9 BigCommerce SEO Tips for Your E-commerce Business Growth
Are you looking for a reliable platform to build your online store but don’t know where to start? An e-commerce website is a great way to reach new customers and increase sales. But with a variety of available options, it’s not easy to make the right choice. In this article, we are going to take a closer look at BigCommerce which is one of the best e-commerce platforms out there and for a good reason. It provides everything you need for launching an online store and growing your business.
Currently, more than 100,000 live stores are using this platform to sell things and process payments, taking advantage of 24/7 BigCommerce support available via phone, email, and chat. Read on to discover what BigCommerce has to offer. We will discuss its powerful features and give you 9 easy BigCommerce design tips to help you get started with your new e-commerce website.
What Is BigCommerce?
BigCommerce is a robust hosted all-in-one e-commerce platform with advanced built-in features and an easy to use interface. It can be a great fit for your new e-commerce website because it can provide you with all the necessary tools and features you may need to build your e-commerce store, manage your products, process orders and payments, and maintain your store’s branded look and feel.
Here are some of the platform’s main features:
- Customizable and responsive pre-built templates for your site
- Built-in BigCommerce SEO tools
- Marketing and conversion tools
- Secure shopping cart
- Inventory management
- BigCommerce integrations with leading payment gateways
- Multi-currency support
- Tools to manage shipping and returns
- Customer and group management
- Dropshipping integration
- Ability to sell across multiple channels, including eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest
- B2B e-commerce solutions
- Point-of-sale solutions
Why Is BigCommerce Good for SEO?
Speaking about the BigCommerce SEO capabilities, we must admit that this platform was built with the best practices in mind because BigCommerce offers you a wide range of tools to help you optimize your website.
When ranking websites, search engines look for special signals and the key of them are present on a BigCommerce store.
- All BigCommerce stores are PCL-compliant on a Level-1 basis and all plans include SSL certificates.
- All BigCommerce URLs are customizable and you can create short URLs – this is considered to be better for SEO.
- You can easily edit Bigcommerce page titles, meta descriptions, and headings which are very important for search engine results.
- BigCommerce sites perform great on mobile because all the templates are responsive and many of them support AMP format (Accelerated Mobile Pages) which helps your website load more quickly and positively affect SEO.
- All the plans include Akamai Image Manager that optimizes all your images and automatically improves Bigcommerce website load time.
- It is possible to create custom 301 redirects and sitemaps to use them for Google Search Console.
As you see, SEO functionality is one of the strongest features of Bigcommerce. Now let’s discuss some other features of this platform in more depth.
Join the club of e-commerce businesses enjoying high ROI from organic traffic.
Speaking about the BigCommerce SEO capabilities, we must admit that this platform was built with the best practices in mind because BigCommerce offers you a wide range of tools to help you optimize your website.
When ranking websites, search engines look for special signals and the key of them are present on a BigCommerce store.
- All BigCommerce stores are PCL-compliant on a Level-1 basis and all plans include SSL certificates.
- All BigCommerce URLs are customizable and you can create short URLs – this is considered to be better for SEO.
- You can easily edit Bigcommerce page titles, meta descriptions, and headings which are very important for search engine results.
- BigCommerce sites perform great on mobile because all the templates are responsive and many of them support AMP format (Accelerated Mobile Pages) which helps your website load more quickly and positively affect SEO.
- All the plans include Akamai Image Manager that optimizes all your images and automatically improves Bigcommerce website load time.
- It is possible to create custom 301 redirects and sitemaps to use them for Google Search Console.
As you see, SEO functionality is one of the strongest features of Bigcommerce. Now let’s discuss some other features of this platform in more depth.
BigCommerce Themes
There are hundreds of pre-built responsive templates with modern design which appeals to a wide range of audience you can choose from. They are divided into several categories and offer a lot of customization options so you can easily find a template suitable for your brand and aesthetic. Although there are only 7 free templates, each of them has about 3-4 different styles you can apply, changing color, navigation etc. Besides, there are lots of premium themes that you can purchase, install, and make easy edits if you know basic HTML and CSS.
Users who don’t have any coding skills can create an online store using a drag-and-drop tool which allows to change the layout of any page. Besides, BigCommerce offers a full HTML editor and provides access to raw CSS files for complex design editing. So if you want a professional custom design, you can have it if you hire one of BigCommerce partners or other companies such as Extrabrains that specialize in BigCommerce development.
Marketing Suite
BigComerce offers a lot of tools to market your e-commerce store. We have already discussed BigCommerce SEO tools that you can configure to increase your website’s search engine rankings. You can also take advantage of customer promotions, coupons, and discounting features to motivate your shoppers by offering them great deals. There are product review tools that allow your clients to leave positive feedback about their shopping experience and help promote your e-commerce store.
Live chat support is another useful feature included in all plans so your website’s visitors can contact sales team while making purchases. You can grow your customer base by integrating email service providers such as MailChimp or HubSpot and reach more customers using BigCommerce integration with Google Shopping. The platform offers built-in social media sharing tools to market your product on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Email marketing capabilities include sending targeted newsletters, messages and cart abandonment notifications.
Product Management
There are a lot of options for adding and managing inventory because BigCommerce is a full-featured CMS that allows to manage your e-commerce store from a single centralized location. You can easily add individual products and import hundreds of products at once.
