BigCommerce is a hosted eCommerce platform that used by international corporations, such as Toyota, Ben & Jerry’s, and Gibson Guitars. With this platform, people can sell their products and services online. While there are a lot of platforms on the Internet that do pretty much the same, BigCommerce is different in its pricing. It is SaaS, which means you don’t buy and don’t own the platform, just pay a subscription price. Moreover, BigCommerce is a platform that has an SEO tool embedded, which means you don’t have to buy and integrate a third-party tool. Instead, you get a fully functional set of SEO tools with BigCommerce. Other functions and features of the platform might be improved too, and the article is devoted to the tips for the most effective use of BigCommerce.
Tip 1: Prioritize Keyword Research
As far as mentioned above, the SEO tool is the most powerful feature of BigCommerce. The embedded SEO module is what makes it different from other platforms. SEO plays a huge role in sales, as soon as SEO helps to promote the online store to the target audience. To achieve this, there is a need to be aware of all the features of the SEO module in BigCommerce. SEO tools are necessary to choose the correct keywords that are going to bring your customers to you. A complete list of SEO tools includes Spyfu, WordStream, SEMRush, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Moz Keyword Explorer.
Read also: How to make a successful BigCommerce website.
These tools help to select your keywords, by offering the keywords that have a high search volume and those that are good for the preferred location of your customers. It is important to prioritize the most suitable and well-working keywords that are going to boost the SEO search of your products and services.
Most often, the free Adwords Keyword Planner is recommended for beginners. With the use of this tool, you need to insert your preferred keywords and get the most high-volume keyword suggestions for your products and services. Another most frequently chosen SEO tool is Ahrefs. It is paid software that enables anyone to work as an SEO engineer by offering the entire set of SEO tools, from market research tools to keyword choosing tools.
Tip 2: Optimize Your Site for Mobile
Today, the entire world goes digital for almost everything, from buying groceries to getting a car. Therefore, your online store should be optimized for mobile browsing very closely. Making an online store mobile-friendly is crucial for the business because too many people make online purchases using their mobile devices. Even Google introduced the policy of the Mobile-first attitude, and this means a lot.
To optimize the online store for mobile, there is a need to add this point to the specs you write about your project. There is a need to think about how your store and your content are going to be visible on mobile devices. In other words, content should go first, and color should go second. In addition, mobile-friendly online stores need to have very clear navigation and all the resources optimized, which allows quick rendering and easy browsing.
Tip 3: Optimize Site Speed
Speed optimization is important for both SEO success and traffic improvement. Practically, only 1 of 4 visitors would wait for the website to load if the loading takes more than 4 seconds. Nearly a half of visitors are not going to revisit the websites that perform poorly. For example, Walmart increased the conversion rates by 2 percent for every 1 second of improvement in page load time. This means that with the high speed of page loading, you are going to have an increased bounce rate and reduced dwell time, which is going to boost the page ranking in Google. In addition, the website speed impacts the ranking of the website indirectly, according to Google's Algorithm Speed Update that counts the page loading speed in its rankings.
Tip 4: Optimize page load speeds for desktop and mobile
So, we have already discussed why the fast speed of loading a website is important for having successful sales, but it is important to underline that both mobile and desktop loading speeds matter. Maintaining your mobile website loading fast is a great thing for boosting SEO ratings, attracting more visitors, and having more sales. There are several approaches to speeding up mobile websites, and these approaches are going to be helpful for all websites, including desktop and mobile online stores.
Today, the majority of issues with slow loading mobile websites and webpages are based on the use of too large images. It is often that advertising banners are loading for more than 4 seconds, and the loading time of the mobile website might take up to 13 seconds, which is unbearable for most customers.
Another problem is having too many server requests when it comes to loading mobile pages. Practically, all these issues are pertaining to desktop websites as well, but they are most evident and obvious when it comes to mobile loading.
Other potential sources of problems include but are not limited to poor web hosting, lots of traffic & poorly managed traffic, unlimited CSS, JS, and HTML code, excessive redirects, too many plugins, server location, and even bad mobile website design.
As soon as the variety and scope of issues that cause poor loading speed are huge, getting professional help is a must to solve all the issues quickly and boost the conversion rate and the number of successful sales, and the experience of SOFTLOFT team would be very handy here.
Tip 5: Maintain a blog with short-tail, long-tail, and LSI keywords
One of the potential ways to boost the attention towards your online store is to have a blog with short-tail, long-tail, and LSI keywords. Having such a blog and adding new articles to it is one of the ways to boost traffic in an organic way. The most important thing here is to use the keywords properly. For BigCommerce online store owners, it is recommended to use Ahrefs or a similar service to select and use only the most often used and the least difficult keywords.
When determining the keywords for your blog posts, use short-tail and long-tail keywords and avoid overstaffing your article with the keywords because this might cause penalties from Google. Specifically, short-tail keywords are keywords that consist of one or two words and are more general, meaning that users search for these keywords often and use them in general searches. On the contrary, long-tail keywords are the keywords that consist of three to five keywords and they are more specific and often used by users in their specific searches.
Finally, a good practice is using LSI keywords that are semantically linked phrases and are commonly used together to search for a certain topic. The use of LSI keywords creates strong levels of organic SEO because it is LSI keywords that describe the main topic of the article and help search engines to identify the idea and the topic of the article.
Tip 6: Ecommerce Site Architecture
Architecture is important for all aspects of our life, including online stores. When developing one, think about your navigation, category pages, and product pages very well. Make sure that you know how quickly and how effectively your customers are going to find the item they are looking for.
Practically, there are three life hacks that can make any architecture great.
- 1. Make it simple and scalable.
- 2. Make sure that the biggest number of clicks to make to get to any page is three.
- 3. Always use the keyword search and create relevant URLs and subdirectories.
Tip 7: Integration with Google Analytics
Last but not least: make sure to integrate your BigCommerce store with Google Analytics. Even if your online store is perfect and works very fast, it needs monitoring to work successfully. Even though BigCommerce comes in a bunch with a variety of monitoring services, integration with Google Analytics is going to help anyway.
First of all, the Google Analytics tool helps to determine what organic traffic metrics and techniques you need to use to boost the organic traffic to your website. After setting up the metrics, you will be able to track the progress of your online store and improve its specs and settings.
Conclusion
Not only development of the BigCommerce website is going to make a successful online store, but also constant monitoring and improvement efforts. Oftentimes, professional help with development and/or troubleshooting BigCommerce is the investment that is going to repay soon and bring a tremendous added value to your online store. Just contact us to invest in your online business and make it shine.
