eCommerce is always changing and it certainly much different now than it was just a few years ago. As a result of the ongoing changes to SEO practices that can make or break an eCommerce business, you need to adapt to the landscape.
BigCommerce offers many tips for using their platform and ways to make your online business successful. Today, we will take a closer look at some of those tips and how you can make the adjustments needed to evolve with the eCommerce landscape and still achieve success.
Before we do, remember that 1Digital Agency and BigCommerce are proud partners. We have experts on design, development and digital marketing on our team and work with the BigCommerce team on a daily basis to help you get your store up and running the way it needs to be and build your success through a content marketing and SEO strategy.
Product Descriptions – You need to have great writing to stand out, and your product descriptions can be the most important thing. If you use too much information from outside sources like the manufacturer, it will not be unique enough to stand out. The best copy for SEO is unique, all your own, and is useful and descriptive for the customers. The more detail, the better, especially when you are trying to convince people that they should purchase your products.
Don’t Cram Keywords – Everything you write will have a target keyword for SEO purposes, but you need to be careful to not force it into copy where it doesn’t fit or isn’t needed. It happens far too often that people write for search engines and not for the people who are actually reading the content. Your content needs to have a natural flow, be easy to read and understand and, in doing so, the keyword should fit naturally.
Include Product Keywords in Page Titles and URLs – A key part of SEO is the page titles that identify your pages and the URL of those pages. Both elements should include a keyword or product title to help aid search engines in finding those keywords. More descriptive product names can help you generate more clicks, especially if the product is part of the page title and displays on search engines in such a way that promotes the product title.
The Content and Headline Should Match – Honesty goes a long way with your customers, but you probably knew that already. What you probably didn’t know was that honesty on the search engines is required too. You risk being blacklisted by Google if you try too hard to get people to click on a headline and then don’t deliver on what it said. The content and title need to match or search engines can flag the content and your results could take a hit.
Reviews – Pages continue to index with search engines the more you update your website. A great way to make regular updates to your eCommerce website is with reviews. Reviews are a great piece of content that come directly from your customers. Many times, these reviews will also include the keyword naturally, so you get some organic results in keyword searches while increasing trust for potential customers which can earn you more business.
Blogging – Another way to produce regular content is to start a blog and update it regularly. Your topics should be relevant and useful to your customers, but it can also improve your SEO by providing a constant and ongoing flow of new and unique content that relates to your business or your products. This is just another way you can promote your business, showcase products, build trust with customers and enhance your search results, all at the same time.
Videos – The numbers don’t lie when it comes to videos. A video being featured on a website makes it 53 times more likely to become a front-page result for Google. It is 41 percent more likely that a visitor will click through. It also becomes 85 percent more likely that a customer will make a purchase. This is just another form of content that can make a big impact on your business, especially in the digital space when a video can be accessed on any device.
As you explore the BigCommerce platform and set up a website that performs well and looks great, you also need to make sure you are promoting your brand, message, products, and business in the right way.
Use BigCommerce's Built-In SEO Controls – The platform-specific advantage worth being concrete about is that BigCommerce exposes the technical controls many platforms hide. For every product and category you can set a custom URL, page title, and meta description independent of the product name, and the platform auto-generates an XML sitemap and supports 301 redirects natively — essential when you rename or retire a product so you do not lose accumulated ranking. Set the URL structure deliberately before launch (short, keyword-bearing, no ID strings) because changing URLs later means redirect chains and temporary ranking loss.
Tame Faceted Navigation – The biggest technical SEO risk for any sizeable BigCommerce catalog is filtered category URLs (by size, color, price) generating thousands of near-duplicate, thin pages that waste crawl budget. The fix is deliberate: canonical filtered variants back to the main category, decide which high-demand filter combinations deserve their own indexable, optimized landing page, and block the rest from indexing. Getting this right is often the single highest-impact SEO action on a large store, and it is invisible to anyone only looking at on-page copy.
Add Product Structured Data – Mark up every product page with Product schema including price, availability, and aggregate rating. This does not change your ranking directly, but it makes your result eligible for rich snippets — star ratings and price shown in the search listing — which measurably increases click-through rate from the same position. BigCommerce themes often include this; validate it in Google's Rich Results Test rather than assuming it is present and correct.
Optimize for Search Intent, Not Just Keywords
The original tips on unique descriptions and natural keyword use are sound; the modern emphasis is matching the page to why someone searched. A category page should target the broad commercial term and help a shopper choose; a product page should target the specific buying query and answer the practical pre-purchase questions (sizing, compatibility, shipping, returns); blog posts should target informational questions and link down to the relevant category. This intent mapping, combined with internal links that pass authority from content to commercial pages, is what turns the BigCommerce platform tips into actual rankings and revenue. Editorial note: the "video makes a page 53x more likely to reach Google's front page" figure in the original body circulated widely years ago and is not a current, verifiable Google metric; video can still aid engagement and visibility, but treat that specific number as dated marketing lore rather than a reliable statistic.
With the help of 1Digital Agency, you can get a content and SEO campaign plan that works for you and helps you get results. Contact us today to learn more.