This Big Cartel SEO guide is exactly what you’d expect a Big Cartel SEO guide to be: a handy way to acquire brand-new knowledge about doing SEO in a Big Cartel online shop or polish your already hard-earned SEO wisdom.
In that regard, it’ll probably lift your spirits to know that this guide helps you perfect the art of:
Implementing Big Cartel SEO strategies and tactics that work
Using effective SEO tools to lighten your workload
Measuring the success (or the lack thereof) of those strategies and tactics
Okay, now let’s see exactly where this guide guides you.
Table of Contents
Your Initial Setup
Use a Custom Domain
When you start with Big Cartel, you have two options: to use a custom domain with a premium plan or to use a bigcartel.com subdomain with the free plan.
Even though it’s good that Big Cartel supports clients by providing a free bigcartel.com subdomain, a custom domain is always better from an SEO standpoint. And generally better for business.
Why? you might ask. Let’s start from the beginning.
Custom domain refers to a website name plus the part that comes after the dot – such as com, net, org, and edu – called the TLD or top-level domain. It’s highly recommended that you stick with com. It’s by far the most familiar TLD – synonymous with the internet for many users – and familiarity breeds trust.
As far as the website name is concerned, your best bet is to opt for something that clearly expresses the unique identity of your brand and is relatable to your target audience. Keep it simple, short, intelligible, and memorable.
Try to avoid hyphens, and don’t use underscores or other uncommon symbols, or for that matter, anything that turns your domain name into a hodgepodge (unless you sell hodgepodge, which we doubt you are doing on a Big Cartel online shop!).
Just consider these two two domains: mybrand.com and mybrand.bigcartel.com. Obviously, the first one is the custom domain, and it conveys a message – your brand is here, and it stands alone. It radiates professionalism. A domain like mybrand.bigcartel.com doesn’t come close to that.
Since custom domains are more user-friendly and meaningful, and search engines are all about being as helpful and convenient to users as possible, it’s reasonable to expect search engines to tilt toward websites with custom domains.
Big Cartel allows you to:
- Connect a custom domain you already own.
Purchase and automatically connect a new domain from Cloudflare, GoDaddy, or other supported domain providers.
Set up a domain manually if your domain provider is not on the list of officially supported domain providers.
Verify Your Domain
The verification of your website domain is necessary regardless of the domain name registrar from which you buy a domain. It proves that you provided correct information and that you’re the genuine owner of that domain.
Usually, you receive a verification link via your email address soon after the purchase.
Typically, you can complete the verification within 15 days. If you fail to do so, your domain will be temporarily suspended.
There are many benefits to domain verification, the most important being:
It prevents people with malicious intent from appropriating your domain.
It’s a fundamental step toward establishing your website’s credibility.
Submit Your Sitemap
A sitemap is just what it sounds like: a map of your website – in this case, a Big Cartel online shop. But it’s important to note that a sitemap contains only the pages that should be visible on the internet, not just any ol’ pages.
This map reveals the structure of your website to Google and other search engines: the pages it includes, the content on those pages, which ones are the most important, and similar information is all contained in a sitemap.
A sitemap lets search engines understand your website better and find its pages faster. That further allows those pages to be indexed sooner than if you left everything for search engines to figure out on their own.
Sitemaps are especially important for websites that are massive and complex, i.e., they have many interrelated pages.
But keep in mind that a search engine can understand the structure and hierarchy of your website as well as the relationship between different pages even without a sitemap – through internal and external linking (more on this later).
However, submitting a sitemap is still highly recommended to ensure more effective indexing.
Besides, it doesn’t do any harm, and it’s a good practice, so why not have it?
The good news is that Big Cartel has got your back on this. It automatically generates a sitemap for stores built on top of it, which is pretty cool, right?
Enable Sitewide SSL
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that secures your online shop by encrypting its communication with the rest of the internet.
Encryption means the data traveling to and from your website is not transferred as plain text, which anyone can read, but is scrambled in mathematically meaningful ways so as to appear as entirely random information to the prying eye, even when someone knows how to peek at it.
The benefits of SSL are obvious.
Imagine sensitive data such as credit card information transferred as clearly readable numbers and words. Now imagine a customer buying something from your Big Cartel store and a total stranger with the right skills being able to see your customer’s credit card number, full name, and CVV number.
What a disaster that would be for any e-commerce and online business! Well, SSL is here to prevent that from happening.
