All CMS and Shopping platforms have both strong and weak elements. Things we love and things we hate. Things that are good for SEO and sales and others that are not. The same is true for Shopify.
One of the really great features in Shopify – from an SEO and sales point of view is the automated dynamic collections. So today we are going to take a closer look at that and how you can use them to gain much more visibility in Google – and ultimately more sales.
Why are category pages so great for SEO and sales?
For most businesses a majority of the most searched keywords are for categories of products – not for a specific product.
People search a lot more for “Protein Powder” or “shoes” than for “Whey Protein Powder with Vanilla” or “Air Jordan 4 Retro Red Thunder”. Just as a couple of examples.
The many times more searches for the categories keywords are done by people that haven’t decided yet. A good category pages with a selection of products that match the search is a great landing page. And visitors convert well from them.
Oh, and by the way, these category pages are also great as landing pages for other kinds of marketing – Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc.
How many categories should you have?
Most webshops present the most important categories in the global top navigation. We also recommend you do that. But you should limit it to the most important – the ones most of your prospects are looking for when they come to your site.
If you have too many categories in your top navigation studies have proven that users get confused and as a result tend to engage and buy less. Keep it simple and focused.
But for most business there will usually be hundreds – if not thousands og relevant categories that you should consider optimizing.
If you for example are selling dresses for women there are off course a lot of searches for just “dresses”. But there are also a lot for “summer dresses”, “white dresses”, “black dresses” (and many other colors), “long dresses”, plus size dresses” just to mention a few. That is all category searches.
Visitors looking for white dresses will convert better if they land on a category page with just white dresses – rather than a page with dresses in all sorts of colors.
It is also a lot easier to get a category page that is entirely focused on white dresses to rank well in Google for “white dresses”.
We recommend that you research your market well in a good keyword tool such as Ahrefs.com. Here you can find all the relevant category variations to add to your site.
How to navigate the (many) categories
You should off course only optimize for the categories that actually match the product variants you sell. But for most webshops that still ends up being quite a lot – many more than what we recommend you add to your global top navigation.
Instead, we recommend that you create a page on your site, make a single link to it and call it something like “inspirational pages”, “More categories”. And on this page you list all of your additional category pages that is not included in your global top navigation.
The challenges of dealing with many category pages
One of the main challenges optimizing category pages on most shopping platforms is, that you have to assign products to each of them manually.
If you only have a few categories that is manageable. But if you follow our recommendations and create many more categories it quickly becomes too much to handle. And as you add more even more of a nightmare.
And this is where the automated dynamic collections feature in Shopify comes in very handy. Because with this you do not need to manually assign products to collections and when you add new collections you can automatically have products that is already in the shop assigned to them automatically.
That makes the ongoing work of category optimization – for SEO and sales, so much easier. We really love this.
Automatic or manual collections in Shopify
When you create a new collection in Shopify you can either manually or automatically add products. If you select “automated” you get the option to set up rules for which products to include.
For the mugs collection on my pottery website I have set it up like this:
After you save it you will be able to see which products was added. You should check that it is right and adjust the filters if not. In my case it ended up like this, which looks fine.
Designing category pages that works for SEO
Google prioritize content that is above the fold – what you see before scrolling down the page or clicking anything. But it is not just Google. Users tend to engage better on collection pages that also include at leas some text above the fold.
The challenge of designing a great collection page is that you also want a great visual, and you don’t want ll that to push down the products so much that visitors do not notice them.
We have found that a design where you use to columns in the top with room for both a nice image (or a video) as well as a good headline and a few lines of text works really well. Google as well as users love this. At my pottery shop it looks like this.
If you want to add more text than what you can at the top – which can be a good idea, we recommend that you add it below the product grid.
At my pottery shop it looks like this.
So how did I do that? As you know there is only one text field. How can you split it in a top and a bottom text?
How tp split your collection text
It is actually quite easy, but you have to do a bit of coding.
First you need to add a “split tag” – that is basically just a few letters that you know you won’t be using in any other part of your text. In my case I use “…”. It looks like this.
And now you need to get into the code …
Exactly where and how you do the coding depends on your theme. I have added to new sections that I use above and below the product grid. In the top banner I only print out the first part of the description – before the “…” using this code:
{%- if section.settings.show_collection_description -%}
<div class="collection-hero__description rte">
{% if collection.description contains '...' %}
{{ collection.description | split:'...' | first }}
{% else %}
{{ collection.description }}
{% endif %}
</div>
{%- endif -%}And on the bottom banner section I print out the other part of the text with this code:
{%- if section.settings.show_collection_description -%}
<div class="collection-hero__description rte">
{% if collection.description contains '...' %}
{{ collection.description | split:'...' | last }}
{% else %}
{{ collection.description }}
{% endif %}
</div>
{%- endif -%}Thats it.
In case all this code stuff is too complicated for you to deal with you will be happy to know that we are planning to include this feature in our SEO Master App. That will require no coding.
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