If you have a Shopify website for your business then it’s a no brainer you want it to do well and perform to its highest potential. One of the best ways to do that is to ensure all of the products on your site are organized in a logical fashion. This makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for, which is essential to reaching your online sales goals. Another important element to take into consideration is your Shopify collection page SEO.
Why is SEO an extra important part of your Shopify collection page? Well, SEO is always important (of course) but optimizing your collection pages is the best and most efficient way to improve the performance of your website overall. It can help you to get your products in front of valuable customers and elevate them all at the same time.
What is a Shopify Collection?
A good place to start is with a thorough understanding of what a Shopify collection is. Especially if you’re thinking about starting a Shopify business and aren’t sure of what exactly a collection is.
A Shopify collection is a group of products that you set up as the owner of the business’s Shopify site. Having these collections helps to make it easy for your customers to browse through the products you’re selling. They can select a specific category and find everything they need within it.
For example, if you were selling jewelry you might have a collection of necklaces and another collection of earrings. If you sell home décor then you might have a collection of throw blankets or pillows.
Whatever it is you’re selling, products can be neatly arranged into these different collections to help make things easy for your customers (and you at the end of the day). It’s also possible to set up a collection called “all products” which will include every product you sell. This allows your customers to see everything you sell within one place and can be a good idea for those with a smaller inventory.
Why Use Shopify Collections?
Is it really that essential to make use of Shopify collections? You bet it is!
Try thinking of your Shopify online store as if it were an in-person shopping experience. When someone visits a store in-person it’s not likely they’re going to find items randomly strewn about the store with little to no organization.
When you visit a store in-person you’re more than likely going to find the products in the store have some sort of organization to them. As a shopper, you generally know what section to go to in order to find whatever it is you’re looking for.
Just the same as your experience shopping in person, you should be able to navigate an online store fairly easily. The harder that customers need to look for something, the less likely they are going to want to stay and buy it (especially when they’re shopping online).
By utilizing Shopify collections, you’re able to organize your items the same way you would in a physical store. This makes for a better shopping experience for customers and increases the chances that they will actually make a purchase. Staying organized definitely pays off.
Why Do You Need to Improve Shopify Collection Page SEO?
Once you’ve established your different Shopify collections and have your pages all set up, is your job done? Not quite.
The next step in the process is to improve your Shopify collection page SEO. Why? Because when your Shopify collection pages are properly optimized with SEO criteria, your collections increase brand recognition if you have a store or previous sales completed by a customer. SEO also helps to increase your shop’s ranking on Google which makes it easier for potential customers to find you online. You need your customers to be able to find you easily.
When your collections are properly optimized, they will show up on SERPs and lead to more clicks. Shopify collection pages are particularly great for enhancing the overall SEO of your website because they are considered hub pages. These types of pages link internally to other pages on your website that are related to the initial topic.
You can almost think of collection pages as the table of contents that helps with navigation on your website. Your customers can start by searching within the more high-level categories and then go further into subcategories as they shop.
How to Organize Shopify Collections
Before you think about optimizing your Shopify collections, it’s important to first think about how you’re going to organize them. Here are four steps you can follow to organize your collections in the easiest way possible.
Understand the Organization Capabilities
The first step in organizing your Shopify collections effectively is to understand what’s possible. Shopify happens to offer a ton of different capabilities when organizing your products. You can use collections and tags to help organize your products and filter through them at the same time. You’re also able to customize your theme to achieve the perfect display.
You don’t need to worry about being stuck with your collections the way they are either. It’s totally possible to name and rename your collections as your business or products change.
One of the best things you can use to narrow down your collections using key search terms is tags. Users can find the things they are specifically looking for.
It’s also important to know your themes are different from collections as they allow you to customize the display of your tags and collections. These features are all super easy to use and allow you to organize your products with ease.
Think about how you will break down your store into browsable sections. This will make shopping easier for your customers and will save you a ton of trouble down the road!
Know About Simple vs. Nested Collections
If you’re looking to organize your collections in their simplest form, then you’re definitely going to want to know about simple collections. If you sell jewelry, for example, you could make a collection of “Gold Necklaces” or “Silver Earrings”.
