The SEO Title

Table of Contents

First things first, what’s an SEO Title for a collection?

An SEO title is an almost invisible bit of your collection that has a massive impact on your SEO and rankings.

It’s the bit that Google displays in the search results (see the highlighted part of the image):

And the bit shows up in your browser’s page title/title tab when you mouseover it (in certain browsers)

 

How much impact do collection SEO titles have on your rankings?

A ton! SEO titles are one of the primary places Google looks to understand what a page is about. SEO titles are high-impact for your collection SEO.

An SEO title is one of the primary places you want to include your main keyword for a page. You can think of an SEO Title for a page like a headline on a print newspaper article. It’s a place where, at a glance, people and Google look to understand what the content is about.

Your goal is to include an SEO title with a specific, niche, long-tail keyword as your main keyword. Your main keyword should be as close to the start of the title as possible. Google reads in and evaluates English page titles left to right, so the words near the start of the page title carry a little more significance.

For collections, I recommend a page title format like

Main Keyword | Secondary Keyword – Store Name
So that might look like

Handmade Kitchen Knives | Boning + Pairing – Handmade Knife Depo

How do you edit a collection’s SEO Title?

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

3. Update the page title listed for your collection

What should you do to optimize your collection SEO titles?

You want to make your collection SEO titles more specific and relevant.

If you have more of a short-tail (‘ head’) term for your collection (like ‘knives’), you want to optimize your SEO Title to be more specific and target a long-tail term (like ‘handmade kitchen knives’).

I recommend reading through your collections and looking at the SEO titles. (If you have a lot of collections, start with a list of the SEO priority collections.)

If you have collections with one-word SEO titles, update those titles to be more specific + target longer-tail keywords.

How can you identify keyword opportunities
for your collections’ SEO Titles?

I’ve found the best way to iterate on my collection titles is by looking at these places:

  1. Look at your current Google Search Console data. For a particular collection, what keywords is the page already ranking for? Are there long-tail keywords you can focus the page title towards?
  2. Look at your competitors for inspiration. Browse your competitors’ sites and see what they’re entering as the SEO titles for similar collections. Try running their site and collection pages through SEMRush and see if that reveals any additional keywords for you to consider.
  3. Update your SEO Title. Once you have an informed opinion on a better main keyword (i.e., more specific, longer-tail, 3-5 words long), you should update your SEO title for that collection to focus on that keyword. (It’s also worth updating the content on the page, like the collection description, to focus on more niche/longer-tail keywords).

Should you optimize
your collection SEO Titles?

YES! This is one of the bigger collection SEO opportunities.

SEO Titles are one of the most impactful opportunities for Collection SEO. Time spent improving and iterating on your SEO Titles (and making them target more specific + long-tail keywords) is time well spent.

Click here

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

Read the previous chapter


Collection Keyword Research

Read the next chapter


Collection Titles (the page headline)

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.

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