Something like 50,000 or so websites are built on BigCommerce. It’s a popular eCommerce platform, to be sure.
But the thing is, to be successful in eCommerce, your website needs to be found. SEO is king, and SEO does not come built into any platform, no matter how “SEO-friendly” it is.
On that note, BigCommerce is SEO-friendly. URL slugs, metadata, and titles are easy to update. It has a built-in blog. It auto-generates and updates its sitemap.
But there’s a lot of SEO that does not come templated. Some of it you can do yourself – but much of it is best left to providers of professional BigCommerce SEO services.
Here are 4 ranking signals you can update on your own – and 4 SEO items that are best left to the pros.
What You Can Do
Update Page Titles/Metadata
Updating page titles and metadata in BigCommerce is a cinch and you can do it easily at the page level. No coding knowledge is necessary, there are fields you can edit right in the back end.
Also, making minor optimizations to page titles and metadata, such as by inserting target keywords, is one of the easiest and most effective SEO updates you can make to a website.
Compress Images
Big images will slow your website down to a crawl. Fortunately, there are (free) plugins you can use to compress your images.
Even better are the free tools you can use to compress your images before you even upload them. Doing so is highly recommended and professional help is not necessary.
Add Alt Text to Images
Those keywords you stuck in your page titles and meta descriptions? Add them to your images, too.
You can add them to image captions, but the real way to do this is to inspect the image file and add the keywords in the “alt text” or “alt attribute” fields.
Refresh Product Page Copy
Last but not least, if you know you ripped product page copy from a manufacturer or a distributor, go back and turn that around.
Duplicate copy doesn’t help your website. Write your own mini-descriptions, include some of those target keywords in them, and your rankings should slowly increase.
What You (Probably) Can’t Do
Keyword Research
You may have noticed that we have invoked keywords several times thus far. Well, making the optimizations using them is easy – if you know which ones to target.
Keyword research is involved and requires in-depth knowledge of competition, keyword difficulty, and search intent.
Otherwise, if you don’t choose good keywords, you could be putting valuable resources into targeting a practically unattainable keyword.
Draft Optimized Blogs
Unless you’ve some experience as a writer and you’re familiar with what it takes to structure and write an optimized blog, this is another thing best left to the professionals.
The vast – vast – majority of blogs on the internet never get any readers, and truthfully, most of them probably don’t even get indexed. If you’re unfamiliar, hire BigCommerce SEO services.
Sow Backlinks
Creating backlinks is not something that anyone can just “do.” It requires access to a wide range of high-DA website admins. It’s also a service that some professional SEO providers offer.
Minify Code (Improves Speed)
There are plugins you can install to minify code and speed up your website, but the best (albeit slowest) way to do so is manually.
Unfortunately, only developers know what code matters and what code can be removed. Unless you can read code, don’t attempt it.
When Hiring BigCommerce SEO Services Is Best
Not sure how to go about performing keyword research for your BigCommerce website and then making the optimizations so your eCommerce business will rank more effectively in the organic Google search results?
Sometimes it makes sense to leave the SEO strategies to the experts. If you’re not familiar with any of the concepts mentioned here, hire an SEO agency for BigCommerce SEO services and set yourself up for long-term growth in organic traffic.