This allows visitors to find what they’re looking for with a simple click of their mouse. Simple collections are especially great for those with smaller stores who don’t have a ton of inventory or variation within their inventory.
Setting up a simple collection will allow your customers to instantly see if you have what it is they’re looking for.
Nested collections on the other hand are great for those with a large inventory and a large amount of variation within that inventory. If you try to put too many products into your simple collection it could make browsing more difficult for your customers. They are a lot more likely to become confused or overwhelmed and leave your Shopify website as a result.
Nested collections make things a lot easier as users can navigate your products and will usually browse for longer as a result. Users are also more likely to convert if they can find what it is they’re looking for, which is part of what makes nested collections so great.
If your customer wanted to see gold necklaces with pendants on them, it’s possible for them to search for this with a nested collection. An example would be “Necklaces” >> “Gold” >> “Pendants.
The easier you make it for your customers the more likely they are to buy from you.
Plan Out Your Organizational Structure
Before you go ahead and get started on creating collections, you should first start by mapping out the structure of your products. Take a look at every product you have. Larger collections of products will likely mean you want to break them down into nested collections. Fewer products can usually mean a simple collection to keep things easy.
A good way to understand how you can organize your collections is by taking a look at your competitors’ websites. If they are successful then it’s likely they have organized their products effectively. This is something you could look to mimic or use as a starting point for your own organizational structure.
Your competitors are actually great to look at for examples of what to do on your Shopify website as a whole. If they are successful then their methods are definitely worth exploring.
The best thing you can do, in addition to looking at your competitors, is to always keep your audience in mind. Think about how they will experience your website and how they will browse through and search for your products.
It could be that finding the perfect balance between simple and nested collections is the key to your success. Do some trial and error to figure out what will work best.
Implement Your Structure
Once you’ve established what your organizational structure is going to look like, it’ll be time to implement it on your Shopify site.
This process can be time-consuming, but it’s definitely worth it to create the best shopping experience possible. Make sure you have a theme developer ready to help modify your theme and create your collections.
Oftentimes, it can be a good idea to get outside help to save yourself the time and stress that can go into setting up your collections. It’s always best to get this help from a professional who can understand your vision and help make your website a success.
How to Optimize Your Shopify Collection Page
Now that you know more about how to organize your Shopify collection page, it’s time to get a better understanding of how to optimize it! What’s the best way to ensure your page gets found? How can you ensure you get the best results from your collection page?
Read through these seven tips on how to optimize your Shopify collection page and you’ll be well on your way to making the most out of it!
Optimize Your Collection for Search
Your collections are sure to look great once they’re organized properly, but they also serve the purpose of guiding your customers toward the checkout page. And sooner rather than later!
When properly optimized, your collections can also attract visitors from their search. You need optimization in order to rank at the top of a SERP.
Here are some of our best tips:
- Include your target keyword in the URL: You should keep your URL short and always ensure your keyword is somewhere within it.
- Identify the correct target keywords: Before you go and use your keywords, make sure you have the right ones. Do your keyword research to see what users are searching for.
- Use your keyword in your title tag: Another great place to include your target keyword is in your title tag. This is usually best when used at the front of the tag.
- Create a unique page copy that uses your keyword: You should try adding in other related keywords as well, based on your research.
- Use your keyword in your H1 tag: It also doesn’t hurt to include it in your H2s, H3s, and H4s.
- Include internal links throughout your site: Each collection page should have links to other internal pages of your site.
There are so many things you can do to optimize your collection pages and help them perform! Here are some additional tips to help you get the best results possible.
Include Quality Imagery
Image quality has become a super important part of optimizing your Shopify collection pages in recent years. Images will increase your ranking and will also help you to get your buyer’s attention. Not only that, high quality images are the best way to display your products and ensure they’re represented properly.
Make sure the images you choose to use are clear and that the product itself is nicely displayed – especially if your products are mostly visual. You’re more likely to get sales if your customers can see exactly what they’re buying.
You should shoot your products from multiple angles so it’s easy to see the product. Save your images in a high-quality format and have the zoom option enabled. You might even go as far as to add videos of the products as well.
