In almost all practical respects, there is no difference between search engine optimization and BigCommerce SEO. However, if your eCommerce website is built on BigCommerce, you’ll still want to make sure you’re doing everything you can possibly be doing to drive organic traffic to your website.

Whatever you do, do not overlook these 4 important classes of BigCommerce SEO and their associated ranking signals.

Site Content: Optimization, Age, Novelty

Site content is one of the most important ranking signals of all. First and foremost, it is important to ensure that your BigCommerce site is full of keyword and search-intent optimized content, product descriptions on your product pages, category pages, in your blog’s posts, and anywhere else that makes sense.

It is also important to optimize your BigCommerce store with new content on a regular basis. Whether this involves a steady stream of new blog posts or press releases is up to you, but content age is a ranking signal that will be applied to your online store.

It is also important that your content is valuable and shareable. Keyword stuffed, lengthy posts that are lengthy for no reason are a thing of the past, and can actually harm your web pages.

Metadata, URLs, on-Page Factors

It is also important to optimize your page URLs, page titles, and meta descriptions, which is all easy enough to do on a BigCommerce website because the platform makes it easy to optimize these fields. These on-page, semi-technical factors should all be optimized according to the same keyword strategy you follow for the rest of your content, and it should make sense with respect to the page and certain focus keywords. Also, update your images with alt text and image descriptions pursuant to your keyword strategy.

Link Structure, Back Linking, Social Signals

While you are optimizing your website with content and other on-page factors, remember to infuse your website with internal links that are sensible and encourage the customer journey along the sales funnel or in search of their desired information. It will not only potentially help boost conversion rates, but it also impacts BigCommerce SEO.

It is also important to build backlinks where you can. Monitor your GSC for any instances of broken or toxic backlinks and disavow or remove them, as these harm SEO (monitor your Google Analytics, too). Don’t purchase backlinks, as this is considered a black hat technique; instead, trade for them or encourage users to link to you.

That, itself, brings up social media strategy and “social signals.” Social signals come from social media platforms and include mentions, Facebook shares, tweets, or even how many followers an official page has. In addition to creating valuable “buzz,” social signals can also help improve your SEO.

Page Speed and Mobile Friendliness

Page speed, in addition to being a massive factor in user experience, also affects SEO. It is not only a ranking signal itself, but if droves of people bounce off of your website due to poor loading speeds, that’s an entirely different problem altogether.

Mobile-friendliness is also a key factor in BigCommerce SEO. Take these two facts for what they are: Google now practices mobile-first indexing, and soon the majority of online transactions will be mobile transactions. They may already be. That is, your website needs to be mobile-device friendly.

If you’re not able to account for all of the factors mentioned above, work with a BigCommerce SEO expert to ensure that your website populates favorably in the organic search engine results. If you’d like to learn more about SEO specifically or how a BigCommerce SEO agency can help you, visit Genius eCommerce at geniusecommerce.com and ask away.