Guide on Creating Product Category Pages that Rank on Google

If you own or are planning to launch an e-commerce website, it’s important to have a solid plan for your site’s structure from the very beginning – and category pages will represent a major portion of your planning.

Category pages hold all of the products that fall into a particular group. A clothing seller, for instance, might have categories for shoes and pants. That same site might also have categories for men’s, women’s and children’s clothing as well as categories for different brands.

Your site’s category pages represent your best chance to rank for broad commercial search terms, and anything that ranks well for a commercial search term has a strong likelihood of generating sales. Therefore, maximizing the search rankings of your site’s category pages is almost guaranteed to lead to a noticeable increase in revenue.

In this guide, we’ll explain exactly what you need to do. Here’s how to create category pages that rank on Google.

Plan a Logical Site Structure

Before you begin developing an e-commerce site, you need to have a concrete plan for the site’s category structure because it’s very difficult to fix the structure after the fact. Think of the overall hierarchy as being a bit like a free in which the trunk represents the main idea for the entire site, the branches represent categories, and the leaves represent individual products within those categories. This structure applies to any type of website, whether you’re planning to operate a clothing boutique, a vape shop, a pet supply store or something else.

Returning to the idea of an e-commerce site for clothing, here’s a working example of how a main idea branches out into narrower ideas and eventually finishes with individual products. Let’s suppose, for example, that your site sells athletic clothing. Here’s what one branch of your site’s structure might look like.

• Athletic Clothing (site’s main idea)
• Baseball Clothing (broad category)
• Baseball Jerseys (more specific category)
• Nike Baseball Jersey (individual product)

Remember that a product doesn’t have to be in just one category; you can add a product to multiple categories if they’re all relevant.

When you plan your site’s hierarchy, remember that you also need to have a plan for how people will navigate through your content. You may not have enough room in your site’s top menu for every category, so you’ll need to have a menu structure that doesn’t confuse people and makes it easy for them to find what they want.

Use Keyword Search Volumes to Guide Your Category Names

When you develop an e-commerce site, remember that the names of your categories are just as important as the categorical structure. A keyword research tool is crucial here because you’ll want to align your site’s category names with the terms that people actually search for.

Returning to the example above, think about what the main idea might be for a site that sells athletic clothing. Is “athletic clothing” the most common search term that people actually use to find those types of products, or is it “sports clothing?” What about “activewear?” You need to know the most commonly used search terms for all of your site’s categories and ensure that the categories’ names match those terms. There are many keyword research tools that you can use to obtain this information.

Add Helpful On-Page Text to Your Category Pages

Once you’ve established your website’s overall structure and chosen names for your category pages, it’s time to create those categories and add content to them. A category page shouldn’t just be a list of products because a page containing only products would have almost no content for Google to index. To avoid that problem, you’ll need to add helpful text to each page.

When you create the text for your category pages, it’s important to focus on the intent that people have in mind when they search for those keywords. When people search for baseball jerseys, for instance, you know that it’s definitely because they’re looking for products to buy and not because they want to know what a baseball jersey is. One of the keys to creating a product page that ranks well on Google is ensuring that the text on the page provides helpful information to someone who might want to buy that type of product. Don’t just describe what the product is because people will already know that.

The keyword research that you conducted when you were choosing the names for your site’s categories will also be useful when you write the text for those pages. You already know that the name of a category should appear somewhere in that page’s body text, but the related keywords that people also search for should usually be in the text as well.

Give Each Category Page an Appealing Title Tag and Meta Description

Before you publish your category pages, you’ll need to give each one a title tag and a meta description. Your site’s content management system can most likely fill these in automatically, but it’s usually more effective to write them yourself. As we bring this article to a close, we’ll leave you with some helpful advice that you can use to ensure that these aspects of your category pages are just right.

Title Tags

A page’s title tag isn’t the same thing as the H1 header, which is the large text displayed at the top of the page. The title tag is displayed in the browser tab when you view a webpage, and it’s also usually displayed on Google’s search results pages. The H1 text will usually be fairly short, but the title tag will typically be longer. A title tag can be an opportunity to entice people to click through to your site, and it can also be an opportunity to use additional keywords related to the main idea of the page. In addition, a page’s title tag should always include that page’s main keyword. Here’s an example that might apply to the category page for baseball jerseys described above.

• H1 Header: Baseball Jerseys
• Title Tag: Baseball Jerseys – Authentic MLB – Free Shipping | MyWebsite.com

In this example, the terms “authentic” and “MLB” may potentially help the page rank well on Google for commonly used search terms relating to baseball jerseys, and the free shipping offer may entice people to click through and view your site.

Meta Descriptions

A page’s meta description doesn’t directly affect its ranking on Google. However, meta descriptions can potentially have an indirect effect on your rankings because a page with a high click-through rate will typically increase in rank over time. A page’s meta description may appear in Google’s search results, so you should take the time to write meta descriptions for your category pages that are as appealing as possible and will encourage people to click through to your site. Use a page’s meta description to describe what people will find when they view your site. If you can, you should also use that space to describe a unique value proposition that will encourage people to click through to your site instead of choosing a different search result.