We get it, it’s overwhelming to run an ecommerce store. Nailing the UX, creating content, optimising SEO; there’s so much to do at the same time.
In this hassle store owners often forget to optimize one of the key pages of their ecommerce website.
The category page.
Skipping SEO for category pages can quietly sabotage your ecommerce growth.
Why?
Because most users don’t search for products by brand name. Instead, they search using broad terms like “sneakers” or “high-top sneakers.”
By curating dedicated pages featuring specific collections, category pages capture the search intent of the users. These pages then guide users to find the right fit for them.
In this blog, we’ll discuss what is an Ecommerce Category Page and its types and how to optimize category pages for SEO among other things.
Ecommerce Category Page And Its Types
Let’s start with a small definition: Ecommerce Category Page is a dynamic webpage featuring a specialized collection of products or sub-categories. It acts as a link between landing pages and product listicles.
The main objective of a category page is to guide a user’s journey by narrowing down the search to relevant items.
A typical ecommerce category page includes the following:
- Overview of category with a short description.
- Subcategories featuring descriptions, images and links to browse it.
- Featured products such as Bestsellers, Top Picks, etc.
- Promotional offers such as discounts, or deals.
Types of ecommerce category pages
Ecommerce category pages can be classified under two types: category listings pages and product listing pages.
Category listings pages
Category Listing Pages act as a hub for other sub-categories or link to product categories. It provides users with an overview of the selected range of products the store has. For example here is a screenshot of the men’s watch category section from Amazon’s website
Product listing pages
Product listing pages are specific pages, displaying a list of individual products. They feature information about price, benefits, reviews, etc. It also includes filtering and sorting options to find the right fit for customers. For example here is the product listing page from amazon under the “men’s watch” category and “wrist watch” subcategory:
9 High-Impact Tactics for Ecommerce Category Page SEO
Now that we’ve discussed the fundamentals, let’s begin with the 9 high impact tactics to improve ecommerce category page seo. let’s get right into into it:
1. Implement a Logical Ecommerce Category Structure
Every optimization task begins with a well-defined structure. And when it comes to ecommerce, the best practice is to group your products into meaningful categories.
Start with broader categories, then drill down into sub-categories and specific products. The structure should be logical enough to satisfy both—search engines and a user’s natural browsing behavior.
One smart way to do this is by including long-tail categories that cater to niche products. If your brand sells unique or specialized items, these long-tail categories are the best way to capture them.
Consider this: Your store sells shoes.
You can begin with “Shoes” as the main category. Then break it down into sub-categories like Hiking Shoes, Running Shoes, Sports Shoes, Casuals, etc.
Now, let’s say you also offer a niche product—shoes designed specifically for motorsports. This deserves its own long-tail category like ‘Shop Motorsport Collection’.
This type of highly-specific category doesn’t just improve SEO, it attracts a high-intent audience looking for exactly that product. And the more relevant the traffic, the better your conversion rates.
Once you’ve built this logical structure, the next step is to pay attention to your URL structure.
Keep URLs short, clean, and keyword-optimized. A good rule of thumb is to have no more than three levels in your subcategory hierarchy.
This practice will also help reduce the crawl depth, the number of clicks it takes to reach a page. A flatter structure makes it easier for search engine algorithms to discover, crawl, and index your pages quickly.
2. Create Informative and Creative Content
When it comes to content for category pages, things can get a bit tricky.
Too little content, and Google may struggle to understand the purpose of the page. Too much, and you risk overwhelming users and confusing search engines.
As Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller puts it:
“When ecommerce category pages don’t have any other content at all—other than links to the products—it’s really hard for us to rank those pages.”
So, what does “good” content look like on a category page?
Well it’s definitely not about keyword stuffing or adding fluff. Those days are long gone now. The goal with the content is to deliver what matters to the users.
Marketers often ask: How do I write SEO friendly category descriptions without making it boring or spammy?
The answer to this would be to focus on contextual relevance. That means, answering user questions, addressing pain points, and offering solutions. Creating content that actually connects with your audience and helps them with their purchase decision.
While it’s great to include an enticing headline, a short description, highlights like features or pricing, and a compelling CTA. But that alone isn’t enough.
Let’s say you run a furniture store. While creating a category page in your website you’ve covered the basic components such as product types, pricing, features.
But what about after sales care and maintenance? Shoppers also want to know things like how to choose the right furniture for their decor or how climate impacts durability.
