Bigcommerce SEO Expert

If I were asked to act as a Bigcommerce SEO expert for a store today, I would not start with keywords. I would start with a full technical audit of the platform's built-in SEO controls. Bigcommerce gives you a lot of levers — customisable URLs, automatic sitemaps, canonical tags you can set per product — but most store owners leave them on the factory defaults. That is a missed opportunity.

I would open the store's SEO settings panel and check every field. The default meta description is pulled from the first few words of the product description, which is rarely the right call. I would rewrite every one for the top 50 products by revenue, not by traffic. Revenue matters more than impressions because you want to protect your best performers. Then I would move to category pages. A typical Bigcommerce store I worked on had 40 category pages driving 65% of organic traffic. I spent two days rewriting those titles and meta descriptions, and the store saw a 12% lift in category-page CTR within three weeks. That is the kind of return you get when you prioritise correctly.

Technical fundamentals come next. I check page speed using Lighthouse and compare it against the mobile-first index. Bigcommerce stores tend to be heavy on JavaScript, so I look for render-blocking resources and lazy-loading opportunities. I also verify that the canonical tags are correct. Bigcommerce lets you set a canonical per product, but many stores leave it blank or auto-generated, which can cause duplicate content with variants. I set the canonical to the main product page and make sure the variant pages are noindexed or use rel="nofollow" where appropriate. Finally, I run a crawl with Screaming Frog to spot 404s, redirect chains, and missing meta tags. The audit takes about four hours and gives me a clear list of what to fix first.

I avoid diving into link building or content marketing until the technical base is solid. The platform's SEO features are powerful, but only if you configure them correctly. You can read more about the platform's capabilities in my [Bigcommerce SEO](/bigcommerce-seo/) field notes, and I cover the audit process in detail in the [ecommerce SEO audit](/ecommerce-seo-audit/) playbook.

The biggest watch-out I have is the tendency to treat Bigcommerce SEO as a set-it-and-forget-it task. The platform's defaults are decent, but they are not optimised for your specific store. For example, Bigcommerce generates a meta description from the first few words of the product description if you leave the field blank. That might work for a few products, but in a catalogue of 500 SKUs, you end up with descriptions like "This is the perfect gift for a loved one" repeated across dozens of pages. That is wasted real estate. I always fill in the meta description field manually for my top 100 products, and use a script to generate unique ones for the rest.

Another watch-out is the way Bigcommerce handles product variants. Each variant gets its own URL, and if you don't set a canonical, those variant pages can compete with the main product page. I have seen stores where the variant page outranks the main product page for a keyword, which splits the click-through rate and hurts conversions. I always set the canonical on the main product page and add a noindex tag to variant pages unless they have unique content.

Mobile performance is another area where I have seen stores slip. Bigcommerce themes are generally responsive, but customisations can add heavy scripts that slow down the mobile experience. I use Google's PageSpeed Insights on a representative product page, a category page, and the homepage. If the mobile score is below 70, I investigate what is blocking the rendering. Often it is a third-party app or a custom font. I removed a font-awesome library from one store's header and saw the mobile score jump from 64 to 89. That kind of fix is easy and pays off immediately.

Finally, do not ignore the [SEO for product pages](/seo-for-product-pages/) specifics. Unique descriptions, alt text on images, and internal linking from category pages to product pages all matter. I have a checklist I run for every new product, and I share it in the [ecommerce SEO checklist](/ecommerce-seo-checklist/). The details matter, and the platform can handle them if you set the fields correctly.

I have been optimising Bigcommerce stores for three years, and I still got things wrong. The biggest mistake I made early on was focusing on product pages at the expense of category pages. I spent hours rewriting product titles and descriptions for every single SKU, but the traffic came from the category pages. I had overlooked the fact that category pages capture broader buyer-intent keywords like "women's running shoes" while product pages target long-tail terms like "Nike Air Zoom Pegasus 38 women's". My first year I moved the needle on product pages maybe 5% but category pages could have given me 20% or more. I now spend 60% of my on-page time on category pages.

Another mistake was ignoring the platform's built-in structured data. Bigcommerce automatically adds some schema markup, but it is not always complete. I assumed it was fine because Google could see the product data. But when I ran the Rich Results Test, I found that the price and availability were missing from the markup because the template had a bug. That store had been missing out on price drop snippets and merchant listing eligibility for six months. I fixed the template and saw a 3% increase in organic click-through rate within two weeks. I now check structured data on every store I audit.

I also underestimated the importance of clean URLs. Bigcommerce allows you to customise product URLs, but I used to leave the default auto-generated slugs. They were long and included IDs like "/product/12345/" instead of "/nike-air-zoom-pegasus-38/". I changed them for a client's top 50 products and saw a small but consistent improvement in rankings for the exact-match keywords. The platform also supports trailing slashes — I set them to off because they are not needed and can cause redirects if you change the slug later. Little things like that add up.

If you are working with a different platform, the [Shopify SEO expert](/shopify-seo-expert/) playbook covers similar issues, and the [SEO for retailers](/seo-for-retailers/) note has broader advice that applies across platforms.