Big Cartel covers this side of your online shop from the very beginning. In virtually all cases, Big Cartel applies SSL to your entire store, regardless of whether you’re on a premium or free plan.
The only exception is when you have improperly secured assets, like images, that you have added yourself. However, that’s fixable, too, and Big Cartel can help you enable SSL sitewide, even in those rare cases.
Set Up Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and Bing Webmaster
Setting up Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Bing Webmaster is key to developing a strategic approach to Big Cartel SEO. Each of them allows you to follow what happens with your online store in terms of website traffic, engagement, leads, sales, popular pages, demographics, and other significant data.
We’ll talk more about their importance and use in the section on SEO analysis. For now, it’s worth noting that they’re all free tools, which makes them must-haves for anyone who plans on doing proper Big Cartel SEO.
Your Online Store Essentials
About Us
The About Us page, contrary to what many probably think, is a pivotal page on a website – it’s right behind the Home page in importance. Hence, it requires proportional attention and care from your side to achieve its full potential.
Your About Us page must tell, or rather show, visitors who you are and what your business does. It should include your company’s story, mission, values, and team members. It must sum up your story, answer the question “Why is your online store here at all?” clearly, and establish rapport with your audience.
But don’t just list facts: present your journey. How did you get started? What inspires your work? What problems do you solve? How do you change the world for the better?
Make it genuine and engaging. That’s what can draw in a larger audience and allow people to feel at home on your site.
Contact Us
A Contact Us page offers visitors ways to get in touch with you. It should include information such as email address, phone number, and physical address.
This page is often among the most neglected on a website, which can harm people’s businesses. But you know better, and you won’t let that happen to you.
To avoid it, in addition to your contact information, ensure your Contact Us page provides details like:
Contact form
General product information
Answers to anticipated customer questions
CTA (call to action) buttons – such as a Call Us button – for those who prefer not to fill out forms
Additionally, ensure this page is easy to find. It can be a frustrating experience for customers to waste time searching for simple contact details just because of your impractical website navigation.
Shipping and Delivery
A page with a shipping and delivery policy is a must for any Big Cartel store, especially considering that Big Cartel is typically used for selling physical art creations.
Transparency and good customer service are key for a successful business, and each of your customers must be able to find with ease information on topics like:
Delivery time
International delivery
Shipping costs
Taxes
Cut-off times
Delivery delays
Damaged or lost-in-transport products
Order tracking
Terms and Conditions
Terms and conditions have a twofold effect: they protect your customers from abuse and protect you from legal liability and copyright infringement.
A Terms and Conditions page must at the very least include:
Privacy policy: Information about your customer’s rights regarding their data and privacy.
Cancellation and return policy: Conditions for refunds, order replacements, and non-returnable items if there are such.
Links to Social Media Accounts
It’s hardly possible today to effectively promote a business without social media.
Even though social media does not directly affect your BigCartel SEO, it can improve it by driving more traffic to specific website pages. For instance, sharing a blog post page on different social media platforms increases the probability of more people viewing it and visiting your website.
Besides that, social media strengthens your credibility. If people find you effortlessly on different social media to learn more about your business, you appear trustworthy. Conversely, a poor online presence can make your Big Cartel e-commerce business look shady.
While all social media platforms are good for promotion, Instagram and Pinterest stand out for creative niches like yours because they focus heavily on visual content. So, if you don’t have profiles on these two, create them. And if you already have, add links to your Big Cartel website.
Use Big Cartel’s Tools for Setting Up Your Store
Big Cartel provides many tools that allow you to set up your store and run your business as smoothly as possible. The number of features you access depends on which pricing plan you choose.
Just as an illustration of what Big Cartel offers:
Intuitive shop designer (website builder) that allows you to change templates, add CSS and integration code, customize fonts and colors, and more
Payment methods like Stripe and PayPal
Multiple sales channels, such as in-person checkout in addition to online selling
Analytic tools to track sales and other data
Shipment and inventory tracking
As far as your shop’s look is concerned, whatever you do, emphasize the artsy side of your business because it’s a Big Cartel store. And Big Cartel’s mission is to help artists and craftspeople promote their creations as best as possible.
Your Products and Product Pages
Optimize Product Descriptions
Optimizing product pages should start with creating unique and compelling product titles.
Use a highly specific product title such as “Digital print for wall art” instead of, say, the generic “Digital print.”
However, try to keep your title below 60 characters because Google may trim longer titles in the search results.