That’s where informational content steps in.
Support your category pages with how-to guides, tutorials, demos, FAQs, blogs, and listicles. And these are the type of content section where you get to use your long tail keywords.
This simple strategy, one educate your audience and two also bring in organic traffic through relevant queries.
Still continuing with the furniture example. Here some content ideas:
- “How to Care for Leather Furniture: Do’s and Don’ts”
- “Step-by-Step: Assembling the Bed [Video Guide]”
Let’s take Ikea’s “furniture” category page for an example.
Just look at how effortlessly they have communicated.
There’s no fluff content, just thoughtful visuals, intuitive categories, and a short intro that subtly tells a story: how their furniture can blend into your life, day or night.
This type of content feels like a guide rather than a sales pitch. The content sits back and lets the products take center stage, but still gives you just enough direction to know what to explore next.
However, here’s a word of caution from Mueller again:
“Our algorithms sometimes get confused when they have a list of products on top and essentially a giant article on the bottom.”
There are many websites who follow this practice of adding content at the bottom of their category page just before the footer. The content aims to provide more relevance and context about the page’s subject.
For example the same IKEA’s “furniture” product page has a content at the bottom that puts more context into the page by saying –
- what the page is about,
- products mentioned in the page,
- things to consider before buying furniture online,
- Why buy furniture from IKEA India?
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
No matter what type of content you are including in your category page, the goal is to support the shopping experience, not distract from it. Only provide what is necessary. Think about what a user might ask when they see your product.
Keep your content relevant and concise. Avoid large content blocks that shift focus away from the products. That’s because when content becomes noise, both your users and rankings take a hit.
3. Meta title and description Optimization
The title tag is the first thing users see when your site appears in a search result. Think of it as your first impression, a headline that can either attract a click or be ignored.
A strong title tag mainly is responsible for two things. One, it influences rankings and two, it increases click-through rates and ultimately conversions.
That’s why no matter whichever page you are optimised for, be it the category page or other product or blog pages, Title of the page needs to be both creative and strategic. Hence, compelling enough to hook users, while also being unique, relevant, and keyword-optimized.
For best practice try to keep the title under 60 characters to avoid truncation in search results.
Many marketers often confuse the title tag with the H1 tag. So here’s a quick difference:
- The title tag appears on the search engine results page (SERP).
- The H1 tag is visible on your category page itself.
Here’s a quick example of the difference:
While both should be keyword-rich, they serve different purposes. Together, they form a part of your above-the-fold content.
That means these two lines of content are the first thing users see when they land on your page. This space is critical for capturing attention at a glance.
The same quick glance attention principle applies to your page’s meta description as well.
Meta descriptions should summarize your page, reflect the intent, and include compelling phrases that improve CTR (click-through rate). The ideal length? Keep it under 155 characters.
Your meta description should act like a mini advertisement. So this place is your chance to highlight USPs, offers, or psychological triggers that make users want to click.
You can include content like:
- “Up to 60% off on all styles”
- “Free shipping on orders above ₹400”
- “Celebrity-approved collection”
- “Top-rated by 500+ customers”
You can also run A/B tests on different meta descriptions to see which ones perform better. At the end of the day, small tweaks here can make a big difference in traffic.
4. Add Product Filtering/ Sorting Option
To help users browse and shop faster, give them filtering and sorting options through faceted navigation. It allows shoppers to narrow down products based on preferences like price, rating, color, size, or style, making their experience smoother and more intuitive.
But here’s the thing: faceted navigation is a double-edged sword when it comes to SEO.
If not handled properly, these filters can generate multiple URL combinations (like ?color=red&size=10), leading to duplicate or thin content. This can confuse search engines, dilute ranking signals, and waste crawl budget.
To avoid this:
- Use canonical tags to consolidate ranking signals and tell Google which version of a page is the “main” one.
- Consider blocking unnecessary filter URLs in robots.txt if they don’t add SEO value.
- Implement parameter handling in Google Search Console to control how Google treats filter-based URLs.
Also, if your store has a large inventory, avoid stuffing everything onto a single category page. Instead, use pagination to split products across multiple pages with clear navigation controls like “Next,” “Previous,” and page numbers.
One quick SEO tip here:
Make sure these pagination links use HTML anchor tags (<a href>), because that’s what Googlebot follows when crawling your site. Avoid relying solely on JavaScript-based navigation as it could block crawlers from accessing your content.
