Meta Descriptions and Collection SEO

First things first, what’s a meta description?

A meta description is a tiny bit of text that appears under your site title and URL in the search results. This is like flavor text in a video game, because meta Descriptions don’t impact your SEO or rankings.

Here’s an example Shopify meta description for a collection on Lake Champlain Chocolate for a collection targeting Vegan Chocolate Gifts:

Shop our tempting selection of vegan chocolate gifts. Discover thoughtful options perfect for you or anyone devoted to the benefits of dark chocolate.

And here’s a Shopify meta description example for a collection from Mac Case , a provider of cases for apple products.

See the affordable and innovative Apple laptop cases, sleeves, bags and backpacks from the company the created the market. Shop for mac cases now!

In both cases, we can see that these meta descriptions describe the content to expect and help ‘sell the click’ to the visitor.

A quick clarification: a meta description is 100% different from a collection description.

How much impact do meta descriptions have on SEO and rankings? (Spoiler: None! Nada! Zip!)

Meta descriptions do not affect your rankings and do not affect your SEO.

A meta description is a bit of flavorful text (320 characters long) that describes a page.

Meta Descriptions do not impact your SEO or rankings.

They do help:

Meta Descriptions do not help with your SEO or rankings.

How do you edit a meta description for a collection on a Shopify store?

Go to a collection page (or create a new collection page.
Scroll down to the ‘Search engine listing’ and click ‘edit.’

3. Update the Meta description listed for your store.

What should you do to optimize your meta descriptions?

Big picture, these do not significantly affect your SEO, and they only help with the presentation of your site in the results and your click-through rate (very slightly).

If you’re going to optimize your meta descriptions?

Work from a prioritized list. Don’t optimize all of your meta descriptions all at once. Pick the top ~five-ten pages on your site earning traffic through Google, and write optimized meta descriptions for those pages. In this case, you’re optimizing the search experience for your site.
Consider ending your meta description with a call to action like ‘Free Shipping,’ ‘Read more,’ or ‘Over X happy customers.’
Work from a template, if possible. That lets you get some relevant content without stressing about its uniqueness.

Bottom line, should you worry about optimizing your collections’ meta descriptions?

No. Focus on other things instead.

At most, update the meta descriptions for your homepage and the ~three or ~five collections getting the most Organic traffic from Google.

Otherwise? Don’t worry about optimizing meta descriptions. Meta Descriptions don’t impact your SEO rankings. There are many other things for you to focus on (like collection descriptions or internal linking).

Now that you’ve finished reading this chapter on collection SEO, you can:

Read the previous chapter

URL Handles and Collection SEO

Read the next chapter

Opportunities with the ‘Product Grid’

Or you can jump to one of these reader-favorite chapters:

If you want help growing your Shopify store, I encourage you to check out my Shopify SEO + Growth services or get in touch and tell me about your store.

First, decide which collections you’re optimizing

You don’t want to optimize all of your collection pages (really!!). You want to focus on optimizing just a small set of all possible pages. (I call these ‘SEO Priority’ collections.)

Which SEO priority collections should you focus on? You can read about that over here.

In short, start with focusing on collections already getting traffic/clicks or that you’re linking to from your homepage content.