TL;DR
On a Shopify store the collection page has the best chance of ranking, and on most stores it is a grid of products with a heading above it and nothing else. That is the biggest structural miss I find. It is not a word count problem. Nobody ever decided the collection was a page.
On a Shopify store the collection page is the one with the best chance of ranking, and on most stores it is a grid of products with a heading above it and nothing else.
That is the single biggest structural miss I find on Shopify sites, and it is not really a content problem. It is that nobody decided the collection was a page.
Why the collection outranks the product
Almost nobody searches for your individual products by name. They search for the category, the thing rather than the specific item, and the page that answers a category query is the collection.
The product page’s job is different: convert the person who has arrived. It is competing with the manufacturer, with Amazon, and often with four hundred other stores listing the identical supplied description. Most product pages cannot realistically rank and it is more useful to say so than to keep optimising them.
So the writing goes on the collection. One page, not four hundred.
Which makes it worth knowing what else the platform is putting in the way. On the store above, 659 tag pages were competing with the collections for the same queries: auto-generated, nobody’s decision, and thinner than the pages they were competing against.
What a collection page needs, and it is not a word count
Here I have changed my mind, and it is worth being explicit because the older version is in my own audits.
On a Shopify homeware store I audited I wrote: almost all collection pages have very little content… add at least 700 words to each of the collection pages. The instinct was right and the instruction was wrong, for the same reason “add 500 words to every product page” is wrong. It is a number rather than a job, and a number gets you seven hundred words of padding above a grid.
What a collection page actually needs is enough to answer the query and somewhere to link from. In practice that is two or three paragraphs doing specific work:
- Say what the category is and who it is for, in the words a customer would use. This is where the relevance comes from.
- Answer the question the category term implies. Somebody searching a category is usually choosing between options: sizes, materials, use cases. Two sentences of genuine buying guidance beats six paragraphs of restated keywords.
- Link out contextually. To the subcategories, and to the two or three products you have actually decided to compete on. A grid with no copy has nowhere to put a deliberate link, so every link on the page is template-generated and ranked by whatever the theme defaults to.
Benchmarking against the web will mislead you here. The 2024 Web Almanac put the median mobile home page at 364 words, so two paragraphs on a collection page already puts you above the median page on the internet, and the median page on the internet is not who you are competing with.
The heading problem that comes with the grid
Worth checking while you are in there. On that same store, every product name in the grid was wrapped in an <h2>, so a collection listing forty products had forty second-level headings before anything a human wrote. The store also had 1,562 URLs with a missing or empty H1.
Strip everything but the headings and the page read: Shop. About. Blue Ceramic Mug. Grey Ceramic Mug. That is not a description of a category. Replace the tag, keep the appearance. The page looks identical afterwards.
Where the copy should go on the page
A practical point people get wrong: burying all the text below the grid is the safe-feeling choice and it wastes it.
A short intro above the grid, two or three sentences, and the rest below is the arrangement I recommend. The intro does the relevance work and the customer scrolls past it in half a second, which is fine. Nobody bounces because a category page had two sentences on it.
Which collections deserve this
Not all of them. A store with ninety collections does not need ninety written pages, and trying produces ninety thin ones.
Pick the collections that match real search demand, that you would back with internal links, and that will still exist next year. Usually somewhere between five and fifteen. The rest keep the template baseline and that is a complete answer.
Spreading the effort thinner does not help. Ahrefs examined 14 billion pages and found 96.55% get zero traffic from Google. Writing ninety mediocre category intros adds ninety pages to that number. Ten good ones is a different outcome, and it is the same afternoon’s work.
The short version
- The collection is the page that can rank. The product converts.
- It is not a word count. I recommended 700 words once and I would not now.
- Three jobs: say what the category is, answer the buying question, link out deliberately.
- A grid with no copy has nowhere to put a chosen link.
- Check whether product names in the grid are H2s. Forty of them is a template problem.
- Short intro above the grid, the rest below.
- Five to fifteen collections, not ninety.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Shopify SEO covers collections, products and the platform’s defaults. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for.