5. Use Visually-appealing design and images
One of the most overlooked best practices for ecommerce category page optimization is the impact of good design.
And by design, I don’t just mean aesthetics of the page. I am talking about high converting visuals that influence buying decisions.
High quality product images on ecommerce websites do play a huge role in convincing users to make a purchase. As a matter of fact, 90% of buyers prioritize photo quality when making purchase decisions.
So, if you are still using generic stock images in your category and product pages then I think it’s high time you let that go and use authentic visuals instead.
Your product photos should look exactly like the actual product. Capture them from multiple angles and in real-life usage scenarios to build trust.
Let’s take IKEA’s Living Room Inspiration page. It’s not just a product listing page, it’s an immersive visual experience for their customers.
Instead of including flat, lifeless stock images, they showcase their products in beautifully staged, real-life living rooms. Moreover every element in the image is thoughtfully placed to bring out the utmost relatability factor for the customer.
These images do more than just show furniture. They tell a story. They make you imagine your life in that setup, which is exactly what your category page images should aim for.
But visual optimization of your category page does not stop there. There is a SEO side of visuals.
Always add “alt text” to your images. Including an “alt text” helps Google understand the context of your visuals. To make the “alt text” more SEO friendly, include relevant keywords in the image descriptions in a subtle and natural way.
For ecommerce categories like jewellery, fashion, or clothing, it’s even more crucial to show the product in use. Why? Because it forms a relativity factor for the page visitor.
You can easily hire models to wear your products and showcase them in real-life environments. This gives your customers a better idea of what to expect thus driving more intent driven traffic to convert.
But here’s a heads-up: don’t compromise your page speed. Large image sizes can slow down your site, which can hurt both UX and SEO. So have a word with your developer about the ideal size of the image you should upload and then create ideas with the technical aspects in mind.
Once all the images are set, in the end make sure that your website design aligns with your brand’s voice and tone.
From colors to fonts to layouts to images, everything should feel cohesive and professional.
6. Optimize Breadcrumbs to Strengthen Site Architecture and User Flow
Breadcrumbs help users navigate your site with ease by showing them exactly where they are within the site hierarchy. These are clickable links, typically displayed in a horizontal trail format like:
Home Decor > Furniture > Living Room Furniture > Beds
From a user experience standpoint, breadcrumbs make it easy for shoppers to move back to broader categories without restarting their search. This fluid navigation can reduce bounce rates and increase the time users spend exploring your catalog.
But breadcrumbs aren’t just for users. They’re incredibly powerful for your category page SEO as well.
Using breadcrumbs contributes to internal linking (one of the strongest on-site signals for search engines). By linking to parent categories and related pages, breadcrumbs help Google understand your site’s hierarchy better.
This becomes especially important for ecommerce sites with deep architecture and multiple layers of categories and subcategories.
Moreover, breadcrumbs also help optimize crawlability of your website. For example: Search bots can follow breadcrumb paths to efficiently index your site, reducing crawl depth and improving discoverability of important pages.
Some experts argue that breadcrumbs might clutter the interface or distract users. But that can happen only when the breadcrumbs are not placed strategically.
In most cases, when designed thoughtfully, they improve both usability and SEO performance. If you’re unsure about this, I would recommend you to A/B test different styles or placements to find the best fit for your store.
7. Distribute Important Link Juice with Internal Linking (also making use of external and backlinks)
Links would always be the most important aspect of your ecommerce seo. And internal linking is not just a basic SEO task, it’s one of the foundational parts of optimizing your ecommerce category pages.
Let’s break it down.
When doing internal linking, start by linking high-authority pages. For example your homepage, top-selling product pages, or seasonal collection hubs to relevant category and subcategory pages.
Why? Because it helps distribute link equity, or SEO value, across your site. The more internal links a page receives from important sections of your site, the more likely it is to be considered important by search engines.
Now here’s where the structure formation comes in. Use a parent-child URL format to mirror your site’s hierarchy. For example:
- Main category: www.yourstore.com/women/shoes
- Sub-category: www.yourstore.com/women/shoes/running
This simple format;
A. Creates a hierarchical relationship between categories and subcategories,
B. Helps Google crawl and understand your site better.
You’re essentially building a pyramid structure, where the homepage sits at the top, followed by categories, sub-categories, and finally product pages at the base.
This structure allows link juice to flow downward logically—benefiting every level.
This also helps avoid a common SEO trap: orphan pages.
