BigCommerce SEO Built in the Stencil Theme, Not Just App Settings

The principles are the same, the execution is platform-specific. BigCommerce ships with strong native foundations (clean URLs, server-side rendering, native canonicals, automatic sitemaps) so you don't need to fix what a generalist CMS forces you to fix. But the real work, Stencil-level schema, faceted nav control, category architecture, Open Checkout Core Web Vitals, multi-storefront hreflang, doesn't get done unless someone knows the platform. That's the difference.

All-inclusive of the work that moves organic revenue. No setup fee and no hidden tiering. The only thing not included is backlink building, which we'll explain below.

Yes. We run the same retainer model for Shopify and WordPress/WooCommerce stores. The pricing is identical, the methodology is identical, the platform-specific work changes. If you're not sure which platform suits your business, we'll give you an honest answer. We don't push BigCommerce onto stores it doesn't fit, and we don't push migrations away from BigCommerce that we'd profit from.

Technical fixes from weeks 1 to 4 can move things quickly, especially if your Stencil theme has missing schema or your faceted nav is wasting crawl budget. Content-driven ranking gains usually start landing in months 3 to 6 and compound from there. Anyone promising results in 30 days for an ecommerce site in a competitive UK SERP is either lucky or lying. We'd rather set the expectation honestly than oversell.

No, and we're honest about why. Real backlink building, digital PR, outreach, getting genuine editorial coverage, is a separate discipline and a separate cost structure. The cheap version, paid link networks and PBNs, is what tanks BigCommerce stores when Google catches up. If you want backlink work, we'll recommend specialists we trust. Everything else that moves organic revenue is included in the retainer.

Yes, that's where most of the platform-specific work lives. The free audit covers schema markup in the theme files, category and product page templates, breadcrumb rendering, internal linking patterns, and Handlebars partials that affect SEO. If we sign, we either work in your existing theme or set up a child theme so updates don't wipe out the work. We refresh the Stencil audit quarterly as part of the retainer.

Yes, this is one of the bigger wins on most BigCommerce stores. We audit your Product Filtering setup, identify which filter combinations have real search demand and should be indexable, canonicalise the rest back to the parent category, and block crawl waste at robots.txt or meta robots level. Done properly, this can pull 20 to 30 percent of indexed-but-useless URLs out of Google and concentrate ranking power where it belongs.

Yes. Headless BigCommerce, usually Catalyst with Next.js, changes the SEO brief: SSG versus SSR rendering trade-offs, sitemap generation in the frontend, edge caching, making sure schema renders in the initial HTML rather than after hydration. If you're already headless we'll audit the frontend's SEO behaviour as part of the free audit. If you're considering going headless, we'll give you an honest view on whether it'll help or hurt your organic performance.

Yes. BigCommerce multi-storefront for cross-border UK brands raises hreflang setup between regional storefronts, canonical tag handling across stores, and country-specific keyword targeting. We've seen multi-storefront setups where the UK store was canonicalising to the US store and tanking its own rankings. We audit and fix that as part of the retainer.

No. 30-day notice, that's it. We don't run 12-month contracts because if our work isn't earning its keep you should be able to walk. The flip side is SEO compounds, so a 3-month trial doesn't usually do justice to the work. We'd rather you stay because the data says you should stay, not because a contract says you have to.