How to Rank Category Pages on Google
Category pages carry most of the commercial search on any shop. On most shops they are a bare grid of products with a heading. That gap is where the money is.
Why Categories Carry The Money
Somebody searching for a type of thing lands on a category. Somebody searching for a specific item lands on a product. There are far more of the first, they are earlier in the decision. They convert.
What a category search means. The choice is still open.
Somebody looking for a type of product has decided roughly what they need without deciding which one. They are choosing rather than buying, which means the page they land on gets to influence what they choose.
What a product search means. The choice has been made.
Somebody typing a model number has already selected. What remains is picking a seller, which is a comparison on price, availability and delivery. Your shop may win it. Nothing on the page changes what they wanted.
Why the difference matters commercially. Influence is worth more than fulfilment.
The visitor who has not chosen can be sold to. The visitor who has chosen can only be served or lost. A shop that ranks only for product terms is competing at the least profitable point in the process.
What most shops do with these pages. Nothing at all.
A heading, a grid of products, perhaps a paragraph below the fold nobody wrote with any purpose. The most valuable pages on the shop are usually the emptiest, which is the whole opportunity in one sentence.
The boundary worth stating now. This page is about ranking a category page that exists.
Designing one sits in our ecommerce web design guides.
What A Category Page Has To Do At Once
A category page has three jobs. They are in genuine conflict. Most category pages fail because somebody optimised for one without noticing the other two.
Rank for the category term. Which needs content, since a grid of product names says very little.
Let somebody browse. Which needs products visible immediately, without scrolling past anything.
Get them to a product. Which needs the path from arrival to a product page to be as short as possible.
Where the conflict bites. Content and immediacy occupy the same space.
Anything placed above the grid pushes products down. Anything that helps the page rank makes the page slower to be useful. A page that opens with four hundred words has answered the first job by failing the second.
How to resolve it rather than pick a side. Separate the two audiences by position.
A short, genuinely useful introduction above the grid, of a couple of sentences, which orients somebody without delaying them. Then the products. Then the substantial content below, where a reader who wants help choosing will look for it and a browser will never notice it.
Why that works. Because the two visitors behave differently.
Somebody who knows what they want scrolls straight to the grid. Somebody who does not is willing to read. Positioning content below serves the second without obstructing the first, which is the only arrangement that serves both.
Creating Categories From Demand
Most shops have the categories their supplier feed gave them. The categories customers actually search for frequently do not exist. Creating one is often the single highest return action available to a shop.
Why it returns so much. Because everything is already in place except the page.
The demand exists. The products exist. Nothing internal is competing for the term, because no page on the shop targets it. Creating the page is a small piece of work against an opportunity that was simply not being served.
Where the gaps come from. A supplier tree organises by brand and range. Customers organise by use, by fit, by material, by who it is for.
Our structure guide covers why those two reliably differ.
How to find the missing ones. Four sources, none requiring guesswork.
Your own site search. What people type once they are on the shop, which is the most direct evidence available of the words they use.
What competitors have that you do not. Not to copy them. A category several competitors have built usually reflects demand somebody measured.
The questions your staff answer daily. Anything asked repeatedly is a grouping customers hold in their heads.
Terms your existing pages rank for accidentally. Where a page receives impressions for something it was not built for, that is demand looking for a home.
What to do when you find one. Build it properly rather than as an empty listing.
A new category with no content is a page that exists rather than an opportunity taken, so blocks four and five apply to it from the start.
The caution. Do not create categories for combinations nobody searches.
That produces the same problem as unmanaged filters, covered in block seven.
Where The Content Goes
Every shop has this argument, usually between whoever wants the page to rank and whoever wants it to look right. Four options exist, each costing something.
Everything above the grid. Best for ranking, worst for everything else.
The page opens with prose and the products are below it. Shoppers meet a wall of text where they expected a shop. This is the arrangement that gives category content its reputation.
Everything below the grid. Best for shoppers. It works.
Products first, content underneath. The cost is that content this far down is read by fewer people, so it has to be genuinely worth finding rather than filler.
Split, with a short introduction above. The arrangement we recommend, per block two.
A couple of sentences that orient without delaying, then products, then the substantial content below. The cost is that the introduction has to be very good, because it is the only part most visitors see.
Hidden behind an expander. Tempting and worth understanding before choosing.
It keeps the page tidy. Content a visitor has to click to reveal is read by very few of them, so the page frequently ends up with content that satisfies nobody: too hidden to help shoppers, too thin to be worth the space.
What decides it for a given shop. How much the category needs explaining.
A category where choosing is genuinely difficult justifies more visible content. A category where the products speak for themselves does not. Forcing content onto it produces the filler block five is about avoiding.
What The Content Has To Do
Three hundred words of category name repeated at intervals is the standard output here. It helps nobody. The content has a specific job. Doing that job is what makes it rank rather than the other way round.
The job. Help somebody choose.
The visitor arrived because they want a type of thing without knowing which one. Everything on the page should serve that.
Four questions worth answering. These are what buying guidance actually consists of.
How do I choose between these? The differences that matter, in the terms a buyer thinks in rather than the specifications a manufacturer publishes.
What should I look for? What separates something adequate from something good, plus what a low price usually costs you.
Which suits my situation? The mapping from circumstance to product, which is the most useful thing a category page can contain and the rarest.
What do I need to know before buying? Sizing, compatibility, what else is required, what people commonly get wrong.
Why this ranks better than optimised filler. Because it matches what the searcher wanted.
Somebody searching a category term is looking for help choosing. A page that provides it is a better answer than one that repeats the term. The words that need to appear turn up naturally when you explain the subject properly.
