BigCommerce keeps a Page Title and Meta Description for each page type, but in a different place for each. Here's where each change from your On-Page Mapping goes.
BigCommerce advises a unique page title under 60 characters, ideally starting with a relevant keyword.
Change the homepage
Go to Settings > Website and scroll to Search Engine Optimization. Paste the new meta title into Home Page Title and the description into Meta Description, then save. A blank Home Page Title falls back to your store name. With more than one storefront, each channel has these fields in its own storefront settings.
From BigCommerce: SEO fields
Change a product
To change a product:
- Go to
Products>All productsand click the product's name. - In the
SEOsection, paste the new meta title intoPage Titleand the description intoMeta Description. - Save the product.
From BigCommerce: Adding products
Change a category, brand, web page or blog post
- Category: go to
Products>Product Categories, edit the category, and use theSearch engine optimizationsection. - Brand: go to
Products>Brands, click the gear icon, and chooseEdit. ChangePage TitleandMeta Description. A blank page title uses the brand name. - Web page: go to
Storefront>Web Pages, edit the page, and openAdvanced Options. A blankPage Titleuses the page's name. Pages made of raw HTML, or that link to another site, have no metadata options. - Blog post: go to
Storefront>Blogand edit the post. It has aMeta descriptionfield but no separate page title field.
From BigCommerce: Product categories, Managing brands, Web pages and Using the built-in blog
Change the H1
BigCommerce's help doesn't say which field becomes a page's H1. Your theme decides. To see which text your theme uses, run the page through the free Meta tag checker, then change that field.
From BigCommerce: Theme accessibility
Change the URL
Each page type has its own URL field: Product URL in a product's SEO section, URL on a category, Page URL on a web page, Brand URL on a brand, and Post URL on a blog post.
BigCommerce creates a 301 redirect for you when you change the name or URL of a product, category or web page. A brand gets one when you tick Redirect old URLs to this URL automatically. A published blog post creates one by default.
To add a redirect by hand, go to Settings > 301 Redirect and click Create Redirect. Manual redirects need a paid plan.
From BigCommerce: 301 redirects
Add image alt text
BigCommerce calls alt text the image description. On a product, add it to each image under Images & Videos. Left blank, the image uses the product's name. For images inside a web page, add the image description in the page's text editor.
From BigCommerce: Adding products and Optimizing your images
Hide a page from search
BigCommerce has no noindex setting per page. Its help says to add a noindex tag to the theme's header, and to consider a BigCommerce Partner, because a mistake there can badly hurt your store's SEO.
The visibility switches do something else. Turning off Visible on Storefront on a product, or a category's visibility, takes the page off your store completely, and a hidden product's URL shows a 404.
From BigCommerce: Understanding the robots.txt file and Managing product availability
Check it worked
Run the live page through the free Meta tag checker. It shows the title, description, H1 and robots tag the page serves now. When the change is live, tick Mark done on the page's row in On-Page Mapping.