Building on BigCommerce Store is the first step on your road to success as a business.
Just like optimizing your Shopify ecommerce store, simply having an online store however is not enough to ensure that people will be clicking in droves to buy your product.
BigCommerce SEO in particular has a particular need for SEO to make the most out of your site.
Many retailers only rely on ad campaigns and social media to make the most of their sales. If you choose to do this, you’re missing out on tons of potential customers by not ranking highly on Google.
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Narrow Down Your Keywords
Stores need to use keywords just like regular sites. Doing the right research to narrow down your keyword focus is the first step to getting your site optimized and search engine ranking highly.
Since you already have a product or products that you sell beginning your keyword research should be fairly easy. Think like one of your customers and search results or search engine results for your product on Google in as many different ways as you can think of. Using what Google spits out for you on the SERP will help you navigate through the plethora of keywords to figure out which ones are most relevant to your business.
Remember, relevance is key, but so is finding your niche within your particular market. One way to find a niche is to find those keywords that aren’t all being taken up by your competitors. Doing a little competition research will help with this as well and also help you find those things you can do better in terms of SEO.
Using keyword tools can also help you to find those high-ranking keywords as well, beyond your organic research.
Optimize the Page
The next step after you find your keywords is to make sure the content on your page is optimized as well. This includes several things.
First, remember you’re including keywords on your on-page SEO, but you’re not slathering your content with them like a marinade. Keywords should make logical sense and should fit the content. You can’t cram in a keyword into a place it doesn’t belong. Search engines algorithms have evolved to incorporate natural language.
Plan your headings, tags, and subheaders around your keywords but make them sound like human language. Additionally, make sure you have included a meta description or many meta descriptions that identify the content of your business and focuses on a primary keyword, meta description, or multiple meta descriptions help with indexing your shop in the search engines.
The next part of optimizing a page is making sure that the user interface is optimized, particularly for mobile users.
More and more users are browsing on mobile phones and a large number of eCommerce sites are still neglecting their optimization for mobile phones. Google has even readjusted its ranking algorithm to favor mobile device users more highly.
This means that if your site is not optimized for mobile, not only could you be missing out on ranking potential, you could lose customers because your page loads too slowly or has images that are not optimized for a mobile screen.
Another tip to optimize your web pages is to limit the use of app integrations and SEO features that drag down the loading speed as well as redirecting to other sites or web pages. Users want a page that loads up quickly and is easy to navigate.
Sell Your Brand to Your Customers
Once your site has been optimized to function properly and to rank higher, the next step is to generate content around your products that makes site visitors want to buy your products.
This is called content marketing and involves creating content attached to your site that drives traffic to your site and improves relevance and site ranking. This can be blog posts, infographics, videos, and other content that provides information that users are looking for.
If you sell shoes, for example, putting up a blog posts about the comfortable fit of your new high tops will drive interest and traffic to your site. Using SEO best practices when you generate the content will improve your site’s ranking further.
Beyond content generation, marketing your brand through available platforms is a great way to improve your search engine optimization. Brand awareness is a factor in search engines ranking, as is trustworthiness. Having effective social marketing can improve your presence on the web and boost your profile.
Using a link-building campaign is another way to boost optimization. Setting up backlinks to reputable sites improves your ranking and raises your site’s importance in the scope of the search engines.
Using Leads and Data to Push Your Brand Further
Knowing your customers can help you to get them coming back and shopping again and again. All the information you need about your customers is available through Google analytics and various extensions that you can use with your BigCommerce SEO site. You can find out what drives your customers to your site and what they are looking for to tailor future additions to your site and for content generation
You can even design ad campaigns and new products around the information about your customers. Running a retail site means you need to stay on top of what your customers want. Part of search engines optimization is predicting user intent and optimizing around that intent.
Being able to anticipate what people will want will help you keep your site optimized at all times. As search engine algorithms evolve, it becomes more and more important to rank in order to acquire customers.
If you want big commerce SEO tips fro your BigCommerce SEO site to reach its potential, focus on user experience and optimize around that.
Final Thoughts
Following the tips in this guide, you can take your BigCommerce SEO site from just another fish in an ocean of online store, to a high-ranking competitor that is making the most of its sales potential.
Ad campaigns and marketing are only one portion of a successful online business. Search engine optimization is the way to help your business reach the audience you want to buy your products. Hopefully, this guide will help you take your business to the next level.
Tim holds expertise in building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams.
When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.
Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
