BigCommerce SEO: How to Tune Your BigCommerce Website for Maximum Rankings

If you're looking for an eCommerce platform that aligns with your SEO goals, BigCommerce could be an excellent option. BigCommerce's SEO configurations come with essential features right from the start, providing you with an advantage over other eCommerce platforms.

We’ll start by examining how BigCommerce stacks up against other eCommerce platforms in terms of SEO configurations. Then, we’ll dive into the specific BigCommerce features you can utilize for improved traffic and rankings.

Other Ecommerce Platforms vs. BigCommerce for SEO

When it comes to ecommerce platforms, there are different options available in the market such as BigCommerce, Shopify, Adobe Commerce, and a few others.

Among all these channels, BigCommerce stands out with its SEO specialties, incorporating built-in configurations to guarantee seamless SEO compatibility.

While setting up an SEO-friendly Magento website may need a team of Adobe Commerce experts, BigCommerce offers many built-in SEO features that simplify the process. Moreover, when compared to Shopify, it’s also more budget-friendly, allowing you to reinvest your resources into other measures so you can reach a much broader audience.

Essentially, BigCommerce simplifies your E-commerce platform-related SEO requirements, allowing you to focus on the SEO tactics and strategies that will realize your store's full potential. 

Here, we break down the essential aspects of BigCommerce SEO into six actionable steps while fully utilizing the SEO functionalities of bigcommerce.

Step 1: Setup SEO-Friendly Website Navigation

An effective website navigation leads the user to easily discover their favorite products. 

An SEO-friendly navigation means that any particular product can be reached within three clicks from the homepage. 

While other ecommerce platforms requires you to invest heavily into creating a custom navigation, BigCommerce offers robust themes and templates that can be easily modified.

BigCommerce also offers built-in breadcrumb navigation, which assists users in exploring your site while enhancing search engine indexing. As a result of these built-in features, BigCommerce makes SEO easier than most other platforms.

Step 2: Develop and maintain SEO-friendly URL structure with BigCommerce

The URLs still play a critical role in determining the rankability of an e-commerce product page. 

With most ecommerce platforms,optimized URL structures often become an afterthought. However, BigCommerce offers a convenient plug-and-play solution for creating SEO-friendly URLs. 

This allows you to create SEO-friendly  URLs based on your specific SEO requirements.

Let’s say you have a large number of similar items. Chances are you may need to differentiate them through a Long URL structure. If you have a smaller product catalog, you could use a smaller URL structure for better reach.

In this way, BigCommerce allows you to auto-populate SEO-friendly URLs on every page of your store. 

Step 3: Managing Robots.txt Directives on BigCommerce

In most e-commerce websites, the robot.txt file is often under-optimized or may not consider the available folder structure of the website. In these cases, the Google bot may not be necessarily taking the most efficient path to crawl the website, meaning to Google your website doesn’t look easy to navigate.

Here are some things to consider while editing the robots.txt of an ecommerce website.

1. Google bot only considers the robots.txt if it is available in the root folder of the website.

2. To control what gets crawled, it’s essential to think about the main folder.

3. For example, if your folder structure is domain.com/en/x-folder/ and you want to stop the X-folder from being crawled by Googlebot the robots.txt directive should be 

disallow: en/x-folder/  or

disallow: */x-folder/ 

Here the disallow structure 

disallow: /x-folder/ won't be correctly followed by Googlebot.

Review your existing and modified robots.txt using a robots.txt checker tool. With the correct directives, you could optimally use a large portion of the crawl budget that could help you rank for more product and category pages.

Don’t forget to add the sitemap URLs to the robots.txt.

Step 4: Utilizing the BIgcommerce Sitemaps

BigCommerce provides you with two inbuilt sitemap features - XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps.

The XML sitemaps allow the bots to easily crawl and index your ecommerce website. You can review if these are auto-updated based on the screaming behavior.

HTML sitemaps on the other hand are referred to as visual sitemaps. These are available at the footer of the website and allow users to browse all products from a single page.

As the size of your ecommerce store becomes larger, you may need more flexibility with your sitemaps. Here, you can easily find 3rd party platforms  that provide additional features such as image sitemaps for better visual performance.

Step 5: Managing Out of Stock Items

In most ecommerce stores, one of the most common causes of crawl wastage is a large number of out-of-stock pages. 

Out-of-stock item pages are frequently left unchanged, creating many pages that take up the crawl budget but don’t provide the right user experience. On the other hand, deleting these pages can result in a buildup of 404 errors, which typically hurts search performance as well.

The BigCommerce platform includes a built-in bulk redirect feature that enables you to redirect the out-of-stock items, helping to preserve the SEO value of those pages and redirect users to a page that features a similar product.

By applying these strategies, you can conserve the crawl budget that would have been used up to crawl the out of stock pages. After that, the saved budget can be reallocated to crawling the more critical live product and category pages.

Step 6: Utilizing Faceted Navigation to Rank For Long-Tail Keywords

One of the most effective ways to increase your ecommerce website traffic would be to rank for more long-tail keywords. To achieve this, it’s essential  to understand the user intent and match the page to the user’s intent.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to rank for the keyword "anc headphones".

In most ecom websites, there would be an option to filter-out anc headphones that appears as a filter on the left hand side. These are usually not indexable urls by design to prevent crawl budget wastage.

BigCommerce on the other hand, allows you to create custom landing pages to target these opportunities. Further, you can redirect the faceted URL to these landing pages.This bigCommerce SEO feature allows the user to easily set faceted URLs to be set as no-index.

In this way, you can create a landing page optimized to meet the user intent for the keyword “anc headphones” and redirect the faceted navigation to this page.Meanwhile, the inbuilt BigCommerce's SEO feature also allows you to set the other faceted URLs as non-indexable to prevent any indexing related issues. 

While most ecommerce websites require many development hours and complicated SEO setups, BigCommerce allows you to set up and customize these pages much more easily. Now, you can focus on ranking these additional pages for your long tail keywords.

Should you choose BigCommerce for SEO?

This would depend on your exact SEO and business requirements.

BigCommerce makes it easier for you to set up and maintain ecommerce SEO. One of the frequently cited reasons for subpar SEO performance is the dependency on the development resources to make the necessary SEO changes. As a result of BigCommerce's SEO features, making necessary SEO changes doesn’t require a developer's involvement.

You can also count on BigCommerce's outstanding forums and customer support to help with any questions or concerns related to eCommerce SEO.

Author Bio:
Jayakrishnan (Jay) is an SEO Manager at Codilar Technologies, a leading digital commerce agency. With more than 8 years of experience, Jay leverages the latest technology to drive traffic growth and deliver campaign ROI for organizations in competitive e-commerce environments.