Next are product meta descriptions. Each of your product pages must have a meta description that provides a straightforward insight into what your product is about.
As people can see meta descriptions in Google search results without clicking links and pages, they should contain important details that quickly capture people’s attention.
Third, write product descriptions that highlight the standout features and benefits of your art or craftwork. They should include information like materials, size, availability, and price.
And keep your product descriptions updated. For instance, if a particular product is sold out, don’t forget to inform your audience.
One more thing: Product descriptions should contain keywords, that is, words you know people use when they search online for products like yours.
Finally, add high-quality product images and, if possible, videos of your products. People are predominantly visual beings, so having nice visuals showcasing your products makes your online offerings immediately more appealing to your visitors.
For instance, photos of how your products look when used by real people in real-life situations can be of high value to any website visitor. And photos taken from different angles against a white or solid background allow your product to stand out prominently and keep your audience’s focus on it.
Videos can help your audience relate even more to what you offer. You can include people, props, or settings that help create a story around your product in a relatable way.
Both images and videos allow you to present more complex details much more effectively than text, making it easier for visitors to familiarize themselves with your products.
Categorize Your Products
To ensure top-notch site navigation and user experience, you should organize your products into categories and subcategories. And for that, you need a category page.
As you could’ve easily guessed, a category page arranges products or content with the same or similar theme under the same category. Essentially, it’s an organized directory within your website that helps your customers find what they need.
To create a good category page, you must first think of the best way to group the products you sell. The number of categories would largely depend on the diversity of your offerings.
For example, if you create various forms of art, you may have these categories:
Prints
Posters
Canvases
Goodies (miscellaneous art products like stickers, bookmarks, and other small items)
Or if you sell only prints, you can categorize them into:
Digital prints for wall art
Digital prints for shirts
Make sure to optimize your category page for SEO by writing suitable titles and meta descriptions, as well as using target keywords. After all, it’s a website page, so you still need to take the necessary steps for people to find your page more easily than your competitors’ pages.
Last but not least, include links to your categories and subcategories in the navigation menu. A good navigation menu helps your customers quickly find the sections they’re interested in without clicking through multiple pages. And the categories of products you sell would be one of the first things they’d want to see.
Your Big Cartel Blog
Start a Blog
A blog is critical for SEO. And it’s next to impossible to take the first step toward that almost mythical top place on Google’s first page without ever starting a blog.
An exhaustive list of blogging benefits would be pretty long. But if you’d like to know the most important, here is a short one:
A blog drives targeted traffic to your website. When you publish blog posts revolving around relevant keywords, i.e., topics, you increase your store’s visibility and attract traffic organically – without paying for ads.
A blog builds your niche authority. Publishing consistently good blog content on subjects in your niche means manifesting yourself as a domain authority. Authority builds credibility, and when people see you as trustworthy, they’re more likely to buy from you.
A blog promotes your products. It allows you to showcase your offerings differently than on product pages, which is nice for a change. You can create heaps of diverse, engaging content that introduce your products to your audience in a non-salesy fashion yet motivate them to buy.
A blog improves user engagement. You can add a comment section after your blog posts and invite readers to express their opinions or even upgrade your content with new valuable information. Also, you can add social media share icons to let them spread the word about the good things they’ve read.
A blog serves as a catalyst for email marketing and social media promotion. You can rehash blog content for social media – say, by creating a short post where you add a link to your latest blog post, inviting people to check it out – or send it to your subscribers in your email newsletter.
Is there a downside to a blog?
Well, kind of. Starting a blog can be hard when you have suboptimal conditions.
Think of it this way. When you camp, you need camping equipment. When you run, you need running equipment. And when you blog, you need blogging equipment. Not something that can be adapted for blogging (among other things), but blogging equipment. Specialized. Purpose-built. Something like… DropInBlog.
DropInBlog lets you add a blog to your Big Cartel store in simple steps and work toward a better SEO and user experience from the moment you add a blog.
Some of the DropInBlog highlights, apart from creating post after post conveniently in a cozy editor (yes, editors can be cozy!), are the following:
Create categories for your blog to organize your posts in different groups so people can find the type of content they want to read.
Add authors with their bios and social media links if you have multiple in-house writers or collaborate with external writers or maybe even bloggers, influencers, and other brands popular in your niche.
Optimize your blog posts for search engines with the SEO Analyzer, a tool that evaluates your post’s page title, meta description, and content, giving you guidance on what you do well and what you need to improve.
