Search Engine Optimization on BigCommerce

Use search tools to maintain the updates

Search engines usually do not notice your BigCommerce site’s SEO changes right away. For that reason widespread search engines such as Google or Yahoo offer you a large range of search tools to help you boost your website’s rankings in search results. That’s why whenever you initiate any changes to a BigCommerce website you’d better reindex website content in all search engines. It could be done by making use of services like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. 

Customize your web pages and site titles

Search engines tend to rank the BigCommerce site content in the following order: 

• Site title
• SEO title
• Page title
• Blog post title
• Heading

How to find best keywords for SEO

When you fill your site with text, you are free to include expressions and words that coincide with the search terms audience uses to discover sites compatible with yours as a constituent of your optimization strategy. The keywords are used to help search engines rank your website as appropriate for users who search by those keywords. 

Your SEO keyword marketing strategy will depend on your site, the auditories you’re trying to draw and goals. Anyway, it’s extremely important to apply keywords for optimization in a clear and distinct way so in order could make sense to your visitors. 

Researching keywords for your SEO strategy

Next, we’ll study the process of keyword research in order you could produce a list of applicable words you should focus on. Utilizing the below tips, you’ll manage to come up with a continuous and thorough SEO plan which will help you boost positions and achieve the goals of your BigCommerce website on search. 

Form a list of points that are close to what you know about your business sphere

Initially, consider the topics you want your BigCommerce site to rank for in general. As a result, you’ll acquire a catalog of five-ten term buckets that can be somehow appropriate to your company’s business area and after that you'll use those lists to choose particular keyphrases. 

If you have a content creation or you may already have some topics you’re talking about most often experience in blogging or content creating experience, blogging. Try to put yourself in the position of your target market while working with optimization and imagine what types of themes they could search. 

Find the matching keywords for your topics lists

When you find some topic buckets, it’s time to search for the keywords that are related to them. Usually, they are expressions you believe might be important to rank for on the search results as your target audience may type these keywords into the query box. The main focus here is to suggest a final list of the keyword expressions you will use for the BigCommerce site. 

One more successful optimization marketing strategy here is to figure out which keyphrases and keywords your website gets noted for. You’ll merely have to use instruments like Google Analytics. Look deeper into your website’s traffic sources to identify which keywords people are using to get to your website. Repeat this for as many topic buckets as you’ve got. 

Try to understand the user intent

User intent is in the group of crucial factors in your taking the top positions in search results and influencing SEO programs as well. Today, it’s more significant that your website deals with the issue that a user was intended to solve rather than simply carrying the keywords and keyphrases the user typed in. 

Keywords bear a lot of interpretations under the surface. And for the objective behind the search is the most important for your BigCommerce website SEO strategy, you have to be genuinely attentive with decoding the keywords you target for. 

To understand what a user wanted to find on the SERP, type into the keyphrases he might use in the search box, and look through the words and phrases that will appear there. 

Find related search terms

If you’re stuck while looking for more keyphrases and keywords your potential visitors are using, you can glance over the corresponding search terms that appear when you enter a keyword or phrase in the search bar. If you type your keyword or phrase and then scroll to the bottom of the first search result page, you’ll find the recommendations associated with your original input. You are also able to apply these suggestions further while working on your optimization plan. 

Take advantage of keyword research tools

You can find a lot of tools offering you an option of keyword research, for instance, Ahrefs or Google Keyword Explorer. They will help you find more keyword suggestions based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords which are based on the recommendations you’ve already generated for your website’s optimization. 

Structure your content

Significant element of successive SEO strategy for any BigCommerce website is properly organizing the content. You should apply heading text formatting to organize pages. Search engines typically give subtitles a maximum priority, similar to titles. For this reason clear and easy to understand headings describing the page content truly facilitate the process of detecting the key topics of your site for search engines. Also, they help your website users promptly look at the page and discover the information they were looking for. 

Look through the following things while working on your SEO program: 

• It’s ok to use only one type of heading within a page since your headings are organized and logical. 
• Insert keyphrases and keywords to your headings. 
• Be careful and avoid applying headings to create formatting, such as quotes, for example. Be sure the heading sizes are used successively within your pages and across your website as a whole. 
• Do not use exactly the identical text in several headings. 

Needless to say, organizing the content on the web page depends on the kind of content you provide.

How to write meta tags for SEO

Meta title tag is a page title that is shown in Google and other popular search engine results. BigCommerce recommends adding meta titles to all pages of your website and this is reasonable enough as this is included in best SEO traditions. As reported by Google, titles are the most important tags in giving users a swift awareness of the content that a page offers. Furthermore, this piece of info is utilized to choose which result to click on. Because of that you’ll need to look through the guidelines below to write a truly an uncommon and striking meta title that will attract new website users to your BigCommerce website: 

• Make a unique meta title for every page of your website. 
• Be short, but insightful. 
• Avoid generating vague and generic titles. 
• Avoid clickbait. 
• Make an effort to correspond to users’ search intent. 
• Include the target keyphrases if it’s necessary. 
• Try to write a meta title less than sixty characters long for it won’t fit into the snippet. 

