How Much Copy A Category Page Needs (And Which Of Yours Deserve It)

A category page sitting at number one on Google UK carries about 310 words of its own copy. Two thirds carry under 400.

Briefs for seo ecommerce category pages rarely name a number, so the writing starts from a guess. Guess high and you are not being thorough, you are moving the product grid further down the screen.

I'm John Butterworth. Eleven years of ecommerce SEO later, including a talk at the SEO Mastery Summit, I have still never opened a Shopify catalogue whose collection count somebody had ever decided on.

So the first question I ask is not how to write a category page. It is which of the several hundred already published deserves one.

That is why the figures below start with a count of pages instead of a word count. What I usually find is four hundred collection URLs worked on evenly, in no order, to a standard nobody had measured.

Below is the measured answer on how much copy a category page needs, and the rule I use to decide which of your category pages are worth writing any for.

Writing The Copy On A Category Page

Write about 300 words, and spend them helping somebody choose between the products already on the page. Anything past that is competing with the grid for the screen, and the grid is what the visitor came for.

What The Measured Number Is

Product grids and navigation were stripped out before counting, so the figure covers only the copy a shopper reads. Digitaloft, a UK agency, applied that to 300 pages ranking first on Google UK for commercial intent keywords. Their headline finding is blunt.

The average #1-ranked category page contains just 310 words of unique content.

Underneath that average sits a spread that matters more than the mean. In the Digitaloft sample, 44% of the pages ranking first carried under 200 words of their own copy, which is shorter than a lot of single product descriptions, and two thirds of them stopped before 400.

The top of the range is thinner still, and the same 300-page count puts numbers on it. Only 13% of the URLs analysed have more than 600 words, and the tail past a thousand is 6% of the sample, so writing long puts a category page in the smallest group on the results page.

But that top of the range is what most briefs aim at. A thousand words of prose buys a category page nothing the winners have, and it costs the product grid the space.

Why Some Winners Carry None At All

Digitaloft also found that 10% of the analysed results had no content at all, aside from an H1 heading on the page. Of these 29 pages, 18 belonged to major brands, which is the detail that decides whether the finding applies to you.

Before you copy that, look at who did it. Brand strength and links carried those pages, and in the catalogues we audit a store without either has nothing to inherit from them.

What separates a page ranking on its own merits is whether the words help somebody decide. Zyppy names the failure mode.

People often attempt to rank categories higher by adding SEO text, filler copy with closely related terms and phrases that adds no real value.

Thin content on a category description is a usefulness problem wearing a word count.

What Those Words Have To Do

Aleyda Solis, the internationally recognised SEO consultant behind Orainti, sets the bar at the purchase decision.

Content should address user concerns at the purchase stage, confirming product superiority, clarifying doubts, and explaining purchase advantages.

Rothy's does that in a sentence. Its women's flats collection tells you the real choice on the page is between bold leopard prints or a classic black, nude or white.

Brooklinen shows the trap, and stores fall into it because the page looks full. Its sheets collection carries offer expiry wording, discount terms and a free shipping threshold.

That is plenty of text. None of it helps anybody pick a sheet.

Hiding the copy is not the fix either. u/steve1401, replying on a thread about a category description breaking a store's layout, put it like this:

Optimised content isn't just for Google. It's for the person reading, so if it's hidden or behind a click-to-show it's less likely to be read and therefore of less value.

The Settings That Decide Whether It Can Rank

None of the copy above matters on a page Googlebot cannot resolve, index or reach. Three settings decide that, and all three live in your store's configuration.

Most seo ecommerce category pages work stalls on these three settings, long before anybody writes a word, and each one is usually a switch somebody set once and nobody has revisited since.

The URL Google Says It Prefers

On URL structure, Google's own ecommerce documentation leaves little room for interpretation:

Add descriptive words in URL paths. The words in URLs may help Google better understand the page.

Google's ecommerce documentation recommends key=value query parameters over bare values. It is equally direct about what to keep out of the internal links pointing at a category page or a product page:

Avoid internally linking to temporary parameters, such as session-IDs, tracking codes, user-relative values and the current time.

Each one resolves to a page the store already publishes somewhere else. Crawl budget drains into the copies while the pages you want indexed wait their turn.

If your store generates them at scale, how crawling and indexing work on a store is the wider version of the problem.

Filtered And Sorted Versions Of The Same Page

Filters are where category URL counts get out of hand. Google's rule for them is one line:

If you use optional query parameters to identify variants, use the URL with the query parameter omitted as the canonical URL.

On Shopify that decision is already made for you. u/Rich-North was answering a merchant who wanted a filtered collection indexed:

The platform adds canonical tags to filtered URLs, which point back to the main collection, so Google won't index those filtered variations.

Treat that as the answer. Where two or three of those views carry genuine search demand, build them as their own collections.

Each one then gets its own meta title, its own copy and a canonical pointing at its own URL.

Leave a filtered view unbuilt and its canonical tag keeps pointing at the parent collection. Our guide to seo faceted navigation covers where to draw that line.

The Links That Have To Point At A Category Page

Google also describes the internal linking chain it expects to follow:

For example, add links from menus to category pages, from category pages to sub-category pages, and finally from sub-category pages to all product pages.

A page outside that chain is the commonest wasted asset I find on a catