BigCommerce SEO Audit: What to Check, and Where to Find It
Most of a BigCommerce SEO audit comes down to ten checks, and the platform handles several of them for you. The job is to confirm those defaults are still in place, then look at what it leaves to you: titles, category content, redirects after a bulk edit, and any robots.txt rules someone has added.
BigCommerce-specific details below come from BigCommerce’s robots.txt article, its 301 redirects article and its Catalyst sitemap docs, as they stood in October 2026. Menus move, so treat the paths as a starting point.
The ten checks at a glance
| # | Check | Where | Good looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Index coverage | Search Console, Indexing > Pages | Products and categories indexed, and every exclusion explained |
| 2 | robots.txt | Settings > Website > Search Engine Robots, and your live /robots.txt | No rule blocking products, categories, CSS or JavaScript |
| 3 | Sitemap | /sitemap.xml, or /xmlsitemap.php on Stencil | Submitted in Search Console and read without errors |
| 4 | URL format | SEO settings for products, categories and pages | One format, changed rarely |
| 5 | Redirects | Redirects settings, or a CSV export | Old URLs reach a live page in one hop |
| 6 | Filtered pages | Live /robots.txt and category pages | Filter URLs stay out of the index |
| 7 | Titles and descriptions | SEO & Sharing on each product | Written for the top sellers, no duplicates |
| 8 | Product schema | Google’s Rich Results Test | Valid Product data matching what the page shows |
| 9 | Category content | Category pages | Enough unique copy to explain the range |
| 10 | Speed | Search Console, Core Web Vitals | Field data good, or too little traffic to report |
1. Start with what Google has indexed
Open Indexing > Pages in Search Console and export the list of pages that are not indexed. Most stores will see a block of “Page with redirect” and a few alternates, which is normal. The reasons worth your time are “Crawled - currently not indexed” and “Discovered - currently not indexed” against real products or categories.
Compare the indexed count with the number of products, categories and pages you actually want found. A store with 400 products and 3,000 indexed URLs has a duplication problem. A store with 400 products and 60 indexed has a quality or linking problem.
2. Read the robots.txt you are actually serving
Open yourstore.co.uk/robots.txt in a browser before you open the admin. BigCommerce’s help centre says it automatically adds URLs to every store’s file to keep filtered listing pages out of search results, and not everything in the live file appears in your website settings. So the file in the admin and the file Google reads can differ, and that is expected.
Your own rules live under Settings > Website > Search Engine Robots, which needs the Manage Settings permission. On multi-storefront, each storefront has its own file, so check them all.
Look for three mistakes: a rule added during a staging build and never removed, a broad disallow that catches a whole product folder, and rules blocking the CSS or JavaScript that pages need in order to render. BigCommerce’s technical SEO guide warns against that last one directly.
3. Confirm the sitemap, and which storefront you run
BigCommerce’s Catalyst docs put the sitemap at /sitemap.xml and say requests for the older Stencil address, /xmlsitemap.php, are redirected there on Catalyst storefronts. On Catalyst, the top-level file is an index: it lists other sitemaps, and the page URLs sit one layer down.
Submit the index in Search Console, then open one child sitemap and spot-check ten URLs. Each should return a 200, and none should point at a redirect or a discontinued product.
4. Decide on one URL format and leave it
BigCommerce’s SEO fields article describes short, long and category presets, plus a custom format. When you change a format you can apply it to every URL or only to ones you have not customised, and a checkbox creates 301s for the old addresses.
5. Audit the redirects
BigCommerce creates a 301 automatically when the name or URL of a product, category or web page changes. That setting can be turned off, per item, so a store with a history of bulk edits may have gaps.
Two kinds of redirect behave differently. A manual redirect points at a fixed address and needs updating if the target moves. A dynamic redirect follows the linked product or category, so it survives a later rename, and it is the better default where you can use it.
Crawl the old URLs from your last migration, or the URLs Search Console lists as “Not found (404)”. You are looking for chains of more than one hop, and redirects that land on the home page instead of the closest match.
6. Keep filtered pages out of the index
BigCommerce’s automatic robots.txt entries cover its own filtered listings, so this check is mostly confirming they are present. Stores with a third-party search or filter app need a closer look, because those can add URLs the default rules do not cover.
Google’s faceted navigation guidance says to block crawling of these URLs if you do not need them in search, and calls canonical tags and nofollow generally less effective in the long term.
BigCommerce’s guide names product collections, variants and faceted search as the usual sources of duplicate content. While you are here, open a variant and a filtered view, and check the canonical tag points to the version you want indexed.
7. Titles, descriptions and the top sellers
Product SEO fields, including the page title and meta description, sit in the SEO & Sharing section of each product. Writing them for a whole catalogue rarely pays back, so sort products by revenue and start with the top 50, then the categories that lead to them. Give each page one main keyword, based on what people search for in Search Console’s Performance report. Check for theme defaults that repeat the store name twice, and for page titles still set to the supplier’s product code.
8. Test product schema on real pages
Run a product page, an out-of-stock product and a variant through Google’s Rich Results Test. BigCommerce’s guide lists the fields to expect: name, SKU or GTIN, stock status, an offer with price, currency and availability, and an image. The price and availability in the markup must match the page.
Review stars need real reviews shown on the page. If an app adds them, check it is not marking up a rating with nothing visible behind it.
9. Category pages do the commercial work
For most stores the terms worth ranking for are category terms. A category page with a heading and a product grid gives Google little to separate it from every other retailer. Add a short block that explains the range, how to choose and who it suits, and link to related categories. Our category page content brief has a template for it, and our internal linking audit covers how to feed those pages.
10. Speed, last
Check the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. Smaller stores often see “not enough data”, which means Google has too little field data to judge, so run PageSpeed Insights on a category and a product page instead. Apps and oversized images are the usual place to look. Speed matters, but it comes after everything above, because a fast page Google cannot index earns nothing.
What to fix first
| Finding | Priority | Why |
|---|---|---|
| robots.txt blocks products, categories or assets | Today | Nothing else matters until Google can crawl the pages |
| Redirects missing from a recent migration | This week | Links and rankings on old URLs are being lost |
| Filter URLs in the index | This month | Crawling goes to pages you do not want found |
| Invalid product schema | This month | Rich results depend on it |
| Thin category pages | This quarter | Biggest ranking gain, slowest to do |
If you want a second pair of eyes, our ecommerce SEO service covers BigCommerce alongside Shopify and WooCommerce, our technical SEO work goes deeper on crawling, and the free SEO audit tells you where to start.