BigCommerce SEO: The 10 Most Common Mistakes
BigCommerce is a genuinely capable e-commerce platform — fast infrastructure, solid built-in SEO controls, no plugin sprawl. But its default settings leave a surprising amount of SEO value on the table, and most store owners never touch the settings that matter. After auditing hundreds of BigCommerce stores, we see the same ten issues over and over. Here they are, why each one costs you, and exactly how to fix it.
1. Faceted navigation creating duplicate content
BigCommerce's product filters are great for shoppers and dangerous for SEO. Every filter combination — color, size, price range — can generate a unique URL, and Google will happily index thousands of near-identical variations of the same category. This splits your ranking equity across dozens of URLs and can trigger crawl-budget waste. The fix: use canonical tags to point filtered URLs back to the main category page, and noindex the parameter-based combinations you don't want in search results.
2. Product descriptions copied from the manufacturer
This is the single most common issue we find. When you paste the manufacturer's description — the same text sitting on 50 competing stores — Google has no reason to rank your version over anyone else's. Unique, original descriptions of 150+ words that naturally include your target keywords are what separate a product page that ranks from one that never gets seen. Write for the buyer's real questions: materials, dimensions, use cases, what makes it different.
3. Missing product schema
Product schema puts price, availability, and review stars directly into your search listing. Those rich results take up more space and earn dramatically higher click-through rates than a plain blue link. BigCommerce supports structured data, but many themes implement it incompletely. Verify with Google's Rich Results Test and make sure price, availability, and aggregateRating are all present and valid.
4. Thin category pages with no introductory content
Category pages target your highest-volume commercial keywords — "men's running shoes," "stainless water bottles" — terms individual products can't realistically rank for. Yet most BigCommerce category pages are just a grid of products with zero text. Add a 200-300 word introduction that includes the target keyword and describes what the category contains and who it's for. This turns a thin listing page into a rankable landing page.
5. Auto-generated meta descriptions that don't pull clicks
When you leave the meta description blank, BigCommerce generates one from your product data. The result is usually truncated, awkward, or duplicated across similar products. Hand-write descriptions under 155 characters that include the keyword and a concrete reason to click — free shipping, a warranty, a differentiator. A great description won't lift your ranking directly, but it will lift your click-through rate, which compounds over thousands of impressions.
6. Slow page speed from unoptimized images and excessive apps
BigCommerce's infrastructure is fast, but you can still slow it down. The two usual culprits are oversized images and app bloat — every app you install adds JavaScript that loads on your storefront. Compress and correctly size all product images, and audit your installed apps quarterly, removing anything you're not actively using. An app you tried once and abandoned is still taxing every page load.
7. Missing alt text on product images
Search engines read alt text, not pixels. Every product image should have descriptive alt text that includes the product name and a key feature — "navy waterproof hiking boot, side profile" rather than a blank attribute or a filename like IMG_2043. Beyond SEO and Google Images traffic, this is a genuine accessibility requirement for shoppers using screen readers.
8. Broken or missing internal linking
Your best-selling products should link to related categories, and category pages should surface featured or complementary products. Most stores never build these connections, leaving products stranded with no internal links pointing to them. Strong internal linking helps shoppers discover more products and helps search engines understand which pages matter most. Add related-product and cross-sell links deliberately, not just wherever the theme happens to place them.
9. No blog or resource content
Stores that publish helpful content — buying guides, comparisons, how-tos — consistently outrank stores that only have product and category pages. Content captures top-of-funnel, long-tail search traffic ("how to choose a running shoe for flat feet") and builds the topical authority that lifts your commercial pages too. A store with a genuine resource section has far more surface area to rank than one that's purely transactional.
10. Ignoring mobile performance
The majority of e-commerce traffic — and an increasing share of transactions — now happens on phones, and Google scores your site based on the mobile experience. If your store loads slowly on a mid-range phone or has cramped tap targets and hard-to-read text, you're losing both rankings and sales. Test on real mobile hardware, not just a resized desktop browser.
The pattern behind all ten
Notice the theme: none of these are exotic. They're default settings left unchanged and small tasks left undone across hundreds or thousands of products. That's what makes BigCommerce SEO so winnable — the fixes are known and mechanical, they just need to be executed thoroughly and consistently. Our team handles exactly this kind of work, one task at a time, delivered within 24 hours.