While product pages often receive the most attention, optimizing category pages is crucial for SEO because it can significantly amplify your SEO efforts.
As they're higher up the website hierarchy, enhancing SEO can increase the traffic on your product pages. Category pages also stand a better chance at ranking for valuable keywords.
Why Do Ecommerce Category Pages Matter for SEO?
Ecommerce category pages help you rank for broader keywords—the ones with strong transactional intent but are highly competitive. Like "sofas" or "shoes".
They typically have much higher search volumes than long-tail keywords. That means you can get a lot more high-value traffic if your category pages rank.
For example, searching "dresses" on Google gives you category page results like this instead of any product pages.
Besides ranking for broader keywords, category pages help shoppers discover your products and distribute PageRank to subcategories or product pages.
Types of Ecommerce Category Pages
There are 2 types of ecommerce category pages:
- Category listing pages (CLP): Pages that list subcategories
- Product listing pages (PLP): Pages that list products
This is Ashley Furniture's CLP.
Here's their PLP.
CLP typically targets traffic higher up the funnel, where users are still casually browsing and getting ideas. Shoppers who land on PLPs signal that they're more serious about buying something.
How to Optimize Ecommerce Category Pages SEO
Ecommerce category page SEO can be broken down into 3 parts:
- Technical SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing technical aspects like improving page speed. On-page SEO is where you enhance content. Off-page SEO includes building more links to your category pages.
Today, we'll focus on the first two.
Structure Your Category Pages
Create Long-Tail Categories
Long-tail categories target a more specific set of products. They have lower search volumes but are still valuable, if not more valuable than broad categories because they tend to have higher conversion rates.
For example, someone searching for "sofas" would be less likely to convert than another looking for "reclining sofas". The latter indicates that they have already done some shopping and decided on the type of sofa they need.
You can find long-tail categories using SEO tools like Semrush or Ahrefs. Type in your root keyword and you'll get a list of long-tail keywords to choose from.
Let's say your brand sells women's clothing. You can enter "dresses" into the SEO tool and you'll find long-tail category ideas.
For brands with huge catalogs, you can use Hypotenuse AI's SEO monitoring tool to do this in bulk.
This feature automatically recommends the best long-tail keywords based on the products in your category, search volume, and keyword difficulty.
Pick a Faceted Navigation Strategy
Faceted navigation is a way to filter products based on specific attributes like size, price, or color.
It provides a great user experience by helping shoppers find products easily and boosting conversion rates. However, implementing it wrong can hurt SEO.
Faceted navigation can create infinite URL combinations, such as:
https://www.example.com/shoes?color=green&size=50&type=running
That means the same category page with the same product and content could be accessible from different URLs, leading to duplicate content. That's poor practice for SEO.
It'll also waste your crawl budget, which might make it harder for Google to discover your new product pages.
How do you know you're facing this issue?
- Do a site search by going to Google and typing in site:yourwebsite.com - if the number of results seems to be abnormally large, it's a sign...
- Head to Pages under the Indexing section of Google Search Console - if the number of indexed pages seems large or has shot up since you implemented faceted navigation, it's another sign...
But don't worry, you can fix this in a few ways:
- Use robots.txt to fix the crawling of faceted URLs
- Nofollow internal links to faceted URLs
- Prevent indexing with the noindex tag
Enhance On-Page Elements
Add Helpful Content
Relevant informational content on your category pages help Google understand what your page offers. Not having any content on the page, as John Mueller shared in an interview, makes it hard for Google to rank the pages.
"The one thing that I notice in talking with the mobile indexing folks is that when the ecommerce category pages don’t have any other content at all other than links to the products then it’s really hard for us to rank those pages."
Having too much copy on the page harms as well, as mentioned in the same interview.
"I could imagine that our algorithms sometimes get confused is when they have a list of products on top and essentially a giant article on the bottom when our algorithms have to figure out the intent of this page."
The key is balance. And helpfulness.
The content should provide sufficient information for shoppers to make a decision. The types of content you want to put here could be taken from questions that users have raised.
If you're writing a category description on leather sofas, you talk about:
- The type of leather you use
- Where do you source your leather from
- How do you treat the leathers or manufacture the sofas
- What are your best-sellers
Include FAQs
Additionally, include FAQs to address possible objections, provide assurance and help users make decisions.
Keep it short and easy to read, and make sure it doesn't interfere with the shopping experience. Most ecommerce brands like to put it at the bottom of the page.
For example, on Adidas' women's tights category page, they included a short write-up that touches on material, use cases, and USPs. They also answered FAQS relevant to the category of products.
You can use Hypotenuse AI's category description generator to craft content and FAQs across all your CLPs and PLPs.
Improve Technical Aspects
Optimize URL Structure
URL structures are important. Good ones help Google crawl and index your site quickly, without wasting any crawl budget.
According to John Mueller, Google treats URLs as identifiers of content.
An optimal URL structure helps search engines understand your website structure. Plus, it improve the user experience by helping users find products more easily.
Therefore, you'd want to optimize and structure it well.
Some Google best practices include:
- Use small letters throughout. Google may consider furniture.com/Sofas-And-Couches and furniture.com/sofas-and-couches as different URLs. So standardize them and keep things simple.
- Use keywords in your subfolders. Instead of using /category, change it a keyword that you could be targeting, like /mattresses or /coffee-table.