Manage multiple blogs using a single login with the unified account login feature.
And when you’re all set, don’t forget to add a link to your blog in the navigational menu. There’s hardly a better way to make it easy to find it.
Do Keyword Research
Writing blog posts based on your inspiration of the moment may appear viable and even cool at the beginning. However, since blogging requires discipline and regularity, expecting to be continuously inspired is not a feasible long-term approach – not even for a writer like Haruki Murakami.
Data and informed decisions should back up every blog post you write since blogging is not a casual affair. It’s a content marketing method, and keyword research is its backbone.
After adding a blog to your Big Cartel store, the next big step is to do keyword research. Keyword research allows you to discover what to write about, that is, what’s relevant to your offerings, niche, and audience.
Keywords are common words and phrases users type in a search engine like Google to find the latest information, learn something new, research a company, or make a purchase.
Hence, doing keyword research means figuring out which words or phrases your target audience uses, creating blog posts around those topics, and incorporating related keywords into your blog as well as product and category pages.
Google and Amazon
You can start your keyword research with as simple a step as typing a word or phrase you know is absolutely relevant to your work. For instance, “pottery” if you sell pottery.
Google autocomplete will start showing you related queries as you type your word. Google’s suggestions will be based on what people typically search for when they’re interested in pottery.
If you add a space or place your cursor before your word, you’ll see even more keyword phrases containing it. Also, when you type words and press Enter, Google will show you common related questions people ask (People Also Ask) about pottery or whatever it is that you offer.
You can do a similar thing on Amazon. The only difference is that Amazon is more product-focused and often includes filterable details like price.
When you’re done with Google and Amazon, compile all the interesting keywords you’ve found and put them in a spreadsheet.
Specialized SEO Platforms
As helpful as typing words in search engines is, you must up your game. And there’s no better way to do that than to do keyword research using specialized SEO platforms, such as Ahrefs, Keyword Tool, MarketMuse, Moz, or Semrush.
Even if their paid subscriptions can be a bit on the expensive side, these platforms typically provide a limited number of free features that can support your BigCartel SEO efforts tremendously. They cut so much time by giving you important information and insights into your keyword of interest, such as:
Keyword volume
Keyword difficulty
Keyword variations
Related questions
User intent
Keyword strategy
SERP (search engine results page) analysis
Now that you have a long list of relevant keywords, how do you decide which to focus on?
Categorize Your Keywords
To bring order to the chaos, you need first to categorize your keywords, that is, group similar keywords based on search intent. Search intent is the reason why users look for something on the search engine, and it falls within one of four categories:
Navigational: Users try to find a specific website or page, such as “BigCartel login” or “Big Cartel support.”
Informational: Users want to learn more about a topic, like “How to choose a new smartwatch.”
Commercial: Users research products to compare different options before purchasing, such as “The best budget running shoes.”
Transactional: Users are ready to make a purchase, like “Coupon deals for a paint brush set.”
Your Big Cartel store content will be a mixture of these four. For instance, your blog will revolve around informational and commercial keywords. Your product pages, on the other hand, will target transactional keywords. Your support page, navigational keywords.
Short Tail and Long Tail
Regardless of the search intent, it’s best to use both short-tail and long-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords are general search terms, such as “filtered water.” Typically, the more general the term, the higher the search volume and difficulty to rank highly for that keyword.
Search volume is the average number of times users search for a specific keyword per month. A high search volume means many people are looking for that term, which can bring more visitors to your website.
Keyword difficulty, on the other hand, tells you how hard it would be to rank on search engines for a specific keyword. It considers how many websites are competing for that keyword and the quality of their content. A higher difficulty score means it’s tougher to rank.
Long-tail keywords are more specific keyword phrases, such as “how to filter water in the wilderness.” They tend to be easier to rank for because of their low keyword difficulty. However, keep in mind that since they typically have a low search volume, you’ll be targeting a much narrower audience.
Still, if you want to rank faster in search engines and avoid competing against the giants in your industry, give precedence to long-tail keywords.
Primary and Secondary Keywords
It’s worth noting that when creating content for your pages, including, of course, blog pages, you should focus on one primary keyword with four to five secondary keywords per page.
The primary keyword is the main theme. For instance, “modern woodcut.”
The secondary keywords can be variants of the primary keyword or, say, subtopics of your main theme. Examples would be “history of woodcut,” “woodcut printing,” and “what is woodcut printing.”
