This is how I'm optimising my collection pages

For Shopify stores selling more than a handful of products, collection pages are by far the biggest commercial traffic opportunity for SEO.

They should be your complete focus to start with.

You’re on Shopify—your technical SEO is probably sound.

Your content can wait.

Your links can wait.

I’m currently in the process of moving my own e-commerce business (Village Cricket Co.) from Woocommerce to Shopify, so I can share with you the different elements and steps I’ve gone through to optimize my collection pages.

A quick note on keyword targeting for category pages

I’m not going to go deep into finding the keywords you should be targeting. There’s a separate guide on that (check out the e-commerce keyword research guide).

But I wanted to touch base quickly on choosing the appropriate level of difficulty for the keywords you choose to optimise for.

If you’re a small brand selling jewellery, with a USP of being waterproof, your collections need to reflect this.

They shouldn’t just be called ‘necklaces’, and you should definitely not try to rank for that.

Instead, target the longer term of ‘waterproof necklaces’ (I’ll explain how in this guide).

Not only will this get you more traffic, but it will get you even more sales than ranking for ‘necklaces’ would because it’s more specific.

The basics of SEO for collection pages

These are the bare essentials you need for your collection pages. These basics should be your first port of call when working on your collection-page SEO.

If you’re limited on time, focus on these and you should get some traction.

Collection Name

Your collection name is what will show up as the main heading on the page (in virtually every theme). It is natively the H1 on the page and should be specifically the main target keyword you are trying to rank for.

In my example below, this is me trying to rank for ‘cricket bats’.

You should keep this short, specific, and exactly on topic.

Collection Description

The collection description is important for SEO, but a lot of brands ignore it because they think adding loads of text might mess with the UX.

But you don’t need a lot of text in a collection description.

What you should aim for is around 50–70 words, describing exactly what the user should expect from this collection page. In doing so, you will naturally mention the target keyword (for example, if you sell waterproof products, you’d naturally mention that here).

So, mention the key benefits or features of the products in the collection and you’ll do great.

Because this text is above the fold, it’s more important than many realise.

Page Title

At the bottom of the collection page edit screen, you’ll find a section called ‘Search engine listing’. Whilst not the only place you need to worry about SEO, these are some key things for you to make sure you edit to maximise your ranking opportunity.

The SEO page title is essentially what will show in the search results and plays a big role in Google understanding what the topic of the page is.

You want to lead with your main keyword.

Then use a separator, I often use pipes ( | ) but occasionally use hyphens too.

Add a keyword variation or USP in the next section.

Then I love to add ‘For sale at [brand name]’ to the end (even if this takes it over the guidelines of length) because you can pick up some easier rankings for ‘[product] for sale’ sometimes.

So, in my example below, I have:

• ‘Cricket Bats’ → the main keyword

• ‘Affordable Bat Selection’ → ‘affordable’ is a keyword variation/USP of our products (I could also use ‘budget’ or similar.)

• ‘For Sale at Village Cricket’ → my standard ending of the page title

Meta Description

To quickly clarify, meta descriptions hold no bearing on your actual rank, so stuffing keywords in there doesn’t boost your ranking.

However, click-through rate from the search results page can be affected by your meta descriptions, so they are important.

But (the ups and downs of meta descriptions) Google rewrites meta descriptions A LOT (I can’t find the research now but it was somewhere around 80% of the time if I remember correctly.

So you have a few options:

1. Don’t write one, just let Google use a snippet from the page as it sees fit (as it most likely will do anyway).

2. Use the collection description you wrote and just paste it as your meta description.

3. Craft a dedicated meta description.

The option you choose will likely depend on the time you have.

If you opt to write it yourself (or you can use AI to write these; it does pretty well at short snippets like this when given a decent prompt), you’ll need to include and consider the following:

• The general guidance on length is 150–160, anything longer will get cut off.

• Mention your main target keyword; this will get bolded within the SERP. 

• Keep it simple and try to entice the click-through.

• Highlight key benefits/features of the products.

• Highlight any shipping offers (free shipping over $40 for example).

URL Handle

The URL handle (or ‘slug’ as other places refer to it) on Shopify is the part of the URL at the end of the /collections/ section.

So, for example, for my cricket bats collection page, it will be >>villagecricket.co/collections/cricket-bats/<<.

(It currently has villagecricket.myshopify.com as the domain because the site is currently still hosted on Woocommerce; I’ll be moving it over in January).

Your URL handle should be your target keyword. Short, sweet, to the point.

Sitemap

You’re on Shopify so you don’t need to worry too much about this, since Shopify natively has a dynamic sitemap that automatically updates as you create new collections.

One thing to note is to not let your collections get out of control and always keep up with removing any you don’t use. And don’t create new seasonal ones each year.

I once had to help a client delete over 2000 collections that were old legacy pages that had no products and were only harming the site.

The only thing you need to make sure you do is head over to Google Search Console and submit the sitemap. This will help Google find your collection pages.

Pro Tip: Don’t add a banner image to your collections

It might seem like a good idea to add a banner image to your collections.

Don’t.

Here’s why:

• Adds more time to scroll to the products

• Pushes more valuable content further down the page

• Slows down the page

• Reduces conversions

I’ve tested this numerous times and it has always proved to be better without a banner image. Glide published the results of an experiment recently too.

Advanced SEO for category pages

Right, you’ve done the basics.

You are now ahead of 95% of Shopify stores. Congratulations!

But if you want to go deeper, increasing your chances of higher rankings, more organic search traffic, and even more sales and profit, check out the next few opportunities.

To do this within Shopify, you will need to create a collection template for each collection if you want to create additional content.

This may vary depending on your theme, but from what I’ve seen recently, here’s how to do it:

1. Navigate to Online Store

2. Click on ‘Customise’

3. In the page selection, click ‘Collections’

4. Select ‘Create template’

For simplicity, name the template the same name as your collection.

Once you’ve done this, you can use the sections available within Shopify and your theme to add additional content dedicated to this page.

These are the key moves you can make to get more from your SEO.

Below Product Grid Content

Historically, many brands placed wall-to-wall text below the product grid.

It looked horrendous. (Annoyingly I can’t find any examples right now, but will share if I come across one.)

There was no avoiding its terrible effect on UX, but it worked for SEO.

It probably still works, but now there is a lot more focus on UX, which means it very rarely happens.

Instead, you can use the Image + Text block section within Shopify to create a better experience that adds both additional (readable) content that can help your user whilst not looking terrible.

Add content to these sections that genuinely helps the user understand more about the products on offer, how to choose them, how they can fit within their routine . . . whatever is relevant to what you sell.

My example is a section on how to choose a cricket bat (the copy is a placeholder from ChatGPT for speed for writing this).

Valuable FAQs

Adding FAQs to your collection page is more about the user experience than SEO.

But they can also give your SEO a boost, so it’s a win-win.

You can find commonly asked questions about the product range with tools like Also Asked.

Here are some examples that I would use:

• Do I need to knock in the cricket bat?

• What size cricket bat do I need?

• What wood are cricket bats made from?

You can even include any commonly asked questions you get from customers too.

Internal Linking

The most underutilised lever for e-commerce stores is improving internal linking.

The potential to make it easier for users and Google to find all the pages on your site makes internal linking an obvious tactic.

You can do this in a few different ways, but the best option on collection pages is to link to either complementary collection pages or to sub-collection pages.

Simple link blocks can be created by developers. My theme has a ‘columns’ section that includes buttons and links, which I’ll be using to link to other collections and product pages.

Overall it's simple, but by doing the above you'll be in the top 1% of Shopify stores.

That’s it from Freddie!