Launching and managing a BigCommerce website is something that any eCommerce entrepreneur can do – even with no development experience whatsoever.
The BigCommerce platform’s easy-to-edit fields and drag-and-drop functionality make it ideal for users of all skill levels.
But you still want that website to generate respectable organic traffic, right? It’s easy to make a misstep as an inexperienced website proprietor that can have large consequences in terms of SEO.
In other words, development work can impact SEO, which will ultimately have a huge impact on how much organic traffic reaches your website.
But, with the help of an experienced BigCommerce developer, you may be able to stay some of those concerns.
1. Minifying Code
Excess code on an online store’s website slows it down, which in turn ruins the customer experience. Not only can developers look at the actual code of a web page and make manual edits that can speed up a website, but they can also install 3rd party tools that can facilitate the process. Fortunately, BigCommerce allows for relatively seamless API integrations in this latter instance.
2. Updating Meta Data and Alt Data
Individually, a single title tag or optimized image isn’t going to make a BigCommerce store soar to the tops of the SERPs, but together, optimized on-page data such as alt attributes, page titles, and meta descriptions can give a website a slight edge.
Anyone can make them, too, since they are easy to edit in BigCommerce; a developer just might be able to do it faster.
3. Implementing 301 Redirects
Every time you update a website’s URL, if any pages link to the old slug, you will just have created a broken link. A broken link, which results in a 404 error, is bad news for SEO.
BigCommerce developers are fastidious about implementing the proper redirects if and when they make edits to URLs; that way your site can work toward the goal of eliminating 404 errors.
4. Scrubbing a BigCommerce Website for Duplicate Content
Occasionally, developers use advanced tools to help them scrub a website for duplicate content. Duplicate content might not ruin the user experience, because readers might not even know where the content came from in the first place. If it is noticeable to them, however, it will make an eCommerce website seem less legitimate and far less authoritative.
In terms of SEO, it’s even worse. Duplicate content can either result in an outright penalty or a loss of authority. There’s conflicting evidence here, but the general consensus is not to steal content because, at best, all you’ll be doing is deferring authority to the original publisher.
5. Properly Implementing the Robots.txt File
One of the main functions of the Robots.txt file is to tell robotic web crawlers with pages of a website they should and should not (or cannot) crawl.
It’s a very simple bit of code, but if your Robots.txt file is not configured properly, it can block Google from seeing and indexing large portions of your website – which is not good for SEO because it will prevent users from finding those pages.
6. Improving Site Speed/Developing a Custom Theme That Is Optimized for Speed
Site speed has a huge impact on the shopping experience and a pretty big impact on SEO, too. Let’s say you love your current theme but is just a little bit too slow for comfort.
A BigCommerce developer can either edit the code of the theme to make it faster or develop a faster, separate but visually identical custom-designed theme that allows your site to maintain its branded appeal while getting a boost for SEO.
Take Development and SEO into Your Own Hands (with the Help of an Elite BigCommerce Developer)
While this eCommerce platform is designed to create effective, appealing eCommerce stores that are optimally prepared to grow your business, a team of BigCommerce development experts can be the key to faster, more reliable growth.
Work with 1DigitalⓇ Agency, an Elite BigCommerce development team with ten years of experience. Their developers and designers are thoroughly familiar with the inner workings of the platform and have executed projects as intricate as building entirely new websites to those as simple as finding and fixing bugs.
Whatever your project calls for, they can do it – especially if it lies at the intersection of BigCommerce website development and eCommerce SEO – their specialty.
