Category pages are your hardest-working SEO asset. Here is how to fix them.
Collection pages carry the most buying intent on your store and are usually the most neglected. A practical fix list.
Patrick Dhital
21 May 2026| 8 min read
Summarise with AI
Ask most store owners where their SEO traffic should come from and they say the blog. Then we look at the data and it is the category pages doing the quiet work, or it would be if anyone had touched them. Collection pages target how people actually shop, they sit close to the buy button, and on most stores they ship as an empty template with a list of products and nothing else.
Why category pages matter more than blog posts
A blog post about "how to choose running shoes" catches someone early, when they are reading rather than buying. A category page for "womens trail running shoes" catches them when their wallet is already out. Both have a place. Only one of them is one click from a sale, and that is the one most brands leave blank.
The fix list
You do not need to do all of this on every category. Pick your ten most commercial collections, the ones that map to real money, and work through them first.
| Element | Common mistake | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Intro copy | None at all, or a wall of repeated keywords | 150 to 250 words that answer real buying questions |
| Heading and title | Generic "Products" or just the brand name | The term people search, like "Womens trail running shoes" |
| Filters and facets | Every filter combination left indexable | Index the valuable combinations, noindex the rest |
| Internal links | Buried three levels deep in the menu | Link from the homepage, related collections and content |
| Product order | Out of stock items shown first | In stock best sellers and new arrivals up top |
Write copy a buyer would actually read
The intro on a category page is not a keyword dump and it is not there to please a robot. Write the two or three sentences you would say to a customer who walked up holding the product, unsure. What is the difference between the options. Who is each one for. What do people usually get wrong. A short, genuinely useful intro beats three hundred words of "discover our premium range of quality products" every time.
Where to put it
Keep the useful first paragraph above the product grid where shoppers and search engines both see it. If you have more to say, a longer section below the grid or an FAQ block works well and keeps the top of the page clean.
Handle filters before they handle you
Faceted navigation is where a lot of eCommerce SEO goes to die. Leave every colour, size and price combination indexable and you hand Google thousands of near-identical thin pages to crawl, which dilutes the ones that matter. Decide which filtered views are worth ranking, such as a colour or a clear sub-category people search for, and stop the rest from being indexed.
A quick test
Search Google for site:yourstore.com and skim the results. If you see dozens of filtered URLs you never meant to publish, your facets need attention.
Fixing category pages is not a one off. New collections launch, products go out of stock, filters multiply. But the first pass on your top ten collections is usually the single highest return job on an eCommerce store, and it rarely takes more than a couple of weeks.
Written by
Patrick Dhital
SEO & Growth, Remarkable Digital
Patrick Dhital leads SEO and growth at Remarkable Digital, where he works with Australian eCommerce and retail brands on organic search, GEO and the kind of growth that shows up in revenue rather than a rankings screenshot. His day to day is a mix of technical audits, category and content strategy, and helping founders work out which SEO work is actually worth paying for. He is most useful on stores that have plateaued: traffic that stopped climbing, category pages that never ranked, or a replatform that quietly wiped out a year of progress. Patrick writes about what is working in eCommerce SEO right now, with a bias toward the practical over the theoretical.