E-Commerce category page SEO is probably the most overlooked strategy when it comes to search engine optimization for companies that sell products online.
I see lots of companies hyper-focused on their product pages or even their blogs, but it often seems like their category pages are an afterthought.
If this sounds familiar, let’s talk about why I think they’re so important and why everything from their Title Tags to their placement on your site to the text they feature (or don’t) matters so much.
What Are Category Pages?
Category pages are the pages on your e-commerce website that list out the various products you sell by – you guessed it – category.
So, for example, if you sell sports equipment, you might have a category for golf clubs. You would also probably divide this category into subcategory pages for Men’s and Women’s clubs. You’d also have subcategories for the different types of clubs: woods, irons, wedges, and putters.
On the other end of the spectrum are your product pages. This is the type of page that you would use to show off an individual club, like a “Callaway Apex 21 9 Iron.”
So, Category Pages = list of products.
Product pages = just one product.
Simple enough, right?
Then, let’s talk about why these pages are so important to your e-commerce site’s SEO.
Why Are They So Important to SEO?
In short, category pages matter for SEO because they usually have the most search potential of any e-commerce page on your site.
Obviously, your homepage probably takes that award if you count your branded traffic, but the focus of your SEO efforts shouldn’t be brand keywords. Those should be automatic.
But if we discount your homepage for that reason and blog posts (which usually don’t convert well for e-commerce sites), category pages are your best chance to attract traffic from non-branded keywords that lead to conversions.
That last element is extremely important because blog posts could be a rival to any page on your site in terms of traffic. However, while blog posts can be great for e-commerce SEO, they don’t tend to convert very well – certainly not as well as category pages do.
While nearly 15 years of experience doing SEO has proven this to me again and again, Jill Kocher Brown has also conducted some important research on the topic that showed that compared to product pages, category pages produce:
- 19% more ranking keywords
- 32% more traffic potential
- 413% more estimated traffic!!!
So, while you may have one or two extremely popular products and plenty of blogs that drive traffic (but don’t convert), no e-commerce page on your site is going to impact your site’s success more than your category pages.
9 Ways to Improve Your E-Commerce Category Pages for Better SEO
Alright, now that we understand what e-commerce category pages are and why they matter, let’s talk about the essential tactics you need to follow to reach their optimization potential and all the traffic that comes with it.
1. Take Advantage of Your Title Tags
As you probably already know, title tags are really important for SEO.
And given how important your category pages are for SEO, they’re even MORE important when it comes to ranking your site for lots of high-converting traffic.
So, let’s talk about how to optimize them for searches and clicks:
Incorporate Your Most Important Keywords
Your category pages’ Title Tags must include the most important keyword for the products being featured on those pages. In fact, you should almost always put them at the very beginning of that tag.
Now, it’s also important to consider what’s realistic for this all-important keyword. Because your category pages usually represent your greatest potential for traffic, they also probably face the most competition. As such, you need to think about what keyword you have the best chance for ranking for so you can actually see traffic.
For example, if you’re selling “Men’s Basketball Shoes”, that’s an accurate keyword, but you’re going to have a really hard time beating Nike, Foot Locker, Amazon, and other massive websites that stand between you and that first page.
Instead, consider long-tail options like “Cheap Men’s Basketball Shoes” or “Men’s Low-Top Basketball Shoes.” And, of course, this is also why your subcategory pages are so important, but we’ll get into that more later.
Don’t Keyword Stuff
More obvious advice here, but don’t take the above advice to mean that you should take the keywords you want most and stuff as many of them as possible into the Title Tag.
Generally, you have about 50-60 characters of a title tag before Google and other search engines will truncate it – cut it short – at which point, those other words may not help much.
So, be concise. Target the most important keywords in the Title Tag and we’ll talk about options for hitting those other keywords a bit later.
Don’t Include Your Brand Name
It’s become commonplace for companies to include their own brand names in every single Title Tag, but I think this is a GIGANTIC unforced error for SEO.
If the category page is only going to feature your brand’s products, I still think it’s worth testing a Title Tag that leaves out the name.
For one thing, you’re likely to get the top spot anyway. If someone is searching for your brand’s product, Google is unlikely to choose another company as a more reliable result. If your product has become extremely popular and is sold on other big sites, that could happen I guess, but this is why it’s worth testing.
And the other reason is because if you leave your brand name out, you have more room to target the non-branded keywords that could get you all kinds of other traffic.
Let’s look at a quick example. Let’s say we started selling basketball shoes. Our Title Tag for the category page that displays these shoes could be “Crimson Agility Basketball Shoes” and we’d still have almost 30 characters left to add other keywords. Maybe it would make sense for our Title Tag to be, “Crimson Agility Men’s and Women’s Basketball Shoes.”
But again, if we’re virtually guaranteed to rank for our brand name no matter what, we’d free up 15 more characters by ditching it, which means we could find at least another relevant keyword to work in there naturally.
Finally, keep in mind that Google is going to modify your Title Tags at least 60% of the time to better match them to a searcher’s query. So, you’ll probably end up having to do some modifications no matter what. Don’t overthink this too much.
Consider Modifiers to Target Long-Tail Searches
I used to always tell clients to leave out modifiers like “Best” and “Top” from any of their category pages because those queries reflected users who were looking to read listicles from third parties ranking products from numerous different brands.
But a lot has changed over the past year since Google started making some horrible really interesting decisions about which sites to put on their first pages.
Again, you’ll need to experiment, but I would consider using modifiers like “Best”, “Top”, or others that would be attractive to your market.
2. Get as Granular as Possible
We just touched on this, so let’s delve more into creating the category pages your e-commerce site needs to reach its full traffic potential.
Ideally, you should publish category pages that target every non-branded keyword that describes the products you sell. This means going from the most general all the way down to the hyper-specific.
So, for example, if you sell shoes, you’d definitely have a category page for that, but you’d also have one for “men’s shoes” and perhaps “men’s running shoes.”
But what about “men’s running shoes for flat feet”? Do you sell those, too? If so, it would be wise to create subcategory pages that Google can show potential customers in their results pages.
Look at how incredibly granular Lands’ End gets with their category and subcategory pages:
Another way to think about doing this is looking at the attributes you use to divide up your category pages to make them more easily navigable for your customers.
Again, if you give customers the option to filter your shoes inventory by those for men or those for a specific sport, those are probably pages that you should treat as actual category or subcategory pages, complete with their own Title tags and H1s.
But do you sort them by price, too? If so, check to see if “Cheap Men’s Running Shoes” is a popular search term. If so, using this filter to create another category page would be an easy way to drive more traffic.
3. Consider How Your Category Pages Link to Products
The main role of category pages is to direct users to your products. That seems straightforward enough, but you should still probably think through how you go about linking to them from these all-important pages.
Prioritize Popular Products
If you have a larger store (around 100k pages), I recommend that you prioritize links to high-performing products rather than linking to every single product through extensive pagination.
For example, you could feature only your most popular products on your main category pages instead of listing out each and every one of them.
Amongst other things, this approach is actually more user-friendly.
After all, it would be incredibly inconvenient if users had to go through hundreds of less-popular products just so they can find the ones that probably brought them to the site in the first place.
But for SEO purposes, minimizing the number of links from category pages also directs PageRank to these key URLs, boosting their visibility in search results. Sharing this vital PageRank with products that don’t get nearly as many – or maybe even any – searches every month is a waste.
Instead of trying to display every single product through endless pagination, you could link to more targeted subcategories that match specific search intents. This would limit the number o links coming off of each page without making your site less user-friendly.
4. Add Content to These Pages
Maybe the biggest missed opportunity I see when auditing clients’ e-commerce websites is that their Category Pages don’t have any content on them at all.
This is a huge missed opportunity for a number of reasons. Adding this kind of content allows you to:
Improve User Experience
Honestly, I don’t really think this one is that big of a deal, but yes, adding content to the top of your category page could help users better understand what they’re about to find on this page.
The reason I say it’s not that big of a deal is because anyone using a search engine who has clicked on your page already has their expectation set. If your page doesn’t meet those expectations, they’ll probably just leave – no amount of text is going to change that.
Still, a few short sentences could help introduce important information about your company’s guarantees, warranties, or even flattering testimonials from happy customers.
You don’t necessarily need to put this text at the top of your page, either, if you’re worried about the content getting in the way of your user’s experience.Once again, here’s how Lands’ End does it really well, not just adding text but adding internal links to this text, as well, to improve their SEO:
I’ll cover internal linking next, but before I do, let’s talk keywords.
Include More Keywords
Okay, in terms of category page SEO, this is where text starts becoming helpful for rankings and traffic.
While Title Tags and H1 tags can include some keywords, you only have so much room for them – definitely nowhere near as much as you get from a block of text.
Adding a section of keyword-rich content allows you to target more long-tail keywords and search phrases that are specific to your niche.
For example, a category page for “Men’s Running Shoes” might include a few paragraphs discussing different types of running shoes, key features, and advice on how to choose the best pair. By naturally integrating keywords like “best men’s running shoes,” “performance footwear,” and “trail running shoes,” you enhance the page’s ability to rank for those search queries.
5. Utilizing Internal Links to Improve Your Category Pages’ Rankings
Internal linking is probably the most underrated SEO tactic – one that I constantly see e-commerce companies underutilize.
This is particularly true when it comes to category pages. While we’ll go over all kinds of steps you can take to optimize these pages, there’s only so much you can do with the pages themselves. There is only so much room for your Title Tag. You can only add so many products. Even the body text you can add has its limit.
But the potential is limitless for how many internal links you can point at your category pages with anchor text that will help them rank better for those queries.
Let’s look at some powerful ways to embrace this tactic.
Use Internal Links from Your Blog
I mentioned earlier that blogs can be vital to the success of your e-commerce website, but in my experience, it’s not for the reasons people usually think.
Sure, blogs can convert, but they’re usually not huge revenue drivers – especially not when compared to your category and product pages.
The reason I think blogs are important to e-commerce SEO is that you can use them to rank and then use internal links to transfer that “authority” to relevant pages that appeal to people who want to buy.
In other words, you can use your blogs to make your category and product pages rank better.
Going back to our example about a category page for basketball shoes, you could create blogs about:
- How to Pick Basketball Shoes
- Which Basketball Shoes Are the Best in 2025
- How basketball shoes should fit
- How to clean basketball shoes
Every time you rank one of these blogs, you’re convincing Google that you understand the topic (basketball shoes).
So, use these important blogs to improve the rankings of your category pages with internal linking.
Internally Link Between Category Pages, Too
You don’t have to stop with blog posts, either. Internally linking between category and subcategory pages, too, for the same reasons we just outlined. Never miss an opportunity to take the trust Google has in one of your pages and spread it around.
…and from Popular Product Pages, too
This is a little bit trickier, but I’ve seen some examples lately of savvy SEOs linking from their high-ranking product pages to relevant category pages.
The reason I call this tricky is because you want to be careful not to give customers a reason to leave your product page if they’re just about to buy. That mistake could literally cost you.
So, if you’re going to follow this advice, be sure to tag the links so you can see if customers are actually clicking on them. While these clicks can make the links more powerful, you want to be able to see if those clicks are costing you conversions, too. If they are, remove them. They’re not worth the extra traffic.
6. Optimize Where Your Category Pages “Live”
Internal linking isn’t just about links from blogs and other category pages, though.
For SEO purposes, you also need to think about which category pages will get links from the menu bar that appears on every page of your e-commerce website.
And even though I think this advice is incredibly important, I never see it in articles about category page optimization, so this could give your e-commerce site a real advantage.
As I’ve just talked about, the links on your website play a major role in helping Google understand their corresponding pages: both in terms of what they’re about and how central they are to your site.
And the links coming from a page on your site also tell Google about what to do with the “link equity” that page has received from the links pointing to it.
In short, every time your webpage receives a link from another page, Google sees this as an endorsement. The combination of these endorsements can be thought of as “link equity” which your page then “shares” with all of the other pages to which it links.
With me so far?
If not, check out this great post on link equity.
Otherwise, if you understand link equity, you understand why you probably shouldn’t link to every single category and subcategory on your website from your site’s menu bar. Doing so means that you’re essentially telling Google, “All of these pages are equally important.”
Another way to think about it is that you’re telling Google, “Give each of these pages the same amount of help when it comes time to rank them.”
Going back to my example about selling shoes, I would definitely want the category page “Shoes” in the menu bar because that will definitely face a lot of competition.
“Basketball shoes” should probably make the cut, too, but maybe not “Basketball Shoes for Flat Feet.”
According to Ahrefs, that keyword gets a decent amount of monthly traffic but could not be easier to rank for:
If that’s the case, giving it equal booking on your website’s marquee would be a huge mistake. Link to it from inside a category page – using attributes and even body text. Link to it from blogs, too, like I talked about earlier.
But flooding your menu bar without a hundred links to pages that don’t face any serious competition is going to make it harder to rank the ones that actually do.
And if you’re worried about users coming to, say, your homepage looking for basketball shoes for people who have flat feet and leaving because they can’t find the link in your menu, you can always test that theory. Tag links in your menu bar to see how often they actually get clicked on. I’ve done this with clients before who are surprised to realize that links they featured prominently on their homepage or in their menu bar never got a single click. In this case, all those links did was make it harder for more popular category pages to attract traffic
Doublecheck Your Menu Bars for Category Pages That Redirect
While I’m on the topic of where you feature the links to these pages, I want to include one other piece of advice that I don’t see in other articles on this topic.
Time and time again when I do SEO audits for new clients, I find that links in their menu bar actually 301 to a different page. Usually, it’s a situation where the link in the menu bar points to ShoeSite.com/collections/basketball-shoes, but the site redirects it to the shortened ShoeSite.com/basketball-shoes.
There can be any number of reasons for deciding to do that, but there’s no good reason to include 301s throughout the menu bar. It could slow down the experience for your user, but it also makes Google do double duty every time it tries to crawl one of these links on every single page of your site.
Switch those out for the actual destination page you want to send customers to and this problem disappears.
7. Add Structured Data
Structured data is essential for improving the SEO of your category pages as it helps search engines understand and display your content more accurately. In today’s e-commerce landscape, most business owners seem to understand this when it comes to product pages, but then drop the ball when it comes to the actual category pages that link to them.
Google offers a handy list of structured data options for your website, which you can organized by “e-commerce”:
However, these are mostly for actual product pages. I would also recommend you consider:
- BreadcrumbList: Allows search engines to display breadcrumb navigation in search results, enhancing user experience and aiding navigation.
- ItemList: Lists the products or articles within a category, giving search engines context on the collection of items and making the page more relevant for related searches.
- Product: If individual products are previewed on the category page, Product schema can provide detailed information about these items, like price and availability.
By implementing structured data on category pages, you increase the likelihood of higher clickthrough rates and improved visibility in search engine results, giving users a more informative and appealing search experience.
Google also offers free tools to test your structured data to make sure your category pages are set up for SEO success.
8. Create Canonical Tags That Support Crawlable Pagination
If you’re not already familiar with them, I really encourage you to read Google’s primer on canonical tags because these HTML elements are essential for creating an e-commerce website that does well with search engines.
However, while using them for product pages is relatively straightforward, I have found that many business owners don’t understand how to use them for category pages.
Using Canonical Tags with Paginated Pages
Put simply, you should use a self-referencing canonical tag for each of your paginated pages. This might seem counterintuitive. Aren’t page 2 and page 3 of a category page basically the same thing? They have the same Title Tags, H1s, and bod text, right?
While this is true, the reason I recommend that you use self-referencing canonical tags for these types of pages is because we still want Google to crawl them. We want Google to see the kind of inventory you offer to customers who turn to Google for help.
And Google “understands” the unique aspects of paginated pages. It knows that even with a self-referencing canonical tag, they’re not different in any significant way. So, you can use these tags without worrying about Google trying to index every version of your category page.
Using Canonical Tags with Filtered Category Pages
The vast majority of e-commerce category pages includes “filters” so that users can decide which attributes of your inventory they’re most interested in exploring.
For example, if you’re selling shoes, I might want to filter your inventory by your “formal” options. I might want to filter the result further by price or color.
In these situations, I recommend that you use canonical tags on these filtered pages to point Google back to the original. For the most part, something like “black formal shoes under $50” probably doesn’t get enough search traffic to justify having its own page in your sitemap that you’re trying to drive traffic to from Google.
The only exception would be when this isn’t the case. “Black formal shoes” should probably have its own subcategory page and you could use filters and canonical tags to establish that (along with including it in your sitemap).
9. Optimize How Your Products Appear on These Pages
For years now, smart SEOs have known that UX is just as important for achieving long-term, profitable results. No matter what improvements you make to your site, if users show up and immediately leave because they don’t like the experience, you’ll soon see your traffic dry up.
And the reason is simple: Google doesn’t want to become known for sending users to websites that don’t deliver user-friendly experiences.
That’s why I highly recommend that you do the following to the product listings that show in your category pages:
- Product Image: High-quality, clear images are crucial, as visuals are the primary factor users consider before clicking through.
- Reviews and Ratings: Of course, reviews are another one. A quick star rating or snippet of the most helpful reviews gives users instant social proof, enhancing trust and encouraging clicks. Showing how many people have rated the product can add credibility.
- Accurate Product Title: A lot of business owners just use the SKU of their product as the title displayed on their category page. This might work for some customers – especially if you have winning images – but it’s far from ideal. Just like you want a good Title Tag and H1 for your actual product pages, you want these to display on your category page, too.
- Price and Discounts: You definitely want to display the price of your products, but make sure to do the same if/when you ever hold sales or have price cuts. And if you’re running a sale across an entire category, make sure that information is right at the very top of the page for all to see right away.
- Availability and Shipping Info: Badges like “In Stock,” “Ships in 2 Days,” or “Free Shipping” are helpful for users who want convenience and faster delivery options.
- Product Variants: If you sell products with multiple options (like color or size), be sure to show a preview of available variants to assure users that you have the version they want.
Standardize these changes across your site to increase engagement, reduce bounce rates, and ultimately boost the SEO performance of category pages.
Of course, this will mean much better conversion rates, too.
Treat Category Pages as Your Top Priority
As I said at the beginning, I think category pages are the most important when it comes to e-commerce SEO. Blogs play a strong supporting role, but if your e-commerce category pages don’t rank for competitive, nonbranded traffic, your entire SEO strategy needs to be revisited.
Hopefully, this blog helps with that, but if you have any questions or would like to speak to me about your site specifically, feel free to contact us.