6 Easy Steps to Boost Your BigCommerce SEO

The main channel for driving organic traffic on the internet is SEO. For those of you reading this built on BigCommerce that remains true.

And generating organic ranking increases using BigCommerce SEO best practices is actually not so hard as some digital marketing experts might have you believe.

Here are 6 easy steps to boosting your BigCommerce SEO.

Table of Contents

Get the Keywords You Need

The first thing you need are some good target keywords.

Open up the SEMRush Keyword Overview (use a free trial if you don’t have an account).

Enter a keyword related to one of your products of which you want to sell more. Look for a difficulty below 30 (green) and a volume of more than 100 (ideally).

Then look at intent – there’s I for informational, N for navigational, C for commercial and T for transactional. You want a keyword that’s one of the latter two.

Pick 5 keywords that meet these criteria and move on.

Drop the Keywords in Headers

Once you have keywords for which you want your website to rank, find the URLs you want to rank for them. These should be product pages, ideally.

Open up the BigCommerce editor and add some of the keywords into headers where it makes sense. Never put more than one instance in each header and don’t force it.

This, right here, is the single biggest effort you can make to improve visibility for these keywords.

Refresh Your Meta Descriptions

Google will automatically generate meta descriptions, but it will also take them from existing page text. You want to write your own so you’re not working with generative text, which doesn’t perform as well as original copy.

So write your own. They should be somewhere between 155 and 180 characters and give a succinct description of the page in question. Include one of your target keywords in each, if possible.

Add Alt Texts to Images

Open up some of the image files on the URL in question, then add some of your target keywords to these. You can make the alt text a phrase or literally just plop the keyword in. The best rule of thumb here is to be succinct and descriptive.

Write a Blog Post and Use Some of Those Keywords as Anchor Text in Links to Your Key Pages

We saved the best and most important suggestion for last. Take a look at those target keywords you chose.

Pick one, and start thinking about it. What topics come to mind when you hear this word? What questions have customers asked you about this word? What do you know about it that you think others should know too?

Get those ideas in order and write an informative article on the topic. Include the keyword in the title and in one or two of the page headers, if possible.

Now, here’s the secret. Include the keyword as anchor text in an internal link to the page on your website that you really want to rank for that keyword.

This last step will inform search engines that the URL that contains the product is the one that should be getting the most authority for it.

Publish the blog, then set back. It usually takes a few weeks, but you should see both pages (the blog and the target URL) start to increase in ranking for that keyword.