If you’re not spending at least as much time on the SEO of your e-commerce site’s category pages as you are on the individual product pages, you’re probably not getting nearly as much organic traffic as you could be.
How would you like to double or triple your traffic? With a little work on category page optimisation, it’s very possible.
Why is category page SEO so important? It’s because category pages are almost always the pages that Google wants to show for broad e-commerce search terms. These are high-volume keywords that people use when they’re ready to spend money.
Let’s suppose, for instance, that you’re a shoe seller. Some of the broad search terms relating to your niche might include “dress shoes,” “running shoes” and “hiking shoes.” If you’ve done the appropriate research, you already know what the broad keywords are in your niche. Search for any of them on Google, and category pages are going to come up.
In other words, if you’re trying to use blog posts to improve your rankings for those keywords, you’re going about it the wrong way and wasting your time.
This article is a crash course on category page SEO. You’re going to learn exactly how to create a Google-friendly and customer-friendly e-commerce category page on a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce from start to finish.
Choose a Unique Target Keyword
The target keyword is the most important aspect of any category page. You’ll need to know what your page’s primary keyword is before you do anything else because all of the other optimisations will build on that. It’s very helpful to use a keyword research tool because you’ll want the page’s primary keyword to align with search volumes.
It’s equally important to ensure that no other pages on your site target the same keyword – including blog posts. If you have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, you’ll end up confusing Google’s algorithm and may not end up ranking for that keyword at all.
Add Relevant and Helpful Text to the Page
A good category page should never be just a list of products, and that means you’ll need to add some helpful text to the page. Your e-commerce platform may give you the ability to add text to the page automatically using AI, but that’s a recipe for failure. There are probably dozens or even hundreds of websites in your niche that are already using AI for their content. Your category pages will look basically the same as theirs and won’t rank for anything. If you want real results and want to compete with top sites like VapeJuice.com, you’ll have to write the text yourself.
Provide Relevant Information for People Ready to Buy
When you write the text for a category page, you should make sure that the text focuses on the page’s target keyword – but it’s crucial to have the right approach. Don’t waste time writing a novella explaining what the items on the page are. The users that you’re targeting already know what the products are, and they’re ready to buy. Focus on providing helpful and relevant information for people who intend to choose and buy a product.
Don’t Worry About Hitting a Word Count
You don’t need to focus on hitting a certain word count when you add text to a category page. In the past, people found that longer content typically had a better chance to rank well compared to shorter content. More recently, though, that hasn’t always been the case – perhaps because Google’s algorithm considers very long content to be a possible sign of AI-generated spam. Look at what currently shows up on Google’s first page for your target keyword. You’ll probably find a wide range of word counts, which is a sign that relevance and helpfulness are much more important than length.
Prioritise the Shopping Experience, Not the Text
Your e-commerce platform probably gives you the ability to choose where the text on your category pages will go – above the products, below the products or both above and below. It can be useful to have a brief introduction at the top of the page, but you should be mindful of the length. You’ll get many visitors who don’t care about the text and are only interested in viewing the products. Make sure that the text doesn’t push the products too far down the page and detract from the shopping experience. Don’t forget to check the page on a smartphone, which will have a narrower viewing area compared to a computer.
Write An Appealing Title and Meta Description
Your e-commerce platform will give you the ability to write a custom title tag and meta description for your category page. Your site can fill in those fields automatically, but you should write the content yourself because you can do a better job. A page’s title and meta description may be shown on Google’s search results pages, so they give you an opportunity to enhance the page’s relevance and encourage people to click through to your site.
Optimising the Title Tag
A page’s title has a direct effect on SEO, so the title for a category page should always begin with the page’s main target keyword. You’ll have a bit of space left over, and you can use the extra room for things like your brand name and alternate keywords related to the page’s main keyword. You can also use the extra room for additional details – like a free shipping offer – that might encourage people to choose your page over the other search results. A title tag should typically be no longer than about 60 characters. Google usually truncates anything longer than that.
Optimising the Meta Description
A page’s meta description has an indirect effect on SEO. Although the text itself won’t affect your ranking on Google, it could improve your rank over the long term if you’re successful in encouraging people to click through to your site. The meta description is your opportunity to pre-sell potential customers on the value that you’re going to deliver when they visit your category page. Talk about things like your prices, your selection, your lightning-fast shipping – anything that expresses your unique value proposition. If your meta description is successful in helping you attain a high click-through rate relative to your competitors, your category page’s ranking will increase over time.
Don’t forget that promising value is only half of your job; you also need to deliver it. That’s what we’ll discuss as we bring this guide to a close.
Focus on the Customer Experience
Achieving a high ranking with category page SEO isn’t just a matter of having the right content on the page; you can also indirectly affect a page’s rank in two ways. As we explained above, one of those ways is by having a high click-through rate relative to your competitors. The other way is by giving your customers a great experience.
Defining a Good Customer Experience
Google can tell how people behave on websites because they track what users do on their search engine. If someone clicks the “Back” button immediately after viewing a search result, Google can see that he or she wasn’t satisfied by that result. Google also uses the Chrome browser to track user behaviour. Between those two things, Google definitely knows if people are having a good or bad experience when they visit your site. If people spend time interacting with your site, that’s a good experience, and you can potentially look forward to improved rankings as a result. If people often click “Back” after viewing your site, your rankings may decrease.
Delivering a Good User Experience
So, how can you ensure that your category pages deliver a good experience and will encourage users to stick around? One way to find ideas is by seeing what your competitors are doing. It’s usually a bad idea to copy a competitor’s website outright, but you may find interesting features or design elements that are worth borrowing.
Here are some other ideas to consider.
- Make sure that your site’s navigation is intuitive and logical. If a category page doesn’t have exactly what the user wants, it should be easy for them to find what they do want.
- Add elements to the page that provide proof of the products’ value. These might include average star ratings from customer reviews.
- Make sure that the products look visually appealing. If you can take your own high-quality product photos rather than using stock photos from distributors or manufacturers, that’ll help your category pages stand out.
- Provide information that helps people quickly find what they want. A smaller category page might have room for you to add bullet lists of the products’ features or explain their best use cases.
- Benchmark the page’s loading time using a tool like Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool also provides advice that can help you maximise the page’s accessibility for those with visual impairments.
Final Thoughts
Category page SEO is an absolutely crucial aspect of maximising the organic traffic of any e-commerce site because category pages have the best chance to rank for competitive product-related keywords – keywords that people typically use when they’re ready to spend money. Although there are no shortcuts here, it’s actually not difficult at all to optimise your category pages as long as you remain focused on the four most important things.
- Make sure that the page has a unique target keyword. No other page on your site should target the same keyword.
- Write some supporting text for the page. The text should provide relevant and helpful information for someone who already knows what the products are and wants to choose which one to buy.
- Write your own title tags and meta descriptions by hand. Promise value and encourage people to click through to your site.
- Deliver the promised value by providing a great experience that makes customers want to stay instead of clicking the “Back” button.