Shopify collections page SEO checklist for growing brands

One of the many aspects of your Shopify store that needs your attention when it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is your collections pages. Since it’s essentially your online store’s hub where customers can get an overview of the types of products you offer, it’s obvious why you’d want to get your Shopify collections SEO right.

Some of the biggest brands in the world rely on the organic traffic they drive to their collection pages as a large source of revenue. As paid ads on platforms like Google and Meta become more expensive–it’s gotten even more important to make sure you’ve got your pages optimized for SEO.

Ranking factors for Shopify collections page in search

What do search engines value when ranking Shopify collections pages? Here’s an effective SEO checklist to help:

• Product grid – The layout and design of your product grid, including how easy it is to navigate, will highly impact your user engagement and search ranking. To help both search engines and your customers understand your collections better, make sure you use clean, organized grids.

• Product variants – While you want to showcase the different varieties of a product, such as size, color, and more, you don’t want to be redundant. Redundancy can impact SEO negatively, as it can lead to keyword cannibalization. For SKUs with non-visually distinguishable variants, it’s recommended to list them all on one product page.

• Parent and child considerations – A ‘parent’ is essentially the overarching product collection, while the child is the type of product under that collection. When a customer clicks on a category, for example, ‘Dog Food,’ will it lead to a grid of subcategories, or will it bring them directly to the products? Showing them products will reduce the number of clicks to find products, which benefits UX and SEO. Customers can use filters to narrow down their search.

• Product page linking – Navigation is important, and internal linking from product pages to the collections it’s part of will help that. While it might sound tedious, Shopify allows for automated internal linking for easier implementation. 

• URL optimization – URLs should always be concise, clean, and meaningful, with relevant keywords to help search engines understand your site.

• User signals – Metrics such as bounce rate and time-spent-on-page can signal to search engines that your website has valuable content – a big factor for ranking. Things like site speed matter in determining bounce rates and engagement on a page–so don’t ignore problems with page load speeds.

• Title tags and meta descriptions – Especially for the purpose of enticing bottom-of-the-funnel traffic, title tags and meta descriptions should follow character guidelines, include your main keyword, and show clear intent. 

• Collection descriptions – Descriptions help encourage potential customers to buy from you and allow search engines to get a better understanding of page content. While you’ll want to get straight to the point for your general description, it can help to have a more detailed description that includes product features and more below your product images.

• External links – Having high quality links from external sites can help your collection page gain more authority. Don’t abuse this by buying links (this can backfire and negatively impact your SEO). 

How to optimize your collection page in Shopify for SEO

To start optimizing your collections page, head over to your Shopify dashboard and navigate to ‘Products’ > ‘Collections.’ Here, you’ll see a list of your collections. In this example, we’ll use the ‘Organic Skincare’ collection. 

On the collection page, you can edit a variety of information and see a list of all products related to it.

From here, you can edit the Collection page description, edit the Collection type, and modify the products under this collection. If you click on a product, you’ll be able to edit everything from its category and type, product tags, the collection it fits under, and more – all things that are integral to good Shopify collections SEO practices.

There’s even the option to add variants, including size, color, material, and style, and edit the search engine listing. There are even character guidelines for the page title and meta description so you can meet SEO guidelines.

How Shogun helps you optimize your collections page SEO

Shogun is a leading Shopify tool designed to truly augment your optimization strategies. With so many innovative features, Shogun makes optimizing your collections page and the rest of your ecommerce store easy and effective. Here are some of Shogun’s most coveted features:

• Keyword Analyzer *New* – Shogun’s new Keyword Analyzer tool allows you to revamp your Shopify keyword strategy. It can help you identify the most relevant keyword opportunities for organic search and help you create quick and effective AI-assisted blog content that features relevant products. This high quality content can help you drive traffic for keywords that can lead to direct sales of content-relevant products.

• Performance Insights – The Performance Insights feature is all about improving and maximizing your website performance. Using precise metrics about your collections page performance, you can make smart, data-driven decisions and audits of your page, refining your SEO and accessibility.

• Visual Editor – With the Visual Editor, you can creatively design and create collections pages from scratch. Go further than Shopify’s limited functionalities and craft pages that are visually dynamic and user-centric. Its no-code canvas provides an intuitive way for you to implement anything from sliders, buttons, and videos to custom elements and create the perfect page. By fostering a superior user experience, you can increase user dwell time and see a boost in your search engine rankings.

• Shogun Section Builder – Add depth to your collections pages with Shogun’s Section Builder. Use the tool to create custom sections and add engaging visual elements to improve time-on-page and convey positive user experience signals to Google. It can transform your Shopify collections pages on your theme and provide your customers with a layered and visually rich UX that steps up your SEO standing.

• Image Optimization – Shogun has a variety of image optimization tools out of the box to make sure your pages are loading quickly. By default, “lazy loading” defers the image loading on the page until it comes into view. This means the page can load quickly, even if it’s heavy on image files (like most collection pages).
  
• Blog Creation  – Create blog content for your store that lives natively on your Shopify URL–helping you drive authority and traffic. Include product displays within the content to drive incremental revenue through your content efforts.

If you’re ready to leverage the potential of SEO, Shogun’s impressive suite of tools can help you master organic search and enhance the visibility, performance and growth of your ecommerce store. Start your free trial with Shogun today!