President & CEO of Corberry Digital Marketing Agency, a full-service digital marketing agency offering web design, SEO, PPC, social & more.
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Category pages are an integral part of any e-commerce website. As topic pages for a group of products, category pages help your customers navigate your website to easily find the products they want. Category pages also make it easier for search engines to map out and make sense of your website.
Like aisles in a grocery store, people can easily find what they’re looking for because your products are separated into categories. Each aisle is grouped into different subcategories that make it easy for customers to find what they need. E-commerce website category pages focus on creating a seamless experience for website visitors.
Best Content For Category Pages
When you’re creating content for your e-commerce pages, your audience already has a vague idea of what they want to buy. But it’s your job to help them fully figure out what they want. This is why including a description of what visitors can find in each category is sometimes more helpful than simple terms like “shoes” or “electronics.”
It’s important to include keywords in your content, but don’t add too many! Creating content that is stuffed with keywords is only going to do you more harm than good. Keyword stuffing is considered a black hat tactic and is not favored by Google because it focuses more on beating the algorithm than creating a great user experience in compliance with Google’s Webmaster guidelines.
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Your content should help customers understand more quickly what you are offering. This can include information that adds value to the products under the category. For example, are they made from organic ingredients? Are they sustainably sourced? Do you provide free shipping? These small but crucial details are key to connecting quickly with your customers. It also helps establish important elements that your business offers.
Internal linking is also very important. Not only does this make it easier for visitors to navigate their way around your website, but internal linking also helps search engines crawl your entire site, which can boost the overall ranking of your page. Make sure that all of your links are working properly! It’s a big red flag for search engines (and customers) if they find links that are broken.
How Long Should Your Category Content Be?
There is no definite length; some websites are successful with just 200 words on their category pages. On the other hand, some find success in having 1,000-plus words. But in general, I’d recommend starting with around 200-300 words for category pages. You may find after a time that more is better for your particular website, but this is a good place to start.
Another great way to determine how long your content should be is to look at your competitors. Check out their websites and see what works well for them. This can give you a better idea of how long your content should be for your specific industry or niche.
Where Should You Put Your Content?
Category pages must prioritize web design that is simple and easy to follow. This is because not all customers will spend much time on it. They go through this page mostly because they’re not sure what to buy yet.
This begs the question: Where should you put your content? Should you prioritize awesome product photos and descriptions instead? Yes, you should. That’s why we follow both the above-the-fold and below-the-fold concepts.
These concepts go way back to the days of newspapers. Since these were folded in half, the heading had to be striking and it should catch the attention of the readers—hence, “above the fold.” Of course, “below the fold” is located on the lower half, which is seen later.
Breaking up your content to fit the above-the-fold and below-the-fold honors time-tested concepts of data presentation. The customer checks the top to see if they’re interested, but they can also check the bottom for more niche or diverse elements.
There are websites that prefer to put all of their content at the bottom and dedicate the top part solely to their subcategories and product photos. This is understandable because they want to prioritize showcasing their subcategories. The problem here is that Google doesn’t really see this in a positive light, at least according to Google’s John Mueller, who said in an interview that it could be confusing for the algorithm to understand how to classify the intent of a page with product categories on top followed by a long article at the bottom of the page.
Why Should You Include Content For Category Pages?
Category pages are treasure troves of traffic. A lot of visitors find their way to category pages first before they go to specific webpages of products that they’re interested in. It would be a waste if you didn’t optimize these pages to get more traffic.
But then, big e-commerce websites don’t really have content on their category pages, so why should you have some in yours? Well, that’s the thing, they’re already big e-commerce websites so a lot of people automatically go to their websites when they need something.
You, on the other hand, may not be as big or popular as your competitors, so use the trick of category page content to get yourself noticed.
It’s important to do everything you can to surpass or even just have an equal footing as your competitors.
Key Takeaway
Your category page is an important part of your e-commerce website. A lot of people see this page before they head off to subcategories or a specific product webpage. Since your category page is already receiving traffic, why not make sure it’s optimized to get even more traffic?
Meaningful content in your e-commerce category page can help bring in more visitors. It quickly tells them about the collection of items in a specific category. Additionally, it helps Google and other search engines figure out the contents of your page. Ultimately, when done well, it can result in higher customer flow volume and overall better ranking in SERPs.
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Author: Michael Fox, Forbes Councils Member
