There is, on nearly every Shopify shop the Goblin audits, a set of pages doing almost none of the work they were built to do. They are the collection pages — what the rest of the world calls category pages — and they are, page for page, the single most wasted opportunity in small-shop SEO.
What a collection page is for.
Consider how people search. One person types “leather notebook” — broad, exploratory, the beginning of a decision. Another types “A5 brown leather notebook lined” — narrow, specific, the end of a decision. These are two different searchers, and they want two different pages.
The specific searcher wants a product page. The broad searcher wants a collection page — a page that shows the whole category at once and helps them narrow down. Your product pages, if written well, can rank for the specific searches. But the broad search — the larger, more valuable search — belongs to the collection page. That is its job. That is the entire reason it exists.
Why it fails to do that job.
Open your own collection page. The Goblin will wager it consists of, in its entirety: a heading with the collection’s name, and a grid of product photographs. No paragraph of text. No description of the category. No title tag worth the name. Nothing for Google to read except the heading and the product names beneath the pictures.
Google arrives at this page, looking for a reason to rank it for “leather notebooks,” and finds a grid of images and the word “Notebooks.” It is, from Google’s perspective, a page that is about almost nothing. So it ranks almost nowhere.
The fix, which takes twenty minutes per collection.
Three changes, in order of importance.
- Write a title tag. Not “Notebooks – Marlow & Daughter.” Instead: “Leather notebooks, handmade in Bristol — Marlow & Daughter.” The category, a distinguishing detail, the shop name last. The Goblin has a whole article on this; the rules are identical for collections.
- Add a paragraph of real text. Shopify lets you give every collection a description, and most shops leave it blank. Two or three sentences: what the category contains, who it is for, what distinguishes yours. Placed at the top of the collection, above the grid, where both Google and the customer will read it.
- Give it one clear heading. The page’s H1 should be the category as a customer would search for it — “Leather Notebooks,” not “The Edition Range” or “Shop the Look” or whatever your internal branding prefers. Branding is for after the click.
A caution, because the Goblin has seen this go wrong.
Once a shop owner understands that collection pages want text, the temptation is to write a great deal of it — five hundred words of keyword-laden prose, stuffed beneath the product grid where nobody reads it. This is the cargo-cult version of the advice, and Google has been wise to it for years.
The Goblin’s measure: the description should be the length you would write if you were genuinely explaining the category to a customer standing in front of you. Two or three sentences at the top. Perhaps, if the category is complex, a short FAQ at the bottom. Never a wall. The text exists to inform, and informative text is, not coincidentally, exactly what Google has spent twenty years learning to reward.
Most shops have between four and twenty collections. At twenty minutes each, the entire fix is an afternoon’s work, and it addresses the broad, high-value searches that product pages can never reach. The Goblin considers it the highest return on an afternoon available anywhere in Shopify SEO.
In an audit, the collection pages get their own section. The Goblin will tell you which ones are closest to ranking, and what specifically each one is missing.
— The Goblin, fond of a category done properly.