The test. Would somebody read this and feel better equipped to buy?
If not, it is padding regardless of length. Length was never the point.
Subcategory Depth
Whether to split a category is decided badly on most shops, usually on tidiness. Splitting can create two strong pages or dilute one into two weak ones. There is a test that tells you which.
The test, in three parts. All three have to pass.
Does the subcategory have its own search demand? Meaning do people search for that narrower thing as a thing, rather than it merely being a property products happen to have.
Does it have enough products to be worth landing on? A category of three items is a disappointing destination however well it matches the search.
Does the parent survive the split? The part usually forgotten. If removing the subcategory leaves the parent thin or incoherent, you have traded one working page for two struggling ones.
When splitting clearly wins. Where the narrower term has real demand and the parent stays substantial.
You gain a page targeting a term you could not previously reach. The parent keeps its own.
When splitting clearly loses. Where the split is a property rather than a category.
Colour, size and price are almost always properties. They belong in filters, per block seven, rather than as pages.
The failure mode nobody expects. Splitting into pages that compete with each other.
Two subcategories so similar that neither has a distinct case for existing will both target the same searches and neither will hold them. If you cannot say in one sentence why somebody would want one rather than the other, they are one category.
Filters, Facets And Pagination
These sit on every category page and they are structural questions rather than category ones, so they are covered properly in our structure guide.
What matters here specifically. Two points that affect the category page itself.
Filters can compete with the page they sit on. Where a filter combination becomes a findable page, it is a near duplicate of the category, targeting the same term with less content behind it.
The rule from the structure guide applies: if people search for that combination it deserves a proper page, per block three. If they do not, it should not be findable at all.
Pagination decides how much of the category exists. Products on the eightieth listing page are a long way from anywhere.
A category needing eighty pages is usually a category that should have been several, which returns to block six. Splitting properly solves the depth problem and produces targetable pages at the same time, which is the better answer than any pagination setting.
Internal Linking Between Categories
Categories linking to each other is one of the cheapest improvements available on a shop. Almost nobody does it deliberately because the theme appears to have handled it.
What the theme gives you. Parent and child links, through the menu and the breadcrumb.
Necessary and purely hierarchical. It expresses how the catalogue is filed, which is not how anybody shops.
What deliberate linking adds. Sideways connections.
Categories that are not related in the tree but are related in a customer's head. Somebody buying one thing is frequently about to need another. The tree has no way of expressing that.
Three kinds worth building. Each reflecting a real shopping pattern.
Complements. What is bought alongside. The connection your staff know without being asked.
Alternatives. What somebody considers instead, including the cheaper option and the better one. A shop that links to its own alternatives keeps the visitor rather than sending them out to compare.
Narrower and broader. Where somebody has landed on something too general or too specific, needing the neighbouring level.
Why this also helps ranking. Two effects at once.
Links from relevant pages support the destination. A shop that links deliberately concentrates strength on the categories that matter rather than spreading it evenly across everything. Per our complete guide, a flat shop leaks what it already has.
Where to get the connections. From people rather than from data.
The staff who answer the phone know what goes with what. That knowledge is rarely anywhere on the website.
Choosing Which Categories To Work On
No shop can improve every category at once. Three factors decide the order. Using one alone produces a poor list.
Demand. How many people search for this type of thing.
The obvious axis and the one most shops use alone, which sends effort to the most contested terms in the range.
Margin. What the category is worth when it sells.
A category with modest demand and strong margin frequently beats a high demand category selling at almost nothing, because the work is paid for by profit rather than by turnover.
How contested it is. The axis that decides whether the effort produces anything.
A term dominated by marketplaces and national retailers may be unwinnable at any reasonable spend. Our guide on the marketplaces covers where a specialist genuinely wins.
How to combine them. Look for the categories that score reasonably on all three rather than highly on one.
The best first targets are usually unglamorous: moderate demand, decent margin, not much competition. They are also the ones nobody argues about, which is why they get overlooked in favour of the flagship category everybody wants to win.
What to do first regardless. The categories you already rank for without trying.
A page receiving impressions for a term with no content on it is the cheapest improvement on the shop, because everything except the content is already working.
Measuring A Category Page
Position is the least useful thing to watch on a category page, because a page can rank well and contribute nothing. Four measures matter more.
Whether it sends people to products. The one that decides whether the page works.
A category page is a junction rather than a destination. If visitors arrive and leave without reaching a product, the page is ranking and failing at the same time. More traffic will not fix it.
Revenue through the category path. What was eventually bought by people who entered through this page.
Not what was bought on the page, since nothing is. This connects the category to money, which nothing else on this list does.
Non-brand impressions for the category. The leading indicator.
This moves before position does and well before revenue does, which makes it the right thing to look at in the early months when nothing else has changed.
How many terms it attracts. Rather than how it ranks for one.
A category page doing its job picks up a spread of related searches. A page ranking for exactly one term is usually a page that was optimised for that term rather than written about the subject.
What a good page looks like on these. Rising impressions across a widening set of terms, visitors reaching products, revenue attributable to the path.
Our measurement guide covers reporting at category level, which shows what a site total conceals.
Your most valuable pages
are your emptiest.
Somebody searching a type of thing has not chosen yet, so the page gets to influence what they choose. Somebody searching a model number already has. Most shops give the first group a heading and a grid.
What is included every month:
£350 per month, one target area. No setup fee, nothing billed separately.
Twenty-two guides.
One subject.
This guide covers category pages. The rest of the series covers the sequence, structure, product pages, technical health, measurement, the marketplaces and everything a store owner has to decide.
