Shopify SEO Guide
SEO for Shopify Collections
Collection SEO is one of the most significant
opportunities to grow your Shopify store’s traffic.
- You want to attract people searching for transactional terms, like ‘Buy Red Shoes’
- Collections are perfect for attracting these shoppers searching with a strong transactional/commercial intent
- If you optimize your collection pages (and build a few more for SEO), you’ll bring more shoppers to your store
What is Collection SEO?
Shopify Collection SEO is about optimizing a Shopify collection page to be more relevant for a specific, niche keyword. That specificity will help your page rank higher in Google and attract more visitors. And you do that by writing + adding relevant content to a few key places on each collection page.
As an SEO consultant specializing in Shopify SEO, I’ve found that the collections on Shopify stores are frequently under-optimized.
Your collection pages are a great way to attract traffic from potential customers searching for purchase-ready ‘transactional-intent’ keywords that relate to your store, like ‘buy red shoes.’
If your collections aren’t optimized, your Shopify store leaves money (and traffic) on the table. You can easily attract traffic to your Shopify store by optimizing just a few things on your existing collection pages (and maybe by creating a few new collection pages.)
Big picture, the more relevant information you can share on your collection page, the better the browsing experience for your customer, and the better your SEO and rankings. (As a guiding light, your goal is to write for humans first and search engine robots second.)
I put together this digital garden to help you understand what goes into Shopify Collection SEO and help you tackle your collection SEO. Read on for detailed guidance (or skip to the collection SEO chapter index).
And if you’re on Twitter, please like or retweet this tweet announcing this guide. Your retweets, favorites, and replies help spread the word and make a difference.
What goes into doing collection SEO?
Collection SEO is primarily about on-page optimizations to your collection pages. That means you’ll optimize your collections by adding or optimizing content to the collection page itself. Where do you add or optimize this content? In just a few places, including the following:
- SEO Title
- Collection Title
- Collection Description
Adding more high-quality, relevant content in these spots will help your collections rank higher on Google.
Remember, your goal is ‘C+,’ not ‘perfect’
In my experience, your goal should be ‘better-than-average’ collection SEO. You don’t need to stress about having perfect collection SEO and doing every last SEO thing perfectly. You want to:
- Identify just a few priority collections for your store
- Optimize the SEO for those collections
- Aim for a goal of ‘better than the average’ than your competitors, not perfect.
Collection SEO doesn’t have to take much time to do well (or better than average). It just takes investing a little time and attention and making sure you’ve tackled the significant and major opportunities.
Your Top Four
Collection SEO Opportunities
These are the top four opportunities for your collection SEO. I recommend focusing your time, attention, and effort on these opportunities.
- Writing and optimizing your collection descriptions. This is one of the more impactful opportunities for your collection SEO. Adding collection descriptions will help them rank higher for keywords, rank for more keywords, improve your overall SEO, and attract more traffic.
- Optimizing the SEO titles on your collections. This is often a great opportunity and one of the more impactful. Optimize the SEO title — the text that shows up in the search results — and see better rankings.
- Optimizing your collection title headline to be more specific. Similar to the impact of an SEO title, optimizing your collection title (headline) will help Google and your customers understand what a collection is about.
- Adding internal links pointing to specific collections. Adding links on other pages on your site that point to specific collections will help your collection SEO.
Tackling those four opportunities on your top priority collections will make a major impact on your Shopify SEO.
12+ Collection SEO Articles
(aka my ‘collection SEO digital garden’ 🌱)
To help you in your Shopify SEO efforts, I’ve put together this digital garden full of articles, tips, guides, and examples to help you optimize your Collection SEO.
Inside each chapter is an article with detailed information on this opportunity for your Collection SEO. Inside each of these chapters, I’ve included specific ‘do this, not that’ information to help you optimize your collections.
Section 1 – Significant Factors
Factor Zero: Keyword Research
Chapter 1 — Before optimizing your collection, it's important to take a few steps to identify the keyword you're optimizing for. Inside, you'll learn a repeatable strategy for keyword research.
Read More
The SEO Title
Chapter 2 — The SEO title on a collection page is like the title of an article in a newspaper. It’s an essential element; without it, something has gone wrong. This guide talks you through the SEO title and how to optimize it.
Read More
The Collection Title
Chapter 3 —The collection title (or page headline) is an important keyword-rich piece of on-page content. You want to make sure your collection title is optimized.
Read More
The Collection Description
Chapter 4 — Collection descriptions are a very high-impact opportunity for your SEO (and a personal favorite). Descriptions get you keyword-rich on-page content.
Read More
Collection Description Examples
Chapter 5 — Browse through these five example collection descriptions sourced from ‘in the wild’ Shopify stores. I share feedback on each description.
Read More
Internal Linking
Chapter 6 — Adding internal links that point to your collections is a high-impact opportunity that’s low-effort to implement. This one is worth implementing.
Read More
Section 2 – Minor Factors
URL Handles
Chapter 7 — URL handles have a tiny impact on your SEO and rankings. It’s best to have clear and short URLs that mention a keyword. Don’t keyword stuff.
Read More
Meta Descriptions
Chapter 8 — Meta Descriptions have no impact on SEO or your rankings. Don’t bother writing meta descriptions for your collection pages until you've optimized everything else in this guide.
