BigCommerce, as a SaaS platform, has a lot of things going for it in terms of SEO that make it easy for both online shoppers and eCommerce administrators to use.
It offers high uptime, high website speeds, good security, and several technical factors that make optimizing for SEO fairly easy.
But you can still do things to attract more organic traffic to your online store, even if you haven’t hired BigCommerce SEO services yet. These are some of them.
Perform Keyword Research
First and most importantly, you need to perform keyword research before you can make any meaningful optimizations. You’ll want to use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush that will let you see what the competition is like for each keyword.
Pay close attention to the number of monthly searches, as well as to the competitive density and difficulty associated with each keyword. These metrics will determine how hard it will be for you to get your BigCommerce website to rank for them.
Also, give search intent some focus. In eCommerce, you’ll want to focus on keywords that are either commercial or transactional and not informational, because people searching for these will be wanting to make purchases.
Try not to overdo it; at first, pick 15 to 30 keywords that you can really focus on for some of your key product or category pages.
Prioritize Key Pages
Once you’ve selected a cohort of keywords your focus should shift to the products, services, or pillars you want to promote.
Focus on these key pages and select a keyword or a few keywords for each. Keep in mind that you don’t want your target pages to compete with each other for ranking.
Optimize Metadata, Page Titles, and Content
Metadata and page titles are easy to optimize in the back end of BigCommerce. Simply login into your admin portal and use the page editor to write new metadata for each target URL. Remember to use your target keywords in your metadata but don’t put each keyword in more than once. Then go through the pages and make sure your title tags are updated with those keywords, too.
Each page should also have fresh content infused with your target keywords. In your content, promote and inform. Try to answer questions your clients have had about those products in the past.
Offering new, optimized content for each target product URL will vastly increase your chances of ranking and attracting organic traffic, especially if you optimize the copy not only for search intent but with your target keywords.
Don’t Copy Content from Manufacturers
One note; as you’re going through and optimizing your website with your chosen keywords, no matter how tempting it becomes, do not copy content from your manufacturer partners, or from other websites.
This is called duplicate content and Google will flag it. If you use duplicate content, at best you will lose organic rankings (Google will default them to the original publisher), or at worst, Google will overtly penalize your website.
Optimize Images
One more easy thing you can do is optimize your images. Either compress them before uploading them or use the BigCommerce Image Optimizer app to compress file sizes so they won’t slow down your page load speeds.
You should also optimize all of your images with alt text, and about 50% of these alt text entries should include target keywords from your list.
Hire Professional BigCommerce SEO Services
Finally, if you’re overwhelmed with day-to-day operations and don’t have time to make these piecemeal operations, hire a company for BigCommerce SEO services. Professional BigCommerce SEO experts will not only make the optimizations listed here, but they will also create content schedules, engage in link-building activities, and improve the technical optimization scores for your website.
If you’re not sure where to start with an SEO strategy, consider a free SEO audit from 1DigitalⓇ Agency before you begin – that will furnish you with ideas for how to proceed and where your biggest opportunities lie.