Content Plan
Finally, when you’ve covered all those aspects of keyword research – which, by the way, do not make up an exhaustive list since keyword research is a pretty extensive topic – the process should culminate in coming up with a content plan based on your keyword research.
A content plan should include:
A content strategy, such as what content channels you use, what your primary channel will be (blog?), the role of social media, whether you will focus on organic or paid marketing, and similar.
A content publishing schedule based on topic clusters inferred from your keyword research.
Measurable short-term and long-term goals.
A clear understanding of your target audience profile/profiles.
A straightforward value proposition.
Write Your Blog Posts
The basic principle of blogging is to write your content with the reader, not search engines, in mind. That’s where your Big Cartel SEO writing’s focus should be.
Don’t get us wrong: It is important to know what search engines expect from your content. But remember that their whole point is to show users the best possible content in terms of quality, accuracy, and suitability. In other words, search engines themselves put the user at the heart of everything, so you should do that, too.
Online search is, essentially, a search for concrete solutions to concrete problems. Even wanting to learn information that seemingly doesn’t have a practical application, such as the history of printmaking, is still solving a problem – in this case, the problem is a missing piece of knowledge about something you are interested in.
Back in the days before the internet, you’d have to go to a library and spend a long time looking for what you needed. And you might not have found it. Search engines reduced this effort to a few clicks on your keyboard. It’s impossible not to appreciate that. And you should create content in that spirit.
Creating valuable content that addresses your customer’s needs builds trust. It encourages engagement, leading to repeat visits and higher chances of conversions. Also, when your content genuinely helps people, it naturally attracts more shares, backlinks, and user interaction, which in turn boosts your SEO rankings.
For example, if you sell art supplies, a topic like “how to choose the right brushes for watercolor painting” could be a great choice.
Headings and Subheadings
With that out of the way, a straightforward title and clear structure – i.e., headings and subheadings — are where you should start when creating a blog post.
An unambiguous title with your primary keyword at the center and a clear idea of your article’s structure will push your creative process in the right direction and streamline your efforts by allowing you to know exactly where you’re going and how you’ll get there.
Headings are also semantic signals that help both search engines and your audience better understand the content and context of your webpage.
It’s good SEO practice to use headings hierarchically. H1 should appear only once on a blog post page and be reserved exclusively for your article’s title.
H2s break down the main topic into sections. H2s play the role of primary headings. You can have as many H2s as necessary.
Use H3s and H4s for deeper subheadings within a primary heading. In other words, they can be used to break down the content under an H2 even further into subsections.
Language and Style
Whatever the topic you cover, try to use language that is as simple and easy to understand as possible. Plain English will communicate your ideas better than fancy Latinisms.
Remember, your goal is to solve someone’s specific problem by offering them a concrete solution that you created or by giving them useful information and improving their understanding of a topic. So, make things easy for your audience: Succinct, readable, and straightforward sentences and paragraphs perform nicely in the SEO context.
Rich Media
Rich media is virtually everything that makes your content more multimedia, such as images, videos, GIFs, quizzes, interactive games, and similar. Including any of these in your blog posts is always a good idea, especially the first two.
Good SEO tools, such as DropInBlog’s SEO Analyzer, will always remind you to add images to your articles. Along with other visual content, they help you tell your story better, create emotional rapport, and simplify complex information, making your content more engaging and effective.
Since we’re mostly visual and playful beings, by adding rich media, you increase the likelihood of your content being liked and shared by your readers. This way, by getting the audience to link to your online store, rich media helps directly with your Big Cartel SEO.
Besides, rich media allows you to break the monotony of long walls of text. Even a few images in your article, together with bullet points and short paragraphs, can make your blog post tremendously more appealing, skimmable, and readable.
FAQ Section
People like FAQs because they provide straight answers to common questions and dilemmas. Hence, you should include them in your blog posts. Find the most appropriate place in the article and add an FAQ section.
When you’re adding FAQs, it’s best to use FAQ-structured data. That would make your blog page eligible for rich snippets, aka rich results.
Rich snippets are an easy way to stand out on Google’s first page. They are Google search results enriched with additional information. They typically include highly conspicuous details, such as star ratings, number of reviews, price, time, location, and more, thus attracting more clicks.
To get these eye-catching snippets, you need to implement schema markup on your blog post as well as product pages.
Usually, you’d have to create schema markup yourself. However, good blogging platforms, such as DropInBlog, take care of this side of your blog for you.