Add Trust Factors
What reasons do customers have to put their trust in you? If you can’t think of any right off the bat, then it’s time to add some trust factors to your collection pages.
Your customers need to trust what it is you’re telling them in order for them to want to buy from you. But how can you show you’re trustworthy?
One of the best things you can do is include online reviews on the page. Reviews are relatively easy to showcase and your customers are likely to put their trust in you as a result. You can put customer reviews right underneath your products so they’re easy for other customers to find and browse through.
When customers can see proof that others have purchased and enjoyed your products, they’ll be a lot more inclined to do the same thing themselves.
Make Your Collections Easily Accessible
Simple and easy to navigate collections pages are essential to your success when it comes to sales. When your collections are designed intuitively, your customers are going to have a much better experience. They’ll be able to find what they’re looking for and sometimes even find what they’re not looking for.
Ensure your collection pages are user friendly. You can do this by thinking from the perspective of how your customers would navigate your website. You can also work with a UX designer to help you get the most out of your pages and ensure they’re set up in a user friendly way.
Be sure to label your collections descriptively. You might opt for labels like “Baby Girl” or “Baby Boy” rather than simply saying “Baby”. Drop down menus are also a great way to create a great user experience on your site.
Map Out Your Site Structure
Again, we will touch on the very important point of mapping out your site structure in a functional way. Without a solid structure, it’s easy for your Shopify site to become a big pile of products that customers have no clue how to navigate.
Ensure there is a logical flow to your website and that you use your audience and product range to build your collections. Start with simple, top-level categories, and then go further into sub categories until you’ve divided everything up.
An example of a top category might be “Necklaces”. From there you could break it down into a sub-category called “Gold”. This could go even further to be “Chokers”, and from there “Choker Pendants”. There are so many different ways to break your products down. And while it might be time consuming, it is essential to helping your customers find what they need and purchase it.
Enable Simple Product Filtering
Your customer might have gotten to your collection page (likely because of the great SEO you implemented), but your work isn’t done quite yet. You need them to make a purchase once they’ve reached the page.
If they have trouble finding the product they’re looking for, then it’s not likely they’re going to stay on your Shopify website very long. Smart product filtering can help with this.
Narrowing down the selection brings up a range of filters and links to other collection pages on your website. These filtering options make it simple for the user to get to what they’re looking for without having to work too hard to get there. As we said, optimization and organized collection pages definitely pay off.
Customize Your Navigation
Navigation is, of course, what makes it easy (or hard if done incorrectly) for your potential customers to get around your website. Great navigation helps to draw their eyes to the things you want to put in front of them.
If you have a particular group of products you know has higher sales than the rest of your products, then you’re likely going to want them to see that group. You want to show those products off as much as possible.
This is made possible through custom navigation which allows you to create a custom shopping experience. You might create a “Best Sellers” collection for users to browse through. This is particularly great for shoppers who don’t know exactly what it is they’re looking for.
Be sure to test out different customized navigation techniques to see what gets you the most conversions
Conclusion: Improve Your Shopify Collection Page SEO
Optimizing your Shopify website in general is one of the best ways to attract new and old customers and ensure your website is getting in front of them. Without SEO, you run the risk of missing out on some valuable sales opportunities. Your customers can’t buy from you if they don’t know about you after all.
Further to that is specifically optimizing your Shopify collection pages. Taking the time and effort to do so can help improve the optimization of your website overall. So, be sure to set up your collections and use the tips above to optimize them efficiently.
We hope this post helped you to learn everything you need to know about Shopify collections and how to optimize them. You should now have a thorough understanding of collection page SEO and how it can influence your website’s performance overall.
If these tips all sound great, but you’re still not sure how to go about implementing them, Blue Water Marketing is here to support all your eCommerce marketing needs! We can help take this important task off your plate or simply offer our advice and expertise to help you through the process.
Either way, we’re excited to help you improve your Shopify website and help you get the sales you’ve been hoping for. Our team of experienced Shopify SEO experts is just a phone call away. Be sure to contact us to set up your free consultation and get started!