Orphan pages are those lonely pages with zero internal links pointing to them.
If Google can’t find a page through your site structure, it won’t index it well, even if the content is solid.
Another important thing is. When doing internal linking use specific anchor text. Instead of writing vague CTAs like “click here” or “see more,” try:
- “Explore women’s party dresses”
- “Shop kids’ waterproof jackets”
- “Discover leather recliner sofas”
Each link should tell both Google and your users what to expect when they click.
And while internal links are the priority here, backlinks for ecommerce websites matters a lot too. But again whenever backlinks come into the picture it’s always the matter of quality over quantity.
I believe you are already managing enough. Why don’t you leave the link building part to us? We have done it before and link building services have driven significant results for our ecommerce clients. Let’s talk about this over a quick call.
Coming back to the point, great internal linking isn’t about adding more links. It’s about creating a logical, meaningful path that helps both users and search engines flow through your store naturally.
8. Use user reviews and ratings in your category page
Social proof and user-generated content (UGC) play a huge role in on-page SEO and conversion optimization for ecommerce websites, especially on category and product pages.
Today’s buyers don’t just browse, they research. Before they even think of clicking “Buy Now,” they check reviews, ratings, and real-life images shared by other users.
That’s why displaying social proof directly on your ecommerce category pages is a must.
User reviews, especially those with actual product images, help your customers bridge the trust gap. Your polished thumbnail image might catch the eye, what seals the deal is often a raw, real-life image taken by another customer.
It answers the buyer’s biggest unspoken question: “Will this product look and feel the same when it arrives?”
From an SEO perspective, this is gold. Here’s why:
- Reviews and UGC add fresh, relevant, and user intent driven content to your category pages. Something Google loves.
- They help satisfy Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Structured data (like star ratings and review counts) can appear directly on the SERP, improving click-through rates.
- They increase dwell time, reduce bounce rates, and send positive engagement signals to search engines.
Hence UGC isn’t just a trust booster—it’s an SEO strategy that compounds over time.
9. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
When it comes to conversion rate optimization, most people mainly focus on product or checkout pages.
But the truth is, your category pages are where the buyer journey starts to get serious. And if your category pages are not doing the job right, you’re losing sales before the real shopping even begins.
Now, here’s the thing: users are quick to judge. If something feels off for example, slow load, clunky design, poor layout, they will bounce. So your category page needs to be smooth, fast, and intuitive.
- Cluttered layout? Fix it.
- Confusing filters? Simplify them.
- Long load times? Compress those images.
Every click should feel effortless.
Also, make your CTAs pop. Use highlighted, clickable buttons that stand out like “Explore Styles”, “Add to Wishlist”, “Shop Now”. The words you choose matter. Get a little creative here.
Play around with your layout too. A/B test different versions of the same page, try swapping button placements, test copy tweaks, shuffle product placements. Let your audience tell you what works.
Track things like:
- Are users scrolling or bouncing?
- Are they clicking into product pages?
- How long are they staying?
Category pages are something you keep refining. Because what works today might not work a month from now. But the goal is very simple: remove friction, build curiosity, and guide users further down the funnel. All this without them even realising it.
How to Measure the Success of Ecommerce Category Page SEO
So moving forward, after you have implemented everything now your job is to see what is working and what is not.
So here’s what you need to track:
Organic traffic: The traffic generated naturally via unpaid activities is organic traffic. Google Search Console and Analytics can help you understand these numbers.
Keyword rankings: Tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs will tell you where your pages rank when users type in specific keywords.
Bounce rate: A high bounce rate is considered detrimental. Maybe your content isn’t engaging, or they don’t trust your site. Heatmaps from Hotjar or Crazy Egg can show you exactly where they’re losing interest.
Click-through rate (CTR): It implies the percentage of users who click on product listings or CTAs. A high CTR, tracked by GA4 or GSC indicates a successful SEO strategy.
Conversion rate: A conversion rate implies how many users completed a desired action, such as, completing a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or adding an item to the cart. The end goal is to drive more sales. And conversion rates are the indicator for it.
Conclusion
A well-executed ecommerce category page SEO strategy is directly linked to the success of your store. Drive more sales with a better UX and more visibility.
Don’t feel overwhelmed and tackle things step by step. Prioritize your goals, fix your issues and slowly move towards #1 in Google ranks.
Category pages are the unsung heroes of your website’s traffic. Fix them today.
