BigCommerce SEO Features: A Complete Review

This is a quick review of BigCommerce SEO features for your BigCommerce store. SEO is critical to your business strategy, especially when you sell on BigCommerce. But is BigCommerce good for SEO?

In this blog post, you’ll learn:

• What BigCommerce SEO means
• Whether BigCommerce is good for SEO

What is SEO on BigCommerce?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on BigCommerce is all about helping your BigCommerce site achieve a higher rank on search engines. The higher the ranking is, the more visitors to your store – in other words, more potential customers.

Is BigCommerce good for SEO?

BigCommerce provides many built-in SEO-friendly functionalities.

Regarding technical SEO, BigCommerce already does most of the technical work for you. That means you don’t have to care much about your website security and data storage, website architecture, mobile friendliness, URLs, etc. This is such a relief for merchants who don’t have technical expertise.

That said, BigCommerce still gives space to those who would love to customize their page by themselves. For instance, they offer auto-populated URLs that are SEO-friendly, but if you want, you can still customize the URLs.

In other words, BigCommerce offloads most of the technical SEO, so that you can focus more on your content strategy.

Regarding on-page SEO, BigCommerce also offers several basic functionalities for BigCommerce blogs, such as:

• Tags
• Alt text for images
• Social sharing widgets

If the pre-built functionalities for SEO are not enough for you, BigCommerce also has SEO integrations that are helpful for you in optimizing your site.

Key features of built-in BigCommerce SEO

A number of high-tech SEO features for your website will be taken care of by BigCommerce.

BigCommerce will:

• Provide auto populated URLs that are SEO optimized for every page of your store. If you want to customize your URL, you can still change them yourself.
• Ensure a unique URL for every single page. Therefore, you won’t get punished for duplicate content.
• Provide microdata to improve your search result listings with information like ratings, pricing, brand, and stock levels.
• Automatically rewrite and redirect the URL when you rename a product. This helps avoid encountering a 404 error (broken link).
• Provide a special CDN (content delivery network) to ensure your site loads quickly.
• Provide a well-organized site architecture.
• Offer a free SSL certificate for stores on any plan to secure your data.
• Provide a mobile-friendly experience with their Stencil themes.

Best SEO apps on BigCommerce

FavSEO

FavSEO is the most widely used SEO app on BigCommerce. With it, you can easily optimize your content, whether old or new. It has a very visual-friendly dashboard, helping you to monitor everything.

Features

• Performs a SEO audit
• Has score for your site performance
• Allows you to bulk edit content
• Support new keyword discovery
• Submits your sitemap to Google
• Tracks the ranking of keywords on Google

FavSEO will charge you $19.95/month.

ProSEOTracker

ProSEOTracker is a great tool for you to optimize your content and get analytical insight into how your site is performing. This SEO tool will leverage your site, helping you to sell more.

Features

• Optimizes metadata and checks for SEO issues
• Has keyword planner
• Researches keywords and plans keywords
• Tracks your ranking
• Analyzes and monitors ecommerce traffic, revenue, and best-selling items
• Monitors all PPC campaigns

FavSEO will charge you $16.95/month.

SEO Rich Snippets

If you are familiar with SEO practice, you’ll surely know that SEO rich snippets play an essential role in boosting your ranking on Google. This app – SEO Rich Snippets – will provide you with small yet essential features that will make your site look more reliable.

Features

• Provides product review stars, price, currency, product availability
• Has the SEO Rich Snippets App installed automatically
• Creates FAQ, HowTo and video structured data

SEO Rich Snippets will charge you $22.00/month.

SEOKart

SEOKart is perhaps the most comprehensive SEO tool on BigCommerce. With its features, you will be able to drive your traffic and thus sales to your store.

Features

• Has advanced SEO audit
• Has SEO Rich Snippets
• Automatically optimizes your images
• Bulk edits your content
• Automatically optimizes all the new products and categories
• Tracks the ranking of your website and your competitor’s on Google

SEOKart will charge you $20.00/month.

Image Optimizer

Today is the age of visualization and other senses. To be able to sell products, you have to show your customers how your products look. And thus, image should also be an important part of your SEO strategy. But how to optimize it to benefit you the most? Image Optimizer is here to help.

Features

• Compresses images to speed up your site
• Makes your images SEO-friendly
• Allows you to restore your original images for 30 days

Image Optimizer has a custom quote for you.

What to do to optimize SEO for your BigCommerce pages

There are 4 types of pages you need to optimize SEO. They are homepage, category pages, product pages, web content pages, and blog posts.

Homepage

To edit Homepage, go to Settings › General › Website › Search Engine Optimization section

In this page, you should spend time optimizing these fields:

• Home Page Title: it would automatically be your store’s name if you leave it blank.
• Meta Keywords: optional
• Meta Description is a short description of your store.
• WWW/No WWW Redirect

Product Pages

Edit any product or add a product › SEO & Sharing section › SEO

You can optimize this kind of page for SEO by optimizing the content for Product description. This description is right below Product Information.

When maximizing product description for SEO, remember to make your content easy to read and don’t duplicate your content on two or more than two products. You should also adopt your keyword strategy to describe your products effectively.

Category pages

To edit Category pages, go to Products › Product Categories › Edit › Search Engine Optimization section

Editing the category pages is pretty similar to the product pages.

Web Content Pages

Go to Storefront › Web Pages › Edit › Advanced Options section

To optimize your web content pages as well as blog posts, you need a clearer strategy to maximize your on-page and off-page SEO for your BigCommerce sites.

Blog Posts

Go to Storefront › Blog › Edit › SEO section

Final thought

To achieve a higher rank in search engine results correlates with making more sales. An SEO strategy will help you make that come true.

Honestly, BigCommerce SEO is supposed to be good enough, even though BigCommerce is not famous for its SEO features. That said, if you are a BigCommerce merchant, you can still optimize its native SEO features while integrating some SEO apps.