How can BigCommerce help with your SEO strategy?

BigCommerce is an eCommerce platform that enables eCommerce brands to create, market, grow and maintain a business of any size all in one place. 

BigCommerce comes with many SEO features that can be very beneficial to your business. These features will allow you to improve your search rankings and drive more organic traffic to your website. In this guide, we will discuss these features and how BigCommerce can help with your SEO strategy. 

What is SEO and why will it help your business? 

Firstly, let's discuss what SEO actually is and why it will be beneficial for your business. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and if done correctly, it will optimise your online visibility. SEO is the process of improving your website in order to increase search engine rankings when people search for your products/services. SEO is a fundamental aspect of your digital marketing strategy because if your website has a high ranking on search engine results pages, then you will have greater visibility than your competition and this will likely increase sales and therefore profits. Search engines will look for different ranking factors based on the users. As such, it is important that eCommerce businesses do everything they can do in order to rank higher to increase their visibility.

BigCommerce SEO

The BigCommerce platform provides businesses with built-in SEO features to help with increasing search engine ranking and driving traffic to your website. You are able to change product names and descriptions, target specific keywords for all of your products and also optimise product images. BigCommerce also uses its content delivery networks in order to optimise your website’s load times, which can be considered a key ranking factor. 

BigCommerce’s built-in SEO features 

• Content Delivery Network (CDN):  BigCommerce has a network that will constantly work to ensure that your website loads quickly for users and search engines, which is an important factor for search engines to consider when ranking websites. 

• SEO-friendly URLs: BigCommerce will generate SEO-friendly URLs for every single one of your pages on your website. There is also an option on the platform for you to edit these URLs to meet your specific needs and wants.  

• Unique URLs: BigCommerce ensures that every page on your website has a unique URL so that you will not be negatively impacted for duplicate content. 

• Built-in microdata: Built in microdata, sometimes known as ‘rich snippets’, will be built into your product pages to enhance your search result listings with information such as pricing, stock levels and ratings. 

• 301 redirects and URL rewrites: If you make changes or move pages on your website, BigCommerce will automatically update the URL. For example, if you rename a product, the URL generated will adjust in order to reflect the name change and the old URL will redirect to the new URL. 

• Edit your robot.txt file: BigCommerce enables you to optimise your website for SEO by controlling which pages are crawled by Google.

How to optimise your BigCommerce SEO

Keywords 

Keywords are words and phrases that should be included in your page descriptions and meta data that are related to your on-site content - an essential aspect of SEO. BigCommerce offers a feature that will help you understand your keyword density. However, it can’t tell you what keywords you should be using, so it’s important to firstly carry out your own keyword research to discover relevant keywords and phrases that are being searched for on search engines. 

On-site optimisation

On-site optimisation refers to the content on your website and is extremely important to get your web pages ranking. There are four key areas of your on-site optimisation: 

• Meta title: This is the first line that will appear on your users search results page and it should include the main keywords in order to rank. Search engines will use this as a key piece of information when ranking your webpage. 

• Meta description: This is the description under the title that will describe the on-site content. This is what will simulate the reader to click on your webpage and can help to increase your amount of clicks. 

• Headers: These are the headings throughout your on-site pages and should contain natural keywords throughout. A lack of proper headings will make it difficult for search engines to understand what your content is about and could impact negatively on your ranking. 

• Quality content: Content is extremely important for SEO. It needs to provide good, useful information for your users. Websites that contain informative content that their users are interested in can perform extremely well when ranking on search engine results pages. BigCommerce makes it easy to add all of your on-site content, as it provides all of the SEO fields required. You simply need to fill in the relevant fields with your content. 

• Images: When reviewing your content, search engines don’t just focus on words. They also look at the images on your site. They will look at alt text and file names, so you need to include both of these in your SEO strategy for it to be successful. 

Alt text is used to provide a description of the image for visually impaired users and also to allow search engines to understand your content more thoroughly. The description should include your keywords for search engines but should also provide a clear description so that it is understood by users that cannot access the image. BigCommerce has a setting that allows you to add alt text and file names to your images. 

Assess your on-site SEO 

SEO involves a lot of processes to ensure that your website ranks higher on search engine results pages. It is important that you assess all of the things we have talked about to ensure your SEO will be successful and get your website ranking. 

To summarise

BigCommerce is a platform that has everything you need to manage your online store and when it comes to SEO, it is extremely helpful. It provides you with SEO features and support to help your website rank higher on search engine results pages. It will provide you with built-in tools to make it easier for you but also gives you full control over all of your SEO components, enabling you to edit anything to how you want it to be. 

SEO can be a difficult concept to grasp but when using BigCommerce, over time it will enable you to improve your SEO strategy with ease and, therefore, increase your ranking and amount of organic traffic to your website ultimately leading to sales and revenue.

‍If you would like to learn more about integrating your BigCommerce store with a 3PL provider to make the process and fulfilment experience as seamless as possible, contact us and we will show you how we can help.