Most category pages, particularly ecommerce category pages, are completely overlooked when it comes to SEO. Our number one recommendation for category page SEO is to avoid what we call “the price list problem”.
This is mostly relevant to ecommerce where category pages have no content and just become a fancy online price list. This adds zero value, doesn’t tell me who you are, why I should buy from you or anything about how to buy your stuff.
Broadly speaking, any site with category pages is prone to this problem. This problem exists on content sites too where category pages are just a list of random blog posts without any context at all.
This is the wrong way to do category pages and not only will visitors get no value, Google will not like ranking those pages either.
You want to make sure that your category pages have at least some content are don’t have the price list problem – if ecommerce, tell me who you are and help me buy your products.
If you’re a content site, fatten out the category page, make it a page in itself.
Table of Contents
Often Category Pages Are Landing Pages, The First Page A Visitor Sees
Particularly in ecommerce, category pages becoming landing pages, the first page a visitor sees on your site.
The visitor usually has no idea who you are, what you do, why they should buy from you versus a competitor or even how to buy from you.
This is a problem because if you don’t explain who you are and why someone should buy from you, then they’re only left with price as the determining factor of their purchase and there’s almost always someone willing to sell something cheaper than you.
Bad Category Page Examples – Pages With The Price List Problem
The video above includes several examples of pages that have this problem, we’ve included a couple of these screenshots of those sites below:
Ecommerce Example:
Realestate Site Example:
Good Category Page SEO Examples
Here’s a couple of arguably extreme examples for you, maybe even overdone but you’ll get the point:
DidgeridooBreath.com – an online store selling didgeridoos
https://www.didgeridoobreath.com/didgeridoos/ – selling didgeridoos, this category page also functions as what we call “a secondary homepage”
This page is excellent as it explains who the business is with a “take a look inside” video, provides a detailed buyers guide, explains how shipping works which is important as this product is physically large and also explains some of the basics behind the didgeridoo.
Not only is this page giving Google plenty of content to help it rank, it also helps visitors along their buying journey. If a visitor is comparing say this site to Amazon, they’re much more likely to stick around here and dig into the content and learn more about the business vs Amazon
JamesClear.com – author of Atomic Habits
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits has arguably some of the best category pages for a content site. The category pages are essentially whole posts in themselves. This is a fantastic way to do content site category page SEO: https://jamesclear.com/habits
How To Do Category Page SEO – Action Plan
Here’s a simple checklist to help you improve your category page SEO and avoid “The Price List Problem”
- Ideally every category page should have content but if you have a site with 100s of category pages this can be difficult – sometimes you can “hack” this by using a short template that gets inserted across all pages
- If you want to manually do this, start with Google Search Console and prioritise the highest performing pages in there first
- Include an “early close” in the content – it’s a shortcut to boosting conversions
- Ideally the category page content should tell me who you are, what you do, why I should buy from you and a USP (unique selling proposition) and HOW to buy from you. The HOW is usually overlooked and should be the most simple and basic step-by-step breakdown of how to complete a purchase
- Any information related to buying the product or anything I need to know in order to buy is good content for the page. A simple example of this might be shipping information. A more complex example that would be suitable for the realestate example above would be adding information or links to information about how property titles and ownership works in Thailand.