DropInBlog automatically grabs the schema-structured data from each blog post and adds it to your online store code, so you don’t have to deal with this yourself.
Call to Action
Your blog post should end with a clear and compelling CTA (call to action). Since you’re working in a highly creative niche, let your creativity loose when writing your CTA.
Don’t settle for standard but kinda boring CTAs like “Order now,” “Buy now,” or “Call us.” They are good, and they make absolute sense in some cases and industries, but they’re everywhere, and sometimes they feel worn out and tired.
Use your imagination to craft an original and powerful yet simple CTA in line with your craft and artful creations.
Keyword Stuffing
We’ve said that your content, in this case, blog posts, must contain keywords relevant to your niche and business. However, please do not overdo your keyword-centered writing.
Yes, there is such a thing as over-optimizing your content, where you try to include so many keywords that you may end up inadvertently harming your blog post’s quality and coherence. That can be a problem – if you do it continuously, you may send the wrong signals to Google – but it is not an insurmountable problem.
But what’s truly a big problem is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is intentional, and, admit it or not, it’s a black-hat SEO tactic that takes overdoing to the next level.
Keyword stuffing means adding keywords so unreasonably often and in unnatural places that your text reads like babbling (if the keywords are visible at all; sometimes manipulators hide them, but search engines can still see them). The idea seems to be to mislead the search engine into viewing your website as a primary source of information on a certain topic.
What you get instead is a penalty. Google, for example, has been known for penalizing websites that resort to keyword stuffing. Penalties include a (dramatic) lowering of your ranking or removing your website altogether from the search engine index.
Duplicate Content
Another big no-no for your Big Cartel SEO is duplicate content.
Duplicate content is as it sounds: Identical or very similar content on multiple pages of a single website or two or more different websites.
The causes for duplicate content can range from accidentally copying content you read somewhere and forgot about to intentionally plagiarizing entire sentences and paragraphs. Creating two very similar pieces on the same topic on your blog also counts as duplicate content.
If it’s this last situation, it’s not good for your SEO because both of these articles will fight to rank for the same keyword, thus “eating” or sabotaging each other’s rankings. This phenomenon is called keyword cannibalization.
Another example of duplicate content is content spinning. That’s when you basically plagiarize someone else’s original text, but to hide that, you reword it. By rewording, we mean, say, using inverted sentences or synonyms.
Whatever its form, duplicate content is bad for SEO because search engines tend to push original and distinctive content higher in the search results. So, even if a certain practice doesn’t include penalties, the fact that it’s not in line with Google’s guidelines makes it not worth your time and effort.
On-Page SEO
Internal Linking
One simple yet effective on-page SEO technique is internal linking.
Internal linking means having links that lead from one of your pages to another. For instance, if you sell prints and write a blog post about modern prints, your article can contain a link that sends the reader over to your product category page.
Internal linking is recommended because:
It improves your website navigation, making it easier for visitors and search engines to find related content.
It allows crawlers to find and index pages on your website easily, especially if it has hundreds of product and blog post pages.
It shows search engines which pages are pivotal on your site due to the established practice of linking to the most important pages.
Strive always to write compelling meta titles and descriptions for your blog posts.
Meta Titles and Descriptions
Meta titles are titles of your blog post pages. A good title should:
Include the main blog post keyword.
Convey concisely the main idea of your page’s content.
Be interesting enough to encourage your customers to click it.
Be no longer than 60 characters.
When coming up with a meta title, it’s highly recommended to:
Emphasize the quality that makes your product unique, say, “handmade.”
Add action words like “shop” and “learn.”
Highlight a convincing benefit, such as “50% off.”
Mention a deal like “buy one, get one free.”
A meta description should inform and simultaneously tickle users’ fancy.
Meta descriptions are summaries of your pages’ content. They’re like a pitch or call to action: Their purpose is to convince users that this page is what they’re looking for.
Like meta titles, meta descriptions should also contain your target keyword and highlight unique benefits like “free shipping” or “save 10%.”
On SERPs, meta descriptions appear right below the page titles.
Their recommended length is 160 characters. Longer than that increases the chances of Google truncating them.
Alt Text and Compressed Images
As we said earlier, long walls of text are not a good practice; you should add rich media, such as images, to make your pages more user-friendly.
Well, when adding images to your blog post or product pages, do the following to boost your Big Cartel store SEO:
Include descriptive alternative text, known as alt text. It’s a short description of the image content, and its function is twofold: The alt text provides better image context for search engine crawlers, and it helps with accessibility.
