Unlock revenue potential by building collection pages

Joe says: “E-commerce stores need to be using collection pages to maximise the potential of their SEO.”

What are collection pages for e-commerce sites?

“Collection pages for e-commerce sites are essentially category pages. They are lists of products that live on the site, and there's so much potential that so many brands aren't taking advantage of.

There is no technical difference between a collection page and a category page, but I use the term ‘collection’ because that's what it's called on Shopify. Many of our clients (and many e-commerce businesses around the world) use Shopify, and it actually makes it easier to build out these pages.

You can build out a collection or a category page across any CMS, but on Shopify, it's so easy to use. It can be done poorly, because the barrier to entry is much lower, but that allows people to get involved, undertake this as a project, and build out this opportunity from a non-branded keyword perspective.

When people are doing it poorly, they just build collections for the sake of it, or they might build three different variations of the exact same type of collection. It might be that they exclude one type of product in one, or they built a collection of t-shirts three years ago, and then they built another collection of t-shirts two years ago, and then another one year ago.

Actually, part of the process is a lot of cleanup as well. Because it's so easy to fill out these collections, people just go in and make new ones rather than optimizing the ones that are already there.”

Are users able to build collections themselves?

“These collections aren’t created from a user perspective. It's definitely the site owner building these out. In theory, you can build out collections for different user types.

It could be that you have a ‘Christmas gifts for dad’ collection and someone internally is then picking out what they think is best based on customer data, the product range, etc. However, a user themselves would not go and build the collection.”

Can you also create sub-collections underneath your main collection category?

“Yes, and this is where we see so much potential.

We work with a lot of fashion brands. If you sell clothing, you can have a ‘jeans’ collection page, and you want to properly optimize that – but within that, you could have ‘men's jeans’, ‘women's jeans’, ‘baggy jeans’, ‘skinny jeans’, ‘blue jeans’, and ‘black jeans’.

If you have the product range, you should 100% be building out those subcategories or sub-collections. The other thing with that is, if someone's specifically looking for skinny jeans, they know what they're looking for. You don't want to serve them all types of jeans; you want to serve them exactly what they're looking for.

That's why there is a lot of opportunity when building out those sub-collections.”

Does Shopify take care of the optimization for sub-pages within that collection?

“Shopify gives you some tools to help optimize, but everything that needs to be optimized needs to be done by an SEO.

It wouldn't necessarily sit under ‘/jeans/skinny’. You would basically build out a new collection. You'd have ‘/jeans’, but you might have ‘/skinny-jeans’ as a separate collection.

In terms of the site hierarchy, if you have a navigation, you might have a drop-down where you have ‘jeans’ and then underneath you have ‘skinny jeans’. Essentially, though, the ‘skinny jeans’ page is on the same level as the ‘jeans’ page.

The reason why you want to do the optimization manually is because there's so much opportunity out there. You need to do the full keyword research, content optimization, internal linking structure, and all of that sort of stuff.

It's quite a manual process, but as an SEO, you want it to be a manual process. If you want to target that specific audience, you need to be in a position where you know how to properly target them, you know exactly how your product range aligns with what they're looking for, and you’re marrying up the two.”

Is there an ideal minimum and maximum number of items to include within a collection?

“I wouldn't say there's a maximum number because, typically, many e-commerce sites will have an ‘all’ page where the collection is just every single thing that they have on the site.

In terms of a minimum, you probably don't want to create a collection if there is only one product. It depends on how deep your product range is and how many SKUs you have. We have seen success with collections where you only have two or three products. When it's just one product, it's a little bit more difficult.

If your products go in and out of stock, it can also depend on how you serve out-of-stock products. If it 404s, you then get into a position where your collection page has zero products, even if it's coming back into stock in two weeks' time.

Typically, you want to start from around three products. I know it's not a lot, but it gives you a good foundation. If you’ve got three different types of skinny jeans, put them in a collection to start with.”

What’s the minimum you need to do in order to fully optimize these pages?

“The process that we follow is we do full keyword research that will help us identify what people are searching for and how that marries up to the product range. We then do keyword mapping. That's really important because, when you go into the subcategory side of things, there is a lot of crossover.

Once you've done the keyword mapping, we then look at the metadata: page title, meta description, H1 tag, etc. Once we've got those foundations built across the key pages, then we'll go into the next phase, which is building that on-page copy and that internal linking structure.

