BigCommerce SEO: SEO Strategies For BigCommerce Success

BigCommerce is an open SaaS E-commerce platform that helps you create and run an e-commerce store. BigCommerce is a widely used Ecommerce platform that provides both B2B (Business to Business) and D2C (Direct to Consumer) services. It has been included in Forbes’ top Ecommerce platforms list as well.

BigCommerce, with its user-friendly features, is a great platform even if you lack advanced technical or coding knowledge. Its drag-and-drop editor allows for easy store design, and while some advanced customization may require a bit of coding, setting up a basic store is a breeze with BigCommerce, an open SaaS platform.

Importance of Ecommerce SEO and BigCommerce SEO

SEO is very crucial for bringing unpaid traffic to any Ecommerce store. Ecommerce SEO includes optimizing your website pages, like category and product pages, your product descriptions, and meta titles and descriptions, with the targeting keywords to rank your BigCommerce store high in search engine results.

High ranking means appearing on the first page of search results, which brings more traffic to your website and provides more sales conversions.

Since BigCommerce is also a platform that helps you create ecommerce stores, it needs an effective SEO strategy for stores created on its platform to help them grow and become visible in search results as high-ranking stores.

SEO for BigCommerce stores, or e-commerce SEO in general, is a crucial investment. When done right, it offers long-term benefits compared to the short-term results of paid marketing. This long-term payoff should give you confidence in your SEO strategy.

How is SEO Better than Paid Traffic?

SEO Strategies For BigCommerce Users

Now that you are well aware of the BigCommerce platform and understand the importance of SEO for BigCommerce, let us see the SEO practices that are already built into the platform, which you can customize and use.

Once we get familiar with these built-in features and their customization on your end, we will then move forward and discuss the SEO practices that are going to be required by you to use within your BigCommerce stores, segregated into four types of SEO, including:

BigCommerce Built-in SEO Features

BigCommerce SEO is not just about having built-in features; it’s about having the right ones that you can use and customize to fit your brand strategy. These features, belonging to different SEO types, will be clearly explained in this blog post, helping you understand their value and how to make the most of them.

Mobile SEO

BigCommerce has a very easy structure for its Ecommerce stores, where it offers responsive themes that can adjust with different screen sizes, SEO friendly URLS, and tools that basically enhance the speed of an ecommerce store, making it a better user experience on each electronic device, including mobile phones. This makes Mobile SEO more likely to be a built-in feature, with more customization at the user end, which can be more effective.

With almost 62% of internet users accessing the web via mobile, having a mobile-friendly website is not just a good practice; it’s a ranking factor. BigCommerce’s mobile-friendly features, including responsive themes and SEO-friendly URLs, make it easier for you to optimize your site for mobile, a crucial consideration for your SEO strategy.

SEO Friendly URLS 

SEO-friendly URLs, which are clean and easy to read, are a key part of a good SEO strategy. BigCommerce’s automatic SEO-friendly URLs, which the user can customize, are a great built-in feature that helps improve user experience and SEO ranking.

Unique URLS and URL Rewrites

BigCommerce also has a built-in tool that lets you redirect your broken links permanently with a 301 redirect and also enables you to rewrite the URLS, which makes it really effective for your SEO, as you do not get high bounce rates due to the availability of broken links and 404 error pages.

More broken links or 404 error pages not only frustrate your audience, but they also could impact your ranking as broken links reduce the chances of being indexed, and your e-store could lose its authority as well.

Content Delivery Network

Since website speed is a ranking factor and essential for SEO, BigCommerce uses CDN to make sure your website loads faster for both your traffic and search engines. A CDN basically uses caching for a website’s content, by placing its content on servers that are close to the users, it reduces the loading speed of the pages and their latency, indirectly helping you with your SEO by ranking your website by making it faster.

301 Redirects

A Redirect prevents your website from having 404 error pages if a link to your product or category page has been broken or removed. By creating a redirect to a new working link, you not only help your users to be able to reach their desired destination page but also make sure search engines index the new link and do not derank your website, seeing too many broken links that could cause a bad user experience.

BigCommerce allows its users to create manual and dynamic 301 redirects that make sure that your store does not have any 404 errors or broken links.

Rich Snippets (Micro Data)

Rich snippets are indirectly related to the SEO ranking of Ecommerce stores. BigCommerce provides you with microdata for your product pages, where you can add details about products like ratings, product availability, pricing, etc. This helps create rich snippets for your products. These provide extra information to your store visitors right from the search engines, hence improving user experience and reducing the bounce rate because it is more likely for people to click on your webstore link if they find a product with all details right in search results, hence increasing click-through rates and webstore ranking.

Free AI Copyrighter Tool

BigCommerce also provides AI Copywriter tools, helping you generate SEO-friendly product descriptions. Although it is always better to use your voice when it comes to speaking for your brand, if you wish to take some AI help, then this will help you immensely in improving your product descriptions, catering to the SEO needs.

Of course, it would be suitable for you to take an idea, but then generate the descriptions yourself and not let your webstore sound like a bot-created webstore. This will be the first of the BigCommerce tips from The Digital Advice that you should take to make your SEO journey an easy and humanised way to make your webstore stand out as a humanised content-based store.

SSL Certificate

Having an SSL certificate ensures encryption when your customers visit your website, making their interaction with your store safe. Websites that have an SSL certificate are considered secure and are visited by people without safety concerns, making it a significant ranking factor for your website by search engines.

BigCommerce provides you with a free SSL certificate along with your domain name, and not just that, it also installs a new free certificate to your Ecommerce store when the old one expires, hence indirectly improving your SEO rankings.

Sitemaps and Robots.txt File

BigCommerce automatically generates an XML sitemap for your store, making it ideal for your SEO and indexing, including providing you with a Robots.txt file that can be edited as well.

You can use the Robots.txt file to disallow the search engine bots from crawling unnecessary pages on your website, making sure they use their crawl budget on meaningful pages. Similarly, an XML Sitemap helps to index your website pages in search engines, making sure they are visible and increasing the chances of your website ranking based on its SEO.

You can set up your Robots.txt file using BigCommerce support guidelines. One of the good Bigcommerce tips. If you are not familiar with the right approach for which content should be disallowed or allowed, it is better to use the default robots.txt file provided by the built-in Robots.txt file for SEO of Bigcommerce.

Built-in Blog

A blog is an additional way of enhancing the SEO of your Bigcommerce Store. Another one of BigCommerce tips for you is to consider creating a blog in your BigCommerce store. This will be easier as BigCommerce already provides a built-in blog for SEO. You can utilize this blog to further escalate your stores’ performance by creating keyword rich blogs helping your store generate more traffic and attracting the audience to visit and purchase from your stoe with a quality blog providing a call to action for your products purchase with internal links to the products that customers can click and reach the exact pages to make their required purchases.

Now that we have learnt about all the BigCommerce SEO related built-in features, taken some BigCommerce tips, let us move further and learn how you can still do more SEO and rank your website high.

On-Page BigCommerce SEO

On-page SEO for BigCommerce refers to the SEO done around the content of your webstore.

High Quality Content

Search engines love high-quality and valuable content. Make sure you are adding value to customers with your content, and it is updated with time, including all the additional information that should be in your webstore. Websites providing high-value and up-to-date content are more likely to be ranked in the search engines.

Keyword Research

Make sure to do proper keyword research. You must first understand your users’ search and purchase intent, and then use the keywords that will attract them towards your e-commerce store. Research your competition as well, see the keyword strategy that they are using, and then try to do better than that.

The Digital Advice also suggests using long-tail keywords, because with the voice search feature available on search engines, most people use long-tail keywords for searching items they need, hence looking for using long-tail keywords might be an extra BigCommerce tip that you can use to improve your SEO than your competitors.

Optimizing Meta Title & Meta Description

Your title is the first thing that will attract your audience; it should be SEO optimised with the use of the primary keyword, and you should not use more than 55 to 60 characters in your meta title.

Your Meta Description might not directly impact your SEO, but using keywords in it and providing a Call to Action within your description will help you get more clicks and more conversions, indirectly increasing the traffic and ranking, which indirectly helps your SEO strategy.

Alt Text for Images

Alt text in images is very effective for your on-page SEO. By providing alt text along with a description of an image, you are helping the search engines read and understand your images and index them for image search results, which boosts your website’s visibility and enables you to rank your website.

Another benefit of doing so will be making it an accessibility feature, helping people who cannot see the context of your images to understand the context of your images using screen readers.

Optimize Products, Category, and Home Page

Optimizing your Home page, Categories and Products pages is an essential off-page SEO practice that you must focus on when considering a BigCommerce store. Make sure you have SEO optimised content on each of your pages, you have interlinked your product pages to your categories pages, your categories pages have a short description using keywords and links that could generate a great user and search engine experience, helping each page to be indexed and helping your store to rank in SERPS.

Internal Linking

Strategically using internal linking helps search engines understand the structure of your website and helps with proper indexing, hence helping search engines crawl and prioritise each page you want them to index. With adequate indexing, you increase your ecommerce store’s ranking, making your website visible to search engines with all of your pages indexed.

Avoid Duplicate Content

BigCommerce will likely create duplicate links for your webstore due to factors like pagination or URL parameters. Having duplicate pages may get you penalised by search engines; to avoid that, you must use the canonical tags. By using the canonical tags, you let search engines know which links or pages should be preferred to index, ignoring the duplicate ones.

By telling search engines which pages are preferred, you improve your indexing and search engine visibility, helping with SEO and ranking.

Technical SEO for BigCommerce

Technical SEO is the SEO that is happening at the backend of the website, involving optimizing the infrastructure of a website to improve its ranking.

Website Speed

Website speed matters a lot. It is considered to be the essential focal point for e-commerce stores. If a website takes too long to respond and load its pages, visitors will likely leave the page. This causes a bad customer experience and increases the bounce rate of your website, making you lose website authority in the search engines’ perspective.

Leverage CDN by BigCommerce, use responsive images, minimize coding and install only useful apps so that your website loads faster.

Remember, speed is a high-ranking factor for search engines and impacts your SEO significantly. It also helps you with more sales conversions by providing a better user experience!

Integrating with Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Integrate Google Analytics & Google Search Console with your Bigcommerce store.

• Search Console will help you manually index your BigCommerce XML sitemap and manually check your pages to see if they have been indexed or not. This way, your indexing is always in check, and you may find out if there are broken links on your webstore.
• Google Analytics helps BigCommerce stores analyse their traffic, the behaviour of their audience, and keyword performance, which makes it easier to interpret and implement SEO changes accordingly.

Indexing Of an Ecommerce Store

Make sure to index your Ecommerce store in search engines other than Google. For example, you can manually index your XML Sitemap in Bing using Bing Webmaster Tools to increase the visibility of your store further.

Monitoring SEO

Use SEO Analysis Tools to stay ahead of Google updates and changes in its algorithm. Google Analytics and GSC-like tools, when integrated into your webstore, help you immensely to keep an eye on your webstore’s stats and figure out what new trends should be followed based on changing audience behaviour and Google’s Algorithm. Always keep a keen eye on Google Updates for SEO to stay ahead of SEO improvements and your competitors.

Off-Page SEO of BigCommerce

All the SEO done on social media for the sake of promoting your Ecommerce store is known as off-page SEO.

Building Backlinks 

Backlinks simply mean having your webstore’s links placed on high domain authority websites, which provides your website with link juice to pages that are liked, increasing the traffic and also improving your domain authority and trust in your brand by the people seeing it referred by authoritative websites.

A good domain authority means a good chance of ranking, as this is a really liked factor in ranking by search engines.

You can write guest posts for popular blogs in your niche in return for getting a backlink from them, or you could provide utmost value through your content and services that earn you quality backlinks from high authority websites based on your performance.

Creating Online Repute For Your Brand

Use social media handles to build the reputation of your BigCommerce store. Place links to your store and products online, create short videos and market your products with links to their pages in the captions or on your social media pages. Use stories to provide insights on your products or collaborate with influencers to promote your webstore.

This not only does off-page SEO but also builds trust in your store and brings you a diverse audience from different channels.

Integrating Social Media

Integrate social media buttons in your webstore and keep your social media platforms updated with your available products regularly with the help of posts, stories or reels and shorts with links and SEO Friendly descriptions of your product pages, indirectly helping you with SEO and ranking by becoming more visible to a diverse audience.

Local SEO For BigCommerce Stores

If your business is working physically on the grounds, then Local SEO must be a part of your SEO strategy.

• You can leverage Google My Business and embed that information into your Webstore. You can also include the customers’ reviews on Google in your web stores, creating credibility for your store online with positive reviews from people.
• Use local keywords in your content throughout your store, including the descriptions and blog.
• Generating backlinks from local sources with good repute also helps increase your visibility and SEO.

BigCommerce Apps For SEO

When it comes to BigCommerce, apart from the built-in SEO features and the SEO activities that you can carry out individually, there are some apps from BigCommerce as well that help you with your Ecommerce SEO.

BigCommerce apps like FavSEO, SEOKart, and ReloadSEO make it easier to manage your SEO without needing deep technical knowledge. By leveraging these apps, you can get insights on keywords, audit your website for any errors related to SEO and automate optimization tasks to cut down on your SEO time and focus on the sales of your website directly.

These apps can help you tweak your SEO and bring organic traffic to your webstore, increasing your search visibility.

Final Remarks

BigCommerce is a great Ecommerce platform that can be used by anyone with little to no coding or technical knowledge. Once you have mastered the art of search engine optimization for your BigCommerce store, there is nothing that can stop you from ranking and getting more conversions.

Follow all the SEO related requirements and strategies, including the BigCommerce Tips from The Digital Advice throughout this blog post. You will be able to ensure the perfect Ecommerce SEO for your BigCommerce stores, resulting in ranking by Google and more sales conversions.

BigCommerce SEO is the optimisation of your eCommerce store, which BigCommerce generates to help it become visible in search engines and get more visitors and sales conversions.

SEO brings in organic traffic, is long-term and free of cost, and provides long-term results, whereas paid promotions live only as long as you are paying, and their results might not be long-term if you discontinue using them.

Other than the built-in SEO tools of BigCommerce, you can use SEO apps by BigCommerce, like FavSEO, SEOKart, and ReloadSEO, to further improve your SEO journey on the platform.

Yes, if there are changes in Google Algorithms, you must try to change your SEO strategy as per the changes.

The top five SEO strategies for BigCommerce SEO would be:

• Knowing the keywords to be targeted.
• Valuable content that is search engine optimized.
• Building backlinks for the website.
• Image optimization and fast website speed.
• Integration of Analytics & Search Console for SEO monitoring.

SEO mistakes that you should avoid include:

• Not optimizing for mobile, a mobile-friendly website.
• Not handling the duplicate content.
• Slow website speed.
• Missing internal linking and structured data.
  Not integrating Analytics or monitoring SEO.