Optimize image file sizes for faster loading times. Page load speed is an acknowledged SEO factor, meaning that compressed images can contribute substantially toward a higher page load speed, especially if your store includes tons of visual material.
External Linking
Linking to credible and helpful external sources is another good practice when writing blog posts.
When linking to high-quality websites relevant to your Big Cartel business, you:
Show that you have a good understanding of your industry and follow the greatest authorities on your own path to becoming one.
Give more credibility to your statements.
Provide helpful resources for your audience to understand the topic better.
There’s one caveat, though: Avoid linking to your direct competitors. The reason is that by linking to them, you boost their SEO, which is not something you want to do.
Big Cartel SEO Features
It goes without saying that you should rely primarily on specialized SEO solutions when working toward better search engine rankings.
However, keep in mind that Big Cartel, too, supports your efforts with built-in SEO features, such as:
Robots.txt (instructions that tell web crawlers which pages they’re allowed to access)
Sitemaps
Canonical URL (the URL of the preferred page version if you have multiple pages with identical or very similar content)
SEO metadata generation
Appropriately labeled alt tags
Encourage Customer Reviews of Your Products
Encourage and display customer reviews, as genuine user feedback enhances your credibility and positively affects SEO. Google is a fan of user-generated content and will surely push regularly reviewed pages with favorable ratings higher on SERPs.
Moreover, social proof, such as good customer reviews, is a powerful mechanism that encourages more sales. People like reading about other people’s experiences. When potential buyers see positive feedback from others, they’re more willing to make a purchase themselves.
However, getting your customers to leave feedback is not always an easy task. You must create a structured process for asking for reviews and automate it, yet personalize the ask and make leaving feedback as simple as possible.
For instance, you can:
Send automated follow-up emails with personalized content based on user names and preferences after a purchase.
Offer incentives like discounts on future orders.
Provide a simple template for a written review, such as a short and straightforward form that takes seconds to fill out.
SEO Analytics
Once you begin creating content and optimizing your website, you should also start measuring the results of your SEO efforts.
Two must-have tools for monitoring your Big Cartel SEO performance are:
Google Analytics 4: It allows you to track everything from user acquisition to engagement to monetization. GA4 is one of the best tools out there, and it’s free, so there’s no good reason not to integrate it with Big Cartel.
Google Search Console: It’s another free tool that provides insights into search performance, indexing status, and technical issues. Google Search Console does not have all the features that GA4 has. However, it’s still an extremely helpful SEO analytics solution that must be part of your tool stack.
As far as commercial tools are concerned, SEO platforms like Semrush, Moz, and Simple Analytics come in extremely handy when measuring analytics.
Key metrics to pay special attention to are the following:
Page views
Organic traffic
Core Web Vitals
Keyword rankings
Referring domains
Organic conversions
Click-through rates
Website authority
Website health
User behavior (bounce rate and dwell time)
The whole point of SEO analytics is to base your approach on data insights, see what works, and improve it. More specifically, data tells you which pages attract the most traffic, which rank highest, which pages lead to the most conversions, where your most loyal audience comes from, and similar.
In that spirit, you should make a list of KPIs (key performance indicators) against which you measure your SEO performance.
As an illustration, it’s not enough only to check how much organic traffic your online store attracts. You must set specific organic traffic goals, both short- and long-term, and put serious effort into attaining them.
For instance, you may have 1K website visitors per month currently. Your first goal can be to get 5K visitors per month in, say, one quarter. You’d know best if this goal is realistic and attainable.
The most important thing is to refrain from setting overly ambitious goals at the beginning. But when you set one, you should use all means at your disposal to meet your goal.
To continue with the example, if after three months your site traffic is lower than 5K, you’d most probably need to make adjustments in your SEO approach. The same applies to other measurables, such as click-through rates and conversions.
Advanced SEO Strategies
Link Building
Link building is the advanced SEO strategy of earning links from other sites to pages on your site. These links are called backlinks.
Backlinks improve your rankings because search engines view them as a signal of authority and credibility. And the more high-quality links you acquire, the better your chances of ranking high.
Keep in mind these two things when building your backlink profile:
It’s better to get several backlinks from high-authority than many backlinks from low-authority sites. You can use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs to check for high-authority websites since they have a feature called domain authority that shows you how authoritative a website is.
Ensure the sites linking to you are relevant to your niche. Relevance increases the value of the backlink. If you own an art store, getting links from another art store is more relevant than a link from an electronic manufacturer.