The reason why we phase it out is that we would rather have a live collection page with minimal content and no internal links on it, earlier, rather than trying to get something perfect done in three months' time. Get those collection pages live, even if there's minimal content on them. Give them time to be seen.

That's when you go into phase two: building that content, building the internal linking structure, looking at the navigation, and things like that.”

What is the new world of potential revenue that this can open up?

“It just opens up how many people can find you. A big part of this process is trying to connect your audience to people who are searching non-branded keywords and search terms.

If you sell leggings and you're heavily reliant on your brand name (which a lot of fashion brands are), you're then opening up a whole new world of people looking for ‘Pilates clothes’, ‘yoga clothes’, ‘running clothing’, or ‘gym clothing’.

That's where we see so much potential because you're then targeting someone who isn't necessarily searching for your brand, but the product aligns, and that's how they come and find out about you. They might think, ‘I didn't realise this brand sold that. I'm going to go in and purchase.’ It removes that heavy reliance on branded search.

The other reason why we do that is that branded search can come in peaks and troughs. If something has gone viral, you might see a spike in brand interest, but then, this time next year, that can drop. By creating these collection pages and putting more onus on non-brand search terms, you're then reducing that risk and making sure you're still generating revenue from a non-brand perspective.”

How is AI search impacting the traffic that you can drive to these pages?

“I feel like the impact might be a little bit overstated. The reason I say that, from a fashion perspective, is that the way that people shop, even offline, is they want to browse. They want to browse clothes. They want to understand what's out there.

If you bought three pairs of jeans in the past three months, it doesn't mean you want to buy another pair of jeans. You might want a pair of chinos or something else.

Fashion changes over time, and people then want to browse and engage with the website. It has more impact from an informational blog copy perspective. If you have a piece of content like ‘The Best 5 Shoes to Wear with a Casual Suit’, that’s where AI is going to have an impact.

I still think there's so much value in creating that content, and even if people are then searching for it through ChatGPT, you still have the link to the article. My perspective on this longer-form informational content is that it really has to come secondary to the more transactional terms, based on the collection pages.

From a collection page perspective (through the lens of fashion), we're not really seeing those search terms producing AI overviews or people using ChatGPT, because it's less informational. They're looking to buy. They want to browse what products are on offer.”

How do you know if you've created too many different collections, and you’ve negatively impacted the authority of that collection?

“When you are originally creating those collections, you want to do that keyword mapping. You want to see where that overlap is and where the issues are. That's why you do the keyword mapping.

In theory, you can have a ‘t-shirts’ page, then ‘long-sleeved t-shirts’, then ‘long-sleeved grey t-shirts’, but you can then start to see the overlap and say, ‘From a data perspective, there is search around long-sleeved grey, black, and white t-shirts, but we can field all of that in one collection page,’ (if you only have three or four long-sleeved products that fit within there).

As you get more granular, it’s about seeing how many products fit within that category that are worth building out. If you have already created all these collections and you're unsure what to do about them, it really is a big data piece that needs to be conducted.

We look at things from the perspective of: optimize, redirect, or merge. Look at all the data and think, ‘Of these collection pages, which are generating clicks and impressions?’ Then look into it from a keyword perspective. Are the pages that you want to rank for X, Y, and Z keywords going to the correct pages? If not, is there some sort of optimization/de-optimization you need to do for other pages to help shift it that way? That's the first step.

Then you look at, out of all of those pages, which need further help. You know that there’s a benefit because you have five ‘black t-shirt’ pages, and you want to optimize those, but you’re not targeting ‘baggy’, ‘slim-fit’, or whatever it is that also has data for ‘black t-shirts’.

You then want to look at the redirect side of things. If you know that you previously sold bomber jackets, but those jackets don't exist anymore, that's when you might redirect that to the most appropriate page. That's really important. You don't just want to redirect it to the homepage. If you know that there's a similar style to that bomber jacket, you might redirect it there. If not, you just redirect it to the ‘jackets’ page.

Then you have merging. If there are too many similar collections, that's when you look to merge. You might have three or four variations of long-sleeved t-shirts, all targeting slightly different terms, but the data is saying that none of these pages are really that authoritative. Merge the content together and build one really strong page with more products in it. Then, redirect the old URLs to that main page.”

Joe, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“If you are an e-commerce site, build out collection pages to open up a whole new world of untapped revenue potential.”

Joe Hale is Founder at Verde Digital. Find out more over at VerdeDigital.co.