In 2022, the benefits of organic marketing (like BigCommerce SEO) are only going to become more and more central to sustained growth. Neil Patel recently observed in the 2021 Make It Big eCommerce Conference that up to 60% of online experiences begin with a search. On top of that, users inherently trust organic listings.
That’s good news not only for merchants with websites built on BigCommerce but for all those that invest wisely in organic marketing strategies. BigCommerce, for its part, offers users a lot to love with respect to SEO. It is fast, secure, and scalable. It’s also easy to create blog posts (BigCommerce comes with a native blog) and edit the meta descriptions, page titles, and URLs of BigCommerce sites.
But no eCommerce platform, no matter how robust, is “perfect” for SEO right out of the box. BigCommerce is no exception, and the fact of the matter is that all experiences with an online store will begin with the theme.
So, with no further ado, here are some of our top picks for themes that are optimized for both BigCommerce SEO and UX.
1. ShopTown
ShopTown, with its simple and straightforward aesthetics, is everyman’s BigCommerce Stencil theme. It’s relatively easy to customize and comes with some unique features built right in, such as a vertical mega menu, and product grids.
It also features a zoom magnifier and an image slider that are great for drawing attention to your products, specifically to featured items. It’s great for CRO and UX.
It might be basic and have a bit of a minimalist feel, but the fact that the theme is responsive and optimized for SEO is another bonus.
2. Chiara
The Chiara theme is primarily geared towards merchants in four main industries: furniture, sporting goods, fashion, and toys. Its basic layout is conversion optimized with big, attention-grabbing, customizable tiles that can be used to promote featured products or categories.
It offers a ton of native options to customize the website homepage as well as quick search functionality and is UX-optimized for mobile devices, which just so happens to be great not only for mobile shoppers but also for SEO.
3. Qrack
Qrack is not just a cool name. It’s actually one of the best-performing SEO-optimized themes available today. It’s a fully responsive theme that has been perfecting its optimization techniques for over ten years. If that’s not good enough, rest assured it’s compatible with a number of SEO plug-ins to give your BigCommerce SEO an additional boost.
Plus, Qrack comes with a lot of features that you and your customers will love. It has a homepage slider, multiple carousels, quick view, layered navigation functionality, and Twitter and Instagram widgets built right in.
4. Beautica
This theme is naturally geared towards suppliers of cosmetic goods and is potentially well-adapted to those serving wellness markets. It’s fully responsive, so it’ll look great on any device, no matter the screen size, and is optimized for SEO while offering a number of additional user-friendly features.
Beautica offers built-in banner templates as well as product image swap functionality and a product label feature, too. It’s modern, clean, minimalist, and great for showcasing a product catalog that contains a lot of entries – perfect for scrolling, too.
5. LaParis
What’s great about the La Paris theme is that it’s flexible and customizable. You can create a visually minimalistic website or one that’s suffused with color and bright, bold background imagery, all with a minimum of legwork.
It’s easy to produce a clean, well-organized-looking BigCommerce website with this theme and it comes with lots of built-in features that don’t require the user to know a lot of code. For example, creating slide shows and featured categories is easy with this theme, with no coding required – plus, it comes with a built-in blog so you can get started bringing in organic traffic (or hire a qualified eCommerce SEO expert for that, of course).
Plus, this Stencil theme is responsive and allows for easy-SEO optimizations.
6. BeoShop
One of the greatest things about BeoShop, from an admin’s perspective, is that there are a lot of theme variations that are easy to customize. In that respect, it’s not a one-size-fits-all theme. It’s very flexible and great for businesses in all sorts of industries.
Plus, it comes with tons of functionality built right in, like social media widgets, and it features a drag and drop editor that makes it easy to change things like headings, banners, collections, new arrivals, and much more.
More good news: it’s fully optimized (at least as much as a theme can be) and fully responsive, so it’ll look great for any store, on any device, which is great for both UX and BigCommerce SEO.
7. AP Alaska
The AP Alaska theme is a responsive BigCommerce theme that can be used for a store in just about any industry. One of the great things about this theme is that it offers a lot of different layouts for homepage design, mega menu structure, as well as product layouts, making it easy to make quick adjustments to the interface to suit your customers, brand, and experience.
With this theme, it’s easy to create a website with color and brand-aligned banners, sliders, and other features that catch attention and guide navigation. The admin dashboard contains a theme editor to make these adjustments and customizations as easy and pain-free as possible.
Also, this Stencil framework theme is fully responsive, a big bonus for both your SEO and UX goals. It’s SEO-optimized, cross-browser friendly, and offers the ability to make fairly granular edits which can facilitate further optimizations.
8. Electronics Supermarket
This is a BigCommerce theme that is easy to install, requires no coding experience, and is super fast, which is great for SEO. It’s also fully responsive (great for all screen sizes) and offers a ton of theme variations, once again, great for SEO and UX.
The great thing about this theme is its versatility. Despite the name, it’s great for merchants in many industries (not just electronics) and enables easy adjustments to the header and footer, the mega menu, banners, sliders, and much more.
It also gives you the ability to customize your homepage by promoting new and featured products by grids, lists, carousels, and tabs, facilitating customer movements down the sales funnel.
9. SarahMarket
Several sources say SarahMarket is a great choice for online grocery stores, and it may be, but given its unfettered ability to succinctly categorize (and promote) a huge collection of products, we say it’s a fine pick for any business that offers a complex assortment of products.
Now, onto SEO. this theme is super fast and fully responsive – both great for BigCommerce SEO (and UX, by the way). It’s also highly customizable, making it even better for optimization for both SEO and UX.
But SarahMarket isn’t just great for customers, it’s great for merchants, too. The theme comes with excellent technical support as well as multiple languages and currencies, so it’s ideal for businesses that sell internationally.
Where You Can Find Some of These BigCommerce SEO and UX Optimized Themes
A quick search will tell you where you can get any of these themes. You can get most of these themes over at ThemeForest.net and HaloThemes.com, although some of them are available through BigCommerce’s own theme database.
Does the Theme Do All the Work? No: Let’s Talk BigCommerce SEO
While these are great themes for both eCommerce SEO and UX, no theme can do all the work to stay up to date with SEO best practices. The theme lays the framework, and an SEO expert does the rest.
Besides, fully optimizing a website and monitoring user behavior and Google Analytics constitutes a full-time job, which is what we’re here for. Whether you’re launching a new website or just going through a redesign featuring a new theme, we’ll run a custom-developed SEO campaign for your company to help spread brand awareness and encourage organic traffic, sales, and conversion rates.
Get in touch with our BigCommerce SEO experts today to get started with a free eCommerce SEO audit so you can gather actionable insights for improvement.