Merchants can easily categorize their products, process orders, and keep track of their inventory. Creating new products is simple with “add a product” wizard and you can enter information about SKU and product code, price, tax as well as details about product type, weight, and shipping. It is possible to assign variants to each product. You can add and edit product descriptions using a WYSIWYG editor or by pasting HTML code. With BigCommerce, you can have a full control of the inventory levels and set different shipping rules. Product filtering feature enables your shoppers to search for products within your online store by brand, size, price, and color, narrowing their search. This feature really improves conversion rates.
Payment Processing
If you choose BigCommerce as an e-commerce platform for your store, you will be able to accept payments using more than supported 60 payment gateways and your customers will have the real freedom of choice. BigCommerce doesn’t charge transaction fees no matter which payment gateway you use. You can accept credit cards and process payments using some leading payment gateways like PayPal, Amazon Pay, Stripe or Square. You can also collect and process offline payments in multiple currencies although we don’t think that most of your customers would be interested in such payment methods.
BigCommerce Support and Customer Service
BigCommerce takes seriously customer service and support and offers a lot of options on the customer support page for finding answers to typical questions. You can get BigCommerce help via phone email or live chat. Besides, there are plenty of online resources to help you learn more about the platform: online resource center, BigCommerce University with plenty of how-to videos and online tutorials, company’s community forum, YouTube channel, and social media pages.
BigCommerce Integrations and Add-Ons
If you need more features than offered in the standard set for your plan, you may extend functionality of your store by purchasing third-party apps from the BigCommerce’s app store. There are about 600 add-ons that easily integrate with BigCommerce and deal with different aspects of running an online business. The categories include apps for
- Shipping and fulfillment
- Marketing
- Sales channels
- CRM and customer service
- Accounting and tax
- Payments and security
- Catalog and order management
- Analytics and reporting etc.
BigCommerce Design Tips
With so many robust features, Bigcommerce platform is designed for conversions and works well for business of all sizes but design of your website plays a crucial role for the success of your e-commerce store. An effective design can make your store visually appealing and help lead your potential customers through your site. It’s important to ensure that your website’s visitors can easily navigate your store, find the necessary products, and quickly add them to cart. In this way, you will have a much better chance of turning your shoppers into actual buyers.
Keep in mind that each element on your website can have an impact on your visitor’s purchase decision. Here are some useful design tips that can help you convert more visitors.
- Keep your store’s design clean. To ensure a great experience for your customers, you should organize all your products into proper categories. Use a grid layout to make your web pages look neat and tidy and don’t put too many products on your home page. It’s much better to use large images with fewer products if you want to increase sales.
- Make your website easy to navigate. Menu is a crucial part of your site and you should ensure that it really helps your customers get from one page to the next. Don’t add a lot of links to the main menu. Instead, you can opt for a mega menu, a drop-down menu or a fly-out menu.
- Optimize your BigCommerce store for mobile users. Remember that having a responsive theme is not enough. You should also make sure that your form fields and images can scale nicely on a smaller screen so your customers will be able to easily click on the correct field. And don’t forget to add mobile payment solutions.
- Incorporate your branding elements consistently to make your website stand out. Get a professional logo and favicon to help your customers instantly recognize your website on social media or in their bookmark section. Use your brand colors in such elements like buttons, menu, and links.
Let professionals take the design of your BigCommerce store to the next level. See the samples of our work.
- Add a search bar for those visitors who come to your website having a specific product in mind. If they can’t find it on your home page, they are more than likely to search for it to find out if you have it. If you don’t provide them with a way to search, your visitors will go somewhere else.
- Make the checkout process simple. Luckily, the platform offers one-page checkout but you can let your customers check out as guests and ask only for necessary customer information to simplify the checkout process even more.
- Add product previews to save your customers’ time and improve their shopping experience. Let your shoppers click on any product and instantly view all the information about the product in a window that pops up.
- Keep visible Buy Now or Add to Cart button. Pay special attention to its design and use a contrasting color to make the button stand out. Make sure the button is large enough so your customers can easily click it on smaller screens.
- Add trust seals to show your customers that all the transactions are processed securely and that all the sensitive information is protected. You can use logos from popular security-oriented brands like McAfee Secure or VeriSign to increase trust to your website.
BigCommerce has a lot to offer for creating a professional e-commerce store and is perfect for fast-growing businesses but you need to know HTML and CSS to customize templates and take advantage of the advanced features. If you are not tech savvy, a good idea is to hire professionals who can help you in setting up your online store.
Need BigCommerce Help?
Are you thinking about launching a new online store and would like to hire an experienced BigCommerce developer? Or are you looking for BigCommerce experts to take your e-commerce store to the next level?
Extrabrains is a leading digital marketing agency with extensive experience in building e-commerce websites for clients. We specialize in custom BigCommerce design, development, SEO, PPC, and conversion optimization. Whether you are looking for building your e-commerce store from scratch and need a BigCommerce designer, want to hire a BigCommerce SEO specialist to drive additional traffic to your store and increase conversion, or need professional BigCommerce support with the development and implementation of an effective marketing strategy, we’ve got you covered. Our talented BigCommmerce designers and experienced Bigcommerce developers would love to help you with your store. Want to learn more about our Bigcommerce design and marketing services? Schedule a free consultation to find out how we can help make your e-commerce business more successful.
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