desktop:

Notice the size? On a 1920x1080 resolution screen, that fills up nearly the entire screen.

That is the equivalent of 5 regular web results! Those are displaced and pushed further down.

And, the experience is similar on mobile, taking over an entire scroll view.

If you are an apparel retailer online and seeing:

• A year-over-year decline in traffic from organic results despite no perceptible change to your “Web” rankings 

and / or

• Significant growth in traffic from your Google Shopping product feed

... those two phenomena may be related!

Organic website specific listings have lost significant visibility to Google’s Product listings (and other SERP Features). Tweet

Before anyone thinks that this means SEO is dead, we would propose instead that SEO has expanded.

The goal for SEOs and retailers should be to win in both the regular web listings AND the Product listings—expand efforts beyond tracking, optimizing, and reporting on web pages to also include product feeds. 

While there could be some cannibalization between the two, winning more SERP real estate is still incrementally better than doing well on just one of the two.

With seoClarity, you can track, manage, monitor, and optimize for Google Shopping and products feeds. 

Key Statistics

Distribution of the Popular Products pack in Top 10 positions

48% of the keywords had a Popular Products pack in the top 3 listings for apparel queries.

Number of Popular Products Packs in the SERP

On mobile, 75% of apparel-related queries triggered 4+ listings. This is incredible opportunity. If you aren't optimizing for Google Shopping, your organic search traffic and visibility is stifled. 

On desktop, the story isn't much different. About 88% of the queries' SERP only had two or more Popular Products listings. 

Why Is Google Doing This?

As more and more people go to specialized search engines like Amazon, Home Depot, or Best Buy to shop, Google is at risk of losing market share for queries that are closest to transactional intent: product searches.

In fact, 61% of online shoppers in the United States start their product search on Amazon, according to a May 2022 study conducted by Jungle Scout and distributed by Insider Intelligence. 

Google has evolved its strategy for the SERP over time for transactional queries related to products. PPC ads were soon joined by Google Shopping, Google Images, and free product listings.

(Google Images offers a direct purchase point to consumers with the intent to buy.)

In fact, Google abandoned its free product listings offering back in 2012 and replaced it with a paid listing option.

At the start of the pandemic, everything changed. It quickly reintroduced the free listings option and since then has carved out significant real estate in the SERPs for the same.

This move also meant that Google could give users a direct path to purchase as opposed to having them start off at a site like Amazon and bypass them altogether. 

How to Leverage Google’s Monetization To Your Advantage

Google’s self-promotion is here to stay and with it, the cannibalization of regular web results. 

Nonetheless, SEOs can still drive incremental traffic and optimize their product feeds submitted to Google.

seoClarity provides enterprises a scalable way to optimize track, measure, optimize, and report on their performance within Google Shopping.  

Recommended Reading: Google Shopping SEO: How to Drive Organic Search Traffic

The History of Google's SERP Monetization

The search engine has long moved to monetize different segments of search. Remember the days of the 10 blue links? Those days are long gone. 

Paid search ads and the rise of the local pack were the first to give Google entities more visibility in the search results, as were specialized search engines like video and images. 

This was soon to be followed by Google Flights, Hotels, Jobs, and others.

Interested in a deep dive on the history of Google’s Monetization push? Take a look our recent article about Google's monetization.

The Prevalence of Other Features on Apparel SERPs

Local Listings

Then there are local listings, which don’t appear as often. After all, Google’s algorithm has evolved and understands when online apparel shopping is distinct from intent to shop offline. 

With only ~3% showing a local listing result in the top 3 positions, it seems that Google’s algorithm learns that when people search for apparel-related terms, there is a lower probability that the user is looking for a location.

However, when it does show up, it’s most commonly in position 1 at 74% of the time. 

Google Images

Out of the 150k keywords we analyzed, Images showed up in the top 10 results 38% of the time with most frequently showing in positions 1-3. 

Most Popular SERP Features

These are the most common SERP features for apparel-related keywords:

• Products
• People Also Ask (PAA)
• Shopping 
• FAQ
• Local Listing

Research Findings By Sub-Category

We looked at the most popular queries in apparel—a whopping 150,000 keywords with a combined ~263 million searches per month and broke them down by sub-category. 

See how these Google SERP features perform in each category of apparel.

(Distribution of Keywords by Sub-Categories Analyzed in this Study)

Key Takeaways By Category

The apparel industry can be segmented into a number of different categories. From women’s to men’s, dresses to footwear, and shorts to swimwear. 

We looked at the following categories and pulled insights for each segment:

Specific Categories 

Category: Women’s Apparel

The women’s category far outnumbers all the others. It’s more than twice as large as the second largest category, men’s.  

Winners in Women’s Apparel

Key Takeaways

Amazon dominates the women's category, followed by department stores like Nordstrom and  Macy's.​

After all, Amazon has an extensive collection of keywords. For example, Amazon has more than 40,000 products for "black dress" compared with less than 2,000 products at Macy’s and fewer still than Target’s 1,000.

All these sites have comprehensive keyword portfolios. That means they all target a combination of high volume and long-tail keywords.​

Category: Men’s Apparel

Winners in Men’s

Key Takeaways

Amazon dominates the men's category as well​.

However, Kohls — a more cost-effective clothing option — cracks the top five for the men’s category. Target, on the other hand, holds a top spot for the women’s category.​

Kohl's, similar to Amazon, Nordstrom and Macy's, utilizes a mega menu in the navigation bar,  whereas Target does not​.

Similar to the women’s category, all of these sites have comprehensive keyword portfolios.

Guide to the Google SERP Features Referenced in this Article

Popular Products feature

Referred to as products.google.com in the seoClarity platform.

Free Product Listing

Google Images

Local Listing