If you are launching a new brand, how can you beat a powerhouse brand for Google's first page rankings? Experts will tell you that it takes time, but it can be done. SEO is a game of tactics and patience. We’ll divulge some of the secrets to beating big competitors at the online game we call search engine marketing.
We’ll use “running shoes” as our product, but the information and tactics will apply to any product or service.
What is a BigCommerce SEO Expert?
Every platform has unique characteristics, and BigCommerce is no exception. The complexities require experience to work through and troubleshoot. You want a company that knows the system.
However, getting your store running is only part of the solution. Running analytics and providing SEO are just as critical to your brand’s success. When it comes to SEO, everyone starts at the bottom, whether your company is a startup or an established eCommerce giant launching a new brand.
BigCommerce SEO experts are specially trained on the unique intricacies of the BigCommerce framework and have a strategic, content, analytics, and website development background to implement loading speed improvements and can refactor your code. They provide the necessary SEO services to drive relevant traffic and to take advantage of what BigCommerce has to offer in terms of SEO capabilities.
What They Do for Your eCommerce Store
If you think of every page of your website as a separate business, then each page must carry its weight and have a perfect score when it comes to SEO.
The first thing that a BigCommerce SEO company will do is to perform a site crawl or site audit to provide a snapshot of your SEO rankings, keywords, and any errors.
Technical SEO & SEO Error Management
One of the principal functions of a site crawl is uncovering errors on individual pages. These errors can be part of the site code and structure. Sometimes there are hundreds of them throughout the site, and each one must be fixed.
Here is a list of the most common SEO errors.
- URL Too Long
- Description Too Long
- Duplicate Content
- Title Too Long
- Description Too Short
- Missing or Invalid H1
- Duplicate Titles
- 4xx Error
- Redirect Chain
- Missing Canonical Tag
There are an additional 15 errors that a site crawl can uncover.
Individually, they may not affect your rankings much, but they all add up. What it means is that search bots and customers have a harder time finding what they want. The result is lower rankings and traffic.
The goal of BigCommerce search marketing experts, once they have the report, is to fix every individual error until the report shows “0.”
SEO Services
With all errors fixed, it's time to ramp up organic traffic by improving SEO. The primary areas are:
- Content Marketing - Blogs and articles that target specific keywords.
- On-Page SEO - Addressing the errors above will automatically improve the pages’ SEO.
- Off-Page SEO - Ensuring that your store has reputable customer reviews, backlinking, a mobile-friendly site, and begin authority building.
SEO experts make it as easy as possible for Google to find your eCommerce store or website and then rank your website higher than your competitors.
Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.
- Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
Taking on the Big Brands
Whether it’s a new brand or a mid-level or enterprise company looking to scale, SEO is vital for long-term growth and traffic. Knocking the big guys off their throne takes dedication to improve your SEO. No company is immune to errors or neglected SEO best practices.
Let’s say that you’ve just launched Bigfeet Running Shoes, and you want to bump Nike from their lofty perch. The first thing a BigCommerce SEO expert will do is a keyword search and site crawl. For this article, we ran a crawl of Nike’s home page and graded it based on the keyword, “running shoes.” Here’s what we found:
The page scored 79 out of 100 and eight elements out of 27 SEO page factors drove the rankings down:
- No broad keyword in the page title
- No exact keyword in the page title
- Poor keyword placement in the title tag
- No keyword in URL
- No keyword in the meta description
- No keyword in H1/Header tag
- No keyword in Alt Attribute/Images
- Too many internal links
Although the keyword “running shoes” is broad and highly competitive, in this case, the new running shoe brand could use it in the URL, H1 tag, and other areas where Nike was unable to do so.
Think of SEO as mountain climbing with each factor a finger or toe hold, helping you climb your way to the top.
Having Unique SEO Optimized Content Can Make All The Difference
We have discussed the many ways that a BigCommerce SEO company can help optimize your website to take on your large and well-entrenched competitors. Still, one other thing you can do that can help you be successful in this arena is having lots of unique and relevant SEO-optimized content. Having content that is generated and added to your website continually that not only provides information but tells your brand story can play a significant role in a successful strategy.
People search Google for information, and Google wants to provide their users with the best possible match for their content. Working with a BigCommerce SEO company to decipher the complex algorithms used to determine which sites have the highest quality content and are most relevant to searches is critical. Google wants to provide the best possible user experience for their customers, and an experienced BigCommerce SEO company helps to deliver that.
When creating unique SEO content, there are a few tips that will help achieve your goals. Writing unique content is not hard if you follow them, ensuring your content is original and unique:
- Never copy text from another website; use your own words
- Use multiple sources when conducting research
- Give your text a unique structure, mixing up paragraphs, titles, sub-titles, and bulleted or numbered lists
- Use your own unique writing style
- Explain things in a way your customers will understand them using plain language
Become the Go-To Resource
Nothing makes people visit and return to a website like when it becomes a valuable resource for them. If your target customer sees your organization as one that provides the products or services they are looking for and valuable information, stories, case studies, etc., they will view you as a subject matter expert. This gives them additional reasons to return to your website and increases your SEO by providing relevant and unique information. An experienced BigCommerce SEO company can help you position your organization to compete on the big stage by optimizing your SEO and content in a way that will enhance the product listings, categories, and
In addition to original written content, using visual and video content is an effective way to increase your Google ranking and tell your story. Using diagrams, pictures, infographics, and video when optimized for BigCommerce SEO can help tremendously and set you apart from others competing in the same space.
It can be challenging to churn out original SEO-optimized content continually, but the effort you put into it will pay off. The more connected you are to your industry, and the more you interact with your customers, the more unique stories you’ll have to tell, making valuable content much easier to create. Now if you have any questions about moving your content and store to BigCommerce, you can always reach out to an expert eCommerce migration agency certified BigCommerce strategist, and they can walk you through the options available and how best to leverage things like blogging, ALT tags, and metadate for your product catalog.
Improving Site Performance
BigCommerce is a growing eCommerce solution for SME companies. Delivering targeted traffic is why you need to hire a BigCommerce SEO expert. They will look at everything to ensure your pages load fast, are both user and search-bot-friendly. With so much competition, don’t leave your SEO to chance. Your page rank and traffic depend upon it.
