If you’re an e-commerce business, Joe Hale suggests that you may be missing out on a significant ranking opportunity.

Joe says: “E-commerce stores need to be using collection pages to maximise the potential of their SEO.”

What are collection pages for e-commerce sites?

“Collection pages for e-commerce sites are essentially category pages. They are lists of products that live on the site, and there's so much potential that so many brands aren't taking advantage of.

There is no technical difference between a collection page and a category page, but I use the term ‘collection’ because that's what it's called on Shopify. Many of our clients (and many e-commerce businesses around the world) use Shopify, and it actually makes it easier to build out these pages.

You can build out a collection or a category page across any CMS, but on Shopify, it's so easy to use. It can be done poorly, because the barrier to entry is much lower, but that allows people to get involved, undertake this as a project, and build out this opportunity from a non-branded keyword perspective.

When people are doing it poorly, they just build collections for the sake of it, or they might build three different variations of the exact same type of collection. It might be that they exclude one type of product in one, or they built a collection of t-shirts three years ago, and then they built another collection of t-shirts two years ago, and then another one year ago.

Actually, part of the process is a lot of cleanup as well. Because it's so easy to fill out these collections, people just go in and make new ones rather than optimizing the ones that are already there.”