Steal These Tips from BigCommerce for Your Online Store

Over recent years, ecommerce has been a hot topic, with more purchasers flocking online to buy their favorite products rather than heading to the store. Ever since the pandemic started, online shopping has gradually become more of a necessity than a convenience. Even those traditional businesses who said they’d never have an ecommerce store have given in and started selling via the internet.

Tools such as BigCommerce have made the transition eternally easier. This out-of-the-box ecommerce store builder gives everyone – from beginners to experts – the tools they need to create an aesthetically pleasing, technically sound, successful online store. Like with anything, the more BigCommerce tips and tricks you know, the more efficiently you’ll be up and running with a user-friendly and SEO-optimized store. If you haven’t got the time or resources to learn the new skills needed, our expert ecommerce SEO agency will work alongside you to build your perfect store.

Let’s get into it. Here are some top tips and answers to your BigCommerce questions to get you up and running with a highly successful online store.

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

BigCommerce SEO Services & Features

One essential element of any website is SEO (search engine optimization). For first-timers, this phrase sounds daunting, but it’s essentially a set of practices you need to put in place for more people to find your store when they search for similar products or brands in Google, Bing, or their preferred search engine. The amazing thing about BigCommerce is it has so many features built-in that you’ve already saved yourself a lot of time and effort.

     1. Optimized URLs

URL structure is imperative for SEO. The problem for ecommerce stores is that they can get quite messy. BigCommerce auto-populates SEO-friendly URLs, using categories, sub-categories, product names, showing a clear user journey, and making your site easy for crawlers to navigate.

     2. Unique URLs

Duplicate URLs are a big SEO negative, and they often occur when stores use the same product name or add a product to multiple categories. However, BigCommerce automatically detects this issue and auto-populates a unique URL every time.

     3. Microdata

This is incredibly advanced SEO, and BigCommerce has it built-in! Microdata, known as rich snippets, is used to add massive value to your search engine listings. Ratings, prices, brand, and stock levels automatically appear when people find your products in search.

     4. CDN (Content Delivery Network) 

Website speed is a vital element of SEO – the faster your site loads, the more Google and users like it. Optimizing this can be a challenge, but not with BigCommerce. The CDN is constantly working in the background, finding ways to load your store more effectively.

     5. 301 Redirect & URL Rewrites

There’s nothing more annoying than finding a page not found, 404 error. While users don’t like it, neither do search engines. These usually happen when you change a product name, move something to a different category, or remove a product from your site. BigCommerce automatically creates a 301 redirect, ensuring users will find the page they need, and search engines won’t penalize you.

Useful BigCommerce SEO Fields

     1. Metadata – Title & Description

The title and paragraph you see in search engine results are known as metadata. While the title tag is important for SEO – both the title and description are crucial for encouraging users to click through to your website. This small snippet of text is often the deciding factor in whether a user opts for your listing or a competitor. 

If you don’t populate these fields, search engines will automatically add them in for you, but they won’t be optimized in the way you’d like them to be. Of the two, title tags are most important, make these enticing, use keywords naturally, and don’t oversell. You’re limited to around 60-70 characters, so be punchy. Additionally, with both title tags and descriptions, be unique – never use the same content across two different pages because you’ll be punished for duplicate content.

     2. Keywords

The keyword section is a BigCommerce help tool that brings huge benefits and gives feedback on your work. It doesn’t allow you to conduct keyword research, so you’ll need a tool such as Semrush to do that. However, once you’ve written your keyword-optimized content, it will provide an analysis and rating of how well your web page is likely to perform in search. 

Additional SEO Expertise

There are SEO elements that BigCommerce doesn’t cover, so you’ll need to look outside of the ecommerce platform. 

     1. Backlinks

One of the most important ranking factors is referrals and backlinks – this is when other websites link to your website.

     2. Content Marketing

Keyword optimized, frequently updated, and valuable content is crucial to ranking for more search terms. Consider adding a blog to your website to attract more traffic. Covering popular topics that your target audience is searching for, answering significant questions, sharing local knowledge, and much more will add value for users, give others more places to link to, and improve your domain authority.

     3. Technical SEO

Site speed, responsiveness, robot.txt, image optimization, XML sitemap, and many more elements are covered by technical SEO. Essentially, these are the practices put in place to ensure your website meets the most up-to-date performance criteria for bots and crawlers to index your pages effectively. You may need to enlist the assistance of an expert for many of these.

In Summary

The BigCommerce SEO service is an out-of-the-box ecommerce store builder with some great functionalities to get you started. Within the system, many features contribute to your website ranking highly within Google. However, there is a tremendous amount of competition out there, and you need to do everything in your power to improve your BigCommerce SEO optimization. 

Learning and implementing the skills we’ve mentioned will empower you to outperform your competitors and attract more users to your site. Becoming a master of SEO is your secret weapon to generating more sales than ever.