6 quick tips on optimizing category pages

If someone had told me in 2014 that category pages usually have more conversion ratio than product pages, I would have laughed at their faces.

Then came Amazon, which changed everything.

Across nearly 30 top U.S., e-commerce sites ranking for more than 25 billion keywords, category pages outperformed product detail pages, driving more keyword rankings and estimated traffic, as well as showing higher potential to capture additional traffic with optimization.
- Search Engine Land

Here are 6 quick tips on optimizing category pages.

1. Meta Title: Research and write a meta title where google is already ranking category pages instead of blogs and product pages.
2. Page Title(H1): Every category page should also have keywords in its page title. So let’s say if you are selling “leather boots,” then it can be “brown leather boots” or “jewelry” can be “handmade jewelry,” and so on.
3. Description: Yes, a 100-word keyword-optimized description will ensure that the category page is ranking well on google. It can be related keywords to your parent keyword and even LSI keywords.
4. Internal Link: Internal link does what backlinks use to do back in the day—internal link your category pages from blogs. Even if you can get a topical, relevant backlink to the category page, it will jump your rankings up.
5. Footer: Footer links are still strong, and putting category pages in a footer can be a good SEO practice.
6. Canonical URL: Make sure your website or your theme isn’t creating a copy of the URLs due to filters on your category pages.

Hope this helps.