BigCommerce is one of the most powerful ecommerce platforms in the industry; the program can definitely help you build a fantastic store with relative ease. Your online store isn’t going to be very useful if you don’t have any visitors making purchases, however. Here are 6 SEO fundamentals that our BigCommerce SEO company regularly uses to bring in the big traffic.
1. Use Schemas
Schema.org contains a collection of schemas, or html tags which are used to markup your web site. These markups are recognized by search engines and help improve the search result displays so that search engine users can more easily find pages they are looking for on your site. Google especially emphasizes schema use, so this measure is essential to your SEO efforts.
2. Use Simple Site Structuring
An important part of search engine ranking algorithms consists of what your visitors are actually doing when they get to your website. As part of optimizing your conversions and keeping visitors on your site – and returning to your site – you should keep your site structuring as simple as possible and easy to navigate. This means using logical and appropriate category trees that make site navigation a snap. One example is offering all of your categories on a sidebar in a menu that persists wherever the visitor goes, which preferably expands and collapses based on where the shopper wants to go.
When our BigCommerce SEO company designs a shopping cart, we aren’t only interested in aesthetics, though a nice-looking site helps. We also want to make sure the browsing and shopping experience is as intuitive and pleasurable as possible so as to encourage return visits and conversions. Search engines keep track of this stuff.
3. Use Simple Keyword URLs
When you create your URLs, you want to think about how they are going to be read by the search engine. For best results, simple URLs that have your domain and then the page they are referring to is the best way to go. Make sure to use keywords where you can. When creating a URL like this, avoid stop words and query strings, and use dashes when you have two or more words after the domain. For example: “http://yourstore.com/electronics” or “http://yourstore.com/electronics/mp3-players” for category pages, and then “http://yourstore.com/sony-walkman” for the actual product page. Try to have only one URL for each product page to avoid duplicate content.
4. Canonical Tags
If you are using customized URLs with query strings or other tools like internal referral parameters for analytics, or multiple URLs for a single page, it helps to set up unified canonical tags to make your URL structures easier on search engines. Some ecommerce platforms do this automatically for you. Our BigCommerce SEO company regularly checks for canonical tags as a matter of principle.
5. Category Structure, Naming, and Tags
It’s worth repeating that your page categories should be simplified and easy to navigate for the user. Try getting in as many keywords as possible when you are naming your categories, and think about what the customer is looking. This also helps your SEO when you go to individual products. When you are naming your products, use the specific model of the product as well as the category it is part of. For example: Sony Walkman MP3 Player. Your title tags and H1 tags should match the name of your category pages.
6. Create Unique Product Descriptions
Each of your products should have a unique description that is not duplicated on other pages or on other websites. So if you have a product on your manufacturer page, it should have a different description than the same product if it is featured on a retailer or affiliate site. Our BigCommerce SEO company also makes sure to write rich descriptions for each of the products. We write feature lists, benefits, specifications, and anything else that is useful to the shopper.
Think of what would be enticing to the kind of shopper you are looking to attract. Avoid short generic descriptions. Search engines are looking for rich, quality content.
These 6 SEO fundamentals should help you refine your online store to appeal to search engines and improve the usability of your website. This will help your website rank higher on search engines, resulting in more traffic and conversions and thus even higher rankings. It is all self-reinforcing. Keep in mind though that many competent web designers are going to be using these tricks. If you really want to stay ahead of the competition, hire a professional to design and optimize your online store for SEO. Coalition Technologies has extensive experience with the BigCommerce platform, as well as SEO marketing. Our BigCommerce SEO company can design you the ultimate online store and get you high search engine rankings in the process. Give us a call at 1-888-652-0637 and get a free quote.