- Use descriptive terms rather than numbers or random letters. For example, clothing.com/dresses/mini-party-dress vs clothing.com/dresses/4254.
- Ensure each page in paginated results adopts a unique URL.
- For URL query parameters, use ?parameter=value instead of just ?value. For example, clothing.com/pants?color=green instead of just clothing.com/pants?green
Optimize H1s and titles
H1s and titles tell humans and search engines what your page is about.
They should include your primary keyword and include the language or search terms that shoppers use.
H1s are the titles visible on your page, while titles appear on Google search. Ideally, you should have just 1 H1 per page.
The H1 and title tag should be very similar but don't have to be exactly the same.
H1 would usually be the name of your product, while title tags could include elements that make it more compelling to users to click through, such as discounts or a CTA. You can also experiment by adding price and secondary keywords to see if there's an uplift CTR.
Here's an example of IKEA's title tag. It includes the qualifier "Affordable" which helps it stand out from other SERPs.
Remember to keep your titles to less than 60 characters so they don't get truncated in search, and front-load your important words.
Implement Structured Data
Structured data helps Google better understand your content. It also features additional information on SERPs that could greatly improve CTR.
There's a whole list of structured data markups that Google supports. But here are a few that are most applicable to ecommerce.
- Breadcrumb
- FAQ
- ItemList
ItemList tells Google that this page is a category page that holds a list of items, while Breadcrumb and FAQ show up on SERPs.
Here's an example of how Google presents the Breadcrumb schema for High Fashion Home.
You can consider including the AggregateRating schema to show your website's average rating.
To implement structured data, you can find the scripts of any schema type on schema.org and test if they work with this schema validator.
Design & Usability
Create a Consistent Layout
A messy and incoherent storefront can turn shoppers away. Similarly, an inconsistent layout makes it confusing for shoppers and may cause them to leave your website.
Create a consistent layout to create a great shopping experience and help users find what they need quickly.
It also portrays professionalism and quality, which spills over to how they perceive your brand and your products.
Here are a few elements to take note when designing your layout:
- Make your website mobile responsive: A large percentage of users shop from their phones. Make sure it looks and feels the same on both desktop and mobile.
- Standardize elements: Stick to the same set of colors, fonts, and button designs across all pages. Use the same dimensions for images.
- Fix your navigation menu and footer: Ensure your navigation menu has the same set of categories and products so users don't get confused.
Use high-resolution images
Especially for industries where shoppers rely heavily on visuals to make their purchase decisions, image quality is crucial.
Ensure the images on your product category pages are of high quality.
Show your products in the same proportion and use similar backgrounds for coherence. This helps users easily compare across products.
Good quality and compelling images attract clicks to your product pages. If possible, allow users to toggle between different colors of the same product to reduce the friction of browsing (i.e. having to click into individual product pages just to view its variants can be annoying).
But instead of using Photoshopping and doing them manually, you can use Hypotenuse's AI picture editor to do the following:
- Enhance image resolution so your images look sharper
- Create studio-quality backgrounds to place your models or products
- Crop images to standardize proportions
- Remove or change backgrounds for consistency
Don't forget to also add alt text to these images!
Enhance User Experience
User experience has become extremely important for SEO.
User experience has a lot to do with speed. How fast your website loads, and how quickly can your shoppers find what they want.
You can optimize your page load speed by compressing your images to balance resolution and image size and use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver content quicker.
To improve the shopping experience, you should also implement a sorting function, filters, and a search bar.
This means you'll need to ensure that your product attributes are all available, accurate, and standardized throughout.
Hypotenuse AI's product data enrichment feature does that automatically. With this feature, you can use AI to fill in missing attributes from the vendor's PDP, any URL, spec sheets or image. It can also correct any inaccurate attributes and standardize them.
Linking Strategy
A robust linking strategy is crucial for ecommerce category page SEO.
It helps distribute PageRank across pages. PageRank is a Google algorithm that ranks pages based on their number and quality of links.
Good internal linking can bring up the rankings of your subcategories or product pages.
You can use a combination of automated and manual internal linking.
Automated internal linking
Automated internal linking depends on categories and the parent-child relationship.
Earlier, we shared the 2 types of category pages: Category Listing Page (CLP) and Product Listing Page (PLP). CLP features broader categories that list PLPs.
Typically, it'll go like this. A CLP shows all the PLPs within it. PLPs list all the products under it. In this way, a CLP is the parent of PLPs (children). A PLP is the parent of product pages (children).
With this hierarchy, you can automate internal linking, where CLPs automatically link to PLPs, and vice versa.
Here's how the internal linking shows up on Adidas' category page.
This can be done through a custom script that detects new product pages or PLPs for linking. Or you can use SEO plugins like Link Whisper on Shopify.
This way of internal linking automatically creates a pyramid site structure. This pyramid site structure, according to John Mueller from Google, helps the search engine understand the context of pages on your ecommerce website.
Manual internal linking
Automated internal linking is great because there's less human error and you won't get orphan categories.
But sometimes, some popular or other relevant categories can get left out or buried under.
Ideally, you want to surface them and create more links. In that case, creating a section where you feature popular categories helps.
Conclusion
There's a whole list of optimizations you can do, and there are probably many more.
But SEO for ecommerce category pages boils down to 2 things—making sure search engines and humans can understand your page content well, and improving user experience.
Keep moving in that direction and your category pages can be your greatest assets in driving traffic to your ecommerce store.
