A Guide to BigCommerce SEO: All You Need to Know

You can blog all you want, but if your website is not being picked up in a Google search, you’re missing a large chunk of your potential market. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a process of actions that improve your website’s visibility online. In this post, we’re going to discuss BigCommerce SEO specifically – how to get the most out of it and maximize the potential of your BigCommerce store.

Why SEO Is Important for E-Commerce

SEO is the essential piece of the puzzle that makes your site more visible online. Greater visibility means more traffic, which leads to more sales – the ultimate goal for any e-commerce store. 

Of course, there’s more science to it than just “more traffic means more sales.” When your website ranks highly in SERPs, this positions your store as being credible and secure – because Google only displays the best quality results at the top of a search query.

SEO is also a major component in content marketing. Content marketing or blogging is an inexpensive but effective form of marketing. Regular publishing keeps your website active, and strategically incorporated keywords enable potential customers to find your blog and, consequently, your store. In saying that, blogging will also help to drive more organic traffic to your site, and organic traffic has greater value and quite often leads to higher conversion rates.

The Fundamentals of SEO

SEO is broken into two parts; the first focuses on the content within your site, and the second is more technical, where you optimize site functionality for the best user experience. It’s important to remember that – above all – SEO is a process, and there’s no magic recipe. So, let’s go through some BigCommerce SEO fundamentals.

On-Page SEO

At the very beginning of the SEO journey, it’s wise to do a bit of competitor research. Find out what your competitors are doing and what topics they focus on. Then, you’ll have to do thorough keyword research. 

Selecting keywords that have just the right level of search volume and competition is important. Including long-tail keywords – longer, more specific phrases – is a smart way to dodge the competition and get picked up in semantic search. This is also the case for selecting keywords that accurately match search intent with your content.

If you’re already on board the content marketing bandwagon, you need to consider the layout and structure of your blog posts. Always add a meta title and meta description because otherwise you’ll end up with whatever Google auto-populates, and it may not present your content in the best way possible. 

You also need to ensure that heading tags are used correctly throughout your content. Breaking a page up with headings is easier to read, will improve the user experience, and will keep your customers on your site longer. It’s important to be methodical about optimizing your content and to frequently monitor traffic and the impact your SEO has. 

Technical SEO

The other aspect of SEO is helping the search engine crawlers to correctly index your pages. You can start by checking the indexability of your site with any of the free tools online. This will tell you if there’s a problem indexing any of your pages and why. 

Including internal links between pages is also really helpful. Adding schema markup is also another bonus point for helping search engines read and understand your content.

You can consider other technical aspects, like how fast your pages load and if it’s mobile-friendly. Pages that are bloated with unnecessary code or large images will load more slowly, and this is a big red flag to search engines. 

Ultimately, all of this user experience plays into your core web vitals score, which impacts your search engine rankings. So, as you can see, SEO isn’t a specific recipe or a one-size-fits-all solution – it’s a combination of factors that lead to success. 

BigCommerce and SEO 

BigCommerce SEO Features

BigCommerce promotes its optimized URLs. When you create a new page or post, the URL will be automatically created and always unique, so there’s no risk of a double-up. What’s also really nice is that these URLs can also be edited, so you have control over URL structure.

BigCommerce automatically adds rich snippets to your product pages so your products can be found more easily and data like ratings, price, and stock availability are displayed. In addition, if you make any changes to a page or product, all your links to that will be automatically redirected to the new one. 301 redirects are automated, so you never have to worry about broken links.

BigCommerce is renowned for fast site loading speeds, which is partly due to its super-fast content delivery network working away in the background. You can also edit your own robot.txt file so that you have control over which pages are crawled by search engines, eliminating those that don’t need to be included.

DropInBlog: Another Option

If you’re serious about blogging and don’t feel like BigCommerce gives you enough SEO control over your blog content, then it’s worth looking into DropInBlog. 

DropInBlog is a professional blogging app that can be found on BigCommerce’s app marketplace and integrates seamlessly. It gives you the ability to develop and manage all your blog content, ensuring it is always perfectly optimized for SEO. Read how to create a blog on BigCommerce using DropInBlog.

You have much the same features as with BigCommerce, including the ability to edit URLs and your meta title and description. It even automatically populates schema markup for your content to really shine in SERPs. 

In addition, you can manage multiple authors and visitor comments and include social sharing buttons and other features like a reading progress indicator. All of these things contribute to a positive user experience on your blog and help you create a winning business blog.

One thing BigCommerce doesn’t have is an SEO assessment tool. You can optimize the content to the best of your knowledge or use a third-party app. Either way, it’s really helpful to have a tool to scan your content before publishing. 

DropInBlog has just that – the SEO Analyzer, which is a built-in SEO assessment tool that actively scores your content as you type. It provides clear details of what to change in order to improve the score and have perfectly optimized content.

Tips for BigCommerce SEO

1. Ensure your site is structured efficiently. You want a logical flow from the homepage out to product pages and your blog.
2. Add meta descriptions to every page, whether it’s a product page or a blog post. Make sure to include keywords at the beginning of the meta description where possible. 
3. Add internal links between your pages; you can do this manually or use an internal linking tool to identify where the best links can be made.
4. Include social media sharing buttons – getting seen on other platforms is hugely beneficial. It’s even better when someone else shares your content.
5. Help your site to run as fast as possible by compressing images and enabling Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) if your chosen theme allows it.
6. Develop a content marketing strategy and a blogging schedule – regular blogging is key to success when it comes to content marketing. 

FAQs