Your meta description, for its part, summarizes the overall page content. Search engines present it in the snippet among the search results. According to Google, the meta description needs to generally tell about and offer a brief summary of a particular page of the site. But you need to know besides this that meta descriptions are not viewed as a ranking factor by Google. Below are some of the best SEO practices you may be interested in to consider to write a description that will work: 

• Try to write a meta description less than one hundred sixty characters long
• Add the target keyphrases if it’s needed 
• Try to meet the search intent of users
• Don’t write nonspecific descriptions
• Don’t use clickbait practices
• Try to keep your meta description under 160 charactersYou‘ll need to produce an uncommon meta description for every page of your BigCommerce site
• Offer an outline of your content precisely. 

Keep in mind that meta descriptions help visitors to decide whether your website is relevant for them. That’s why you should concentrate on them when working on your optimization strategy. 

What is local SEO

You may also want to optimize your website for some local area. It’s remarkably needed for those who have some sort of local business like a shop, restaurant, or agency. Applying local SEO best practices would be a great idea for them. 

Optimizing your local business website is practically about showing it to users that live in the matching region and wish to find some new brick-and-mortar locations. Applying a local SEO program you need to aim at letting Google know that the business is positioned in some particular area and you wish to be found by visitors on that territory. 

The grand-rule here is that you should provide the right address in a city/region. If you comply with this condition, you’ll be given the opportunity to produce a local landing page. In addition, your site needs to have the accurate Local Business Schema markup. It is going to help you in demonstrating to Google that your organization is placed in some certain area. In addition to technical and SEO optimization, generating the content that is aimed at local users can be a brilliant idea. 

On your BigCommerce website, there are plenty of places where a website owner could add his location. For example: 

• Business info settings
• Bigcommerce Google reviews
• Map blocks
• Text blocks in the footer
• Text blocks on the Contacts page

Also, you might want to start an account in Google My Business for it will help you improve your local rankings and SEO program. Manage and create online listings in Google My Business as a component of your optimization plan. 

Enable SSL on your BigCommerce site

Once you switch on SSL on your website, your custom URL begins with https. This means that every page of your website may be accessed with a safe connection. Google regards https as a rating indicator and sites that still use http may be punished. If you can’t tell if SSL is switched on your website, click on the SSL panel and configure it to Secure.

What are backlinks in SEO

incoming links, also known as inbound links or backlinks, are links from one website to another site. Google and other popular search engines regard backlinks as some kind of votes for a page these links direct to. Pages with a huge number of inbound links are awarded with higher organic search engine rankings as the more backlinks you have, the higher the site will rank in all search engines, including Google. For this reason backlinks should be included in the most important elements of your optimization strategy. 

Inbound links form the basis of Google algorithm PageRank. Google has performed thousands of changes to the original PageRank since it has been initiated, but backlinks are constantly at its core, remaining a center ranking signal. 

Here is the checklist on the sorts of inbound links that are appreciated the most: 

• From a domain that hasn't been referenced to you before. In the context of SEO, you should have less links from diverse domains than plenty of links from just one domain. 
• From the site that is thematically connected with yours. When one website mentions another, Google expects to discover that these two are topically related to each other. 
• Coming from trustworthy sites. It is also known as the principle of “Domain authority”. The more authority a site that is linking to you has, the more authority it can pass to you. 
• Comprising your target keyphrases in the link anchor text. Anchor in this case is the visible text part of the link. But bear in mind that these links have to be not overboard with keywords. 

Keep these things in mind when starting to develop your backlink strategy. 

Reduce your page loading time

Time your page loads is very important for your BigCommerce website’s position in search results. If your pages are slow, it may damage your SEO, so you’d better think about reducing your page size for faster loading. Here are some methods you may want to consider: 

1. Don’t use more than 60 blocks per page. 
2. If the page overlays more than one theme, it’s better to break it into separate pages. It will upgrade your SEO by providing more structured content for your visitors. 
3. Attempt to reduce the amount of videos. Content like YouTube or Vimeo videos can impact load time. 
4. In case blog posts load slowly, try to use blog excerpts rather than demonstrating the full text of the post. 

Whenever you guess your pages load lazily, use particular instruments that will help you measure the loading speed of your site’s pages. 

More SEO help

Bear in mind that your SEO strategy is your duty and as search engine algorithms change every day. In addition, every BigCommerce site has special marketing conditions and there is no general solution that can be used by everyone. So if you’ve stumbled upon something or have any problems, try to follow popular SEO specialists and search for help in the virtual community.