When it makes the most sense to focus your Shopify SEO on your collection pages

In a prior article I wrote about prioritizing your SEO efforts on product pages instead of collection pages.

Jodi wrote in with a counter-example:

We sell a lot of brands, and the brands (which are also collections) probably have a higher chance of being searched by customers. (Just a guess.)
So for example, if I am looking for shoes for my kids maybe I like the brand Old Soles. So I google Old Soles. I think it would be less likely for someone to google the product Old Soles Dress Hoff Navy blue size 25. <..> If that is the case, would it make more sense to focus on the collection? It would seem to me that you would have more success from a traffic perspective. Or would it still be better to focus on products?

She makes a good point. If your Shopify store’s collections are based on brand names, there could be a higher volume of searches for those brand names than the product names.

Though if a product page has mentioned the brand name enough, there’s a chance that a specific product page will show up in the ranking for the more generic brand name too.

To use Jodi’s example, the Old Soles Dress Hoff product page might show up in an Old Soles search.

In this case, it would be best to split your SEO efforts between both the collection and product page. Aim for the brand keywords with your collection page and the specific product keywords with your product pages.

The way to prioritize your time would then be based on the brands and products that are contributing the most revenue. Say Nike shoes are outselling Old Soles, then focus most of your time on the Nike collection and product pages first.

One simple improvement you can make is to get your structured data in order.

Google has been working on Rich Snippets so I bet there’s going to be more search enhancements coming out in 2018 for stores with structured data.

And JSON-LD for SEO is the easiest and safest option in the Shopify app store to automatically add that data.

Already trusted by over two thousand stores, it’s among the top SEO apps overall.