Read More
Section 3 – Advanced Opportunities
Product Grid Optimizations
Chapter 9 — Optimizing your product grid to output additional product details is a high-impact opportunity for your SEO. (This is advanced + technical.)
Read More
Splitting Content on your Collection Page
Chapter 10 — It may make sense to split your collection descriptions above/below the product grid. In this chapter, I share contextual info + code samples.
Read More
Section 4 – Additional Opportunities
How To Pick Which Collections To Optimize
Chapter 11 — If you already have collections, which should you optimize? (Not all of them!) In this chapter, you’ll learn how to identify your SEO MVP collections.
Read More
Building A Collection Keyword Map
Chapter 12 — You can make a free copy of my keyword map and track the keywords your collections target in one central place.
Read More
Summary: Better Practices for Collection SEO
Chapter 13 — A summary of the top, most significant opportunities and better practices for your Shopify Collection SEO.
Read More
An analysis + ranking of the top 10 collection SEO opportunities
I’ve collected and analyzed the top ten collection SEO opportunities for you. You can move these levers to optimize your collections to earn more traffic.
- Four of them I consider significant opportunities. These are the more impactful optimizations that I recommend focusing on.
- One of them I consider a significant opportunity that requires technical resources. You can tackle this if you have a developer (or are comfortable editing your theme files). If not? You can safely ignore it.
- Five of them I consider minor opportunities. You can eventually tackle them if you have the time and inclination, but they aren’t essential and sometimes don’t even impact your SEO. I recommend taking your time considering those opportunities.
In the table below, I’ve scored and commented on the top ten major and minor collection SEO opportunities
For each opportunity, I’ve:
- Assigned it a score from 1-3 based on Effort and Impact (see scoring table to the side)
- Multiplied the Effort and Impact scores together to get a total score for that opportunity (a higher score is better)
- Ranked the opportunities based on their total score
- Included notes on that particular opportunity and the impact for your store and a link to the full article for that opportunity, if one is available.
Scoring Table
| Effort | Impact |
|---|---|
| Low – 3 | Low – 1 |
| Medium – 2 | Medium – 2 |
| High – 1 | High – 3 |
Table Scoring and Ranking the
Collection SEO Opportunities
SEO Opportunity | Type | Effort | Impact | Score | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Writing a collection description | Significant | Medium | High | 6 | Very high impact and a personal favorite. |
| Optimizing the SEO Title | Significant | Medium | High | 6 | High impact opportunity. Google looks at this as a major factor. |
| Building internal links and pointing to a collection | Significant | Low | Medium | 6 | Good opportunity, especially when adding links to other collections, your homepage, or articles. |
| Optimizing the ‘Collection Title’ for a collection | Significant | Low | Medium | 6 | Good opportunity. It can help Google better understand what your collection is about. |
| Optimizing the product grid | Significant (Advanced) | Medium | High | 6 | Great opportunity and takes development resources. Closer to 4.5 than 6. |
| Splitting collection descriptions below the product grid | Minor (Advanced) | Medium | Medium | 4 | Not that great opportunity and often requires custom coding. I recommend you pass. Close to 3 than 4. |
| Meta descriptions and collection SEO | Minor | Low | Low | 3 | Meta Descriptions have no impact on SEO or rankings. Don’t bother with this until you’ve optimized everything else for your store. |
| URL handles and collection SEO | Minor | Low | Low | 3 | URLs should be friendly, can include a keyword, and should rarely change. Don’t worry about optimizing this unless your URLs are really unfriendly. |
| Featured images and collection SEO | Minor | Low | Low | 3 | If your image is large, it will take more bandwidth to load, which may hurt your SEO if your customers are in regions with slower internet. |
| Page loading speed and collection SEO | Minor | Medium | Low | 2 | Not really something to worry about. If you’re concerned, run a specific page through WebPageTest and look at the results. |
Who is this person talking to you about Shopify Collection SEO? 
Hey there, I’m Kai Davis, a growth marketer and SEO consultant for Shopify stores. I’ve worked with Shopify stores on SEO and growth since ~2014. Since 2020, I’ve specialized in collection SEO on Shopify stores.
I put together this free resource on collection SEO because all I could find on the topic was outdated! This ‘digital garden’ is full of information, tips, examples, and practical advice based on my first-hand 15+ years of experience working in SEO, digital marketing, and copywriting.
I hope this helps you better understand collection SEO and the actions to take!
Questions? Want to chat SEO? Wondering if I can help your store grow? You can always reach me at kai@doubleyourecommerce.com.
Excelsior!
Kai
Ready to Grow?
Meet for a no-pressure initial consultation
Let’s have an initial conversation about your store, your SEO and marketing goals, and us working together.
- I'll bring questions to learn more about you and marketing goals and how I might be able to help
- You bring yourself and your impression of what's working with your SEO and marketing, what isn't working, and the change you're looking to see
- After our initial conversation, if I can help, I'll share a recommendation for next steps including which of my services make the most sense for you and your store
SEO tips. Get regular ‘do this, not that’ tips on what to optimize, how to rank higher, and earn more traffic from Google.