News

Over the last few years Google have launched more & more simple website audit tools. Lighthouse, Pagespeed Insights (complete with API), the reworked Search Console, and more.

We also know that internally they use ‘playbooks’ – rough heuristics to help website owners judge the quality of their sites.

Now they’ve launched ‘Grow My Store’ – a simple tool specifically aimed at Ecommerce sites, to help website owners understand whether their site ticks some of the boxes Google judge as important to ecommerce customers:
Results break down into 6 areas at the moment:

Product information
Product details (are products clearly listed & described?)
Product ratings / reviews (do you include ratings/reviews?)
Product search (do you have a search/filtering tool in place?)
Product prices (are prices clearly listed?)
Personalisation
Personalised accounts (can users sign up for accounts)
Wishlist (do you have a wishlist/favourites option?)
Flexible fulfilment
Basket (can users add/remove/amend a basket)
Next day delivery (do you offer it as an option? even with extra charge, it seems Google prioritise this as a positive)
Free returns
Multiple payment methods
Customer service
Contact phone (is a phone number clearly visible?)
Live chat (do you offer a live chat function)
Returns policy (is it clearly visible?)
Social media (do you list at least 2 social media channels?)
Security
HTTPS (do you have it in place?)
Mobile
Mobile speed (how fast is your site when rendered on mobile? This essentially links off to testmysite.withgoogle.com)
Mobile friendly (is your site easy to use on a mobile? Which links off to masterfulmobile.withgoogle.com)
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As you can see from the above – some of these are quite arbitrary (if you’re making bespoke products, perhaps ‘next day delivery’ is of no interest to your customers, for example), and some are pointers off to other audit/information tools Google already have in place.