Some effective backlink-building tactics for your Big Cartel SEO are the following:
Public relations
One way to do PR is to feature your brand in industry-related blogs, news sites, or online magazines. All you need to do is reach out to journalists and bloggers who cover your niche. Pitch a blog or suggest contributing to their articles, and ask for backlinks in return.
You can also participate in podcasts as a guest. This not only builds your authority but also results in a backlink from the podcast’s website to your store.
Guest blogging
This approach is similar to PR: You write articles on other websites and get links in return.
Linkable assets
Infographics, checklists, original studies, reports, and valuable stats are all linkable assets. Other sites often use these to illustrate and give credibility to their points, which is why it’s one of the link-building tactics suggested by famous SEO experts like Brian Dean.
Forums
Making valuable contributions to discussions on popular forums like Reddit and Quora is a great way to insert a link to your site along the way. But be careful not to come off as too self-promotional. People there discuss issues they care about, so don’t make them feel like you’re taking advantage of their situation.
Link roundups
Link roundups are lists containing links to interesting pages and sites within a niche.
Say you’re a professional photographer who owns a Big Cartel store, and you find a website that curates links to photographers’ websites worth visiting. You can reach out to this link roundup creator, showcase your online store, and ask them to include a link to one of your store pages.
That way, you can earn a new backlink and increase the chances of other people finding you online and linking to your store themselves.
Influencers
Collaborating with influencers is another way to promote your products and earn backlinks. However, bear in mind that this can be an expensive link-building tactic if the influencer is highly popular.
Article comments
Commenting on articles related to subjects you cover is also a good way to include links to your blog posts or product pages.
But here, too, what we said about forums applies: don’t make it too obviously about yourself. People don’t like intrusive and salesy marketing.
Directory listings
Getting backlinks from directory listings is not an efficient backlinking tactic anymore, but it won’t hurt you either.
What you do in this case is find niche-relevant and good directories, like Google Business, list your online business there, and leave a backlink to your Big Cartel shop.
It’s worth noting that directory listings can help with local SEO.
User Experience (UX)
A good UX design makes your website easy and enjoyable to use. It includes:
Easy navigation: Menus and buttons are clear and simple, so people can find what they’re looking for without any hassle.
Quick loading: Pages load fast, so users don’t have to wait and get frustrated.
Works on all devices: The site looks great on phones, tablets, and computers, giving everyone a good experience.
Easy-to-read text: The text is big enough, spaced well, and easy to read. Information is broken up into headings, bullet points, and images to make it more digestible.
Consistency: The look and feel are the same across all pages and devices, so users know what to expect as they browse.
Clear feedback: Users get clear messages when they do something, like a confirmation when they submit a form or an error message if something goes wrong.
Accessibility: The design is made so everyone can use the website, including people with disabilities. That includes features like text descriptions for images and easy keyboard navigation.
When your customers find your site easy to use and engaging, they tend to stick around longer, explore more pages, and are less likely to leave right away. That signals to search engines that your site is valuable, which can help boost your rankings.
Bounce Rates
Good UX can lead to increased time on site, more pages visited per session, and lower bounce rates. Reduced bounce rates are especially important.
Bounce rate is a metric that shows the percentage of page visitors who leave without taking any action, such as clicking or buying. A high bounce rate means low user engagement. And low user engagement means low conversion rates, which is not good, especially for an e-commerce store.
High-quality content, good copywriting, clear CTAs, and social proof are all factors that lower bounce rates in addition to good UX. So, work on these to reduce bounce rates as much as possible.
SEO Trends and Algorithms
Keep up with evolving SEO trends and algorithms.
Google, for example, regularly updates its algorithms to give users the best possible search experience. These updates can affect your site’s ranking, so it’s important to stay informed about the latest best practices, especially after sweeping algorithm changes.
Good ways to stay SEO updated and relevant are the following:
Join SEO communities.
Follow thought leaders.
Subscribe to newsletters from sites like DropInBlog and Niche Pursuits.
Read reputable SEO blogs like Google Search Central Blog, Moz, and Search Engine Land.
Final Thoughts
The best time to start SEO for your Big Cartel store was yesterday; the next best time is today.
This detailed SEO guide was created to be your go-to resource as you embark on your Big Cartel SEO journey. But remember, SEO is a continuous process, so never stop learning and looking for more and more sources of search engine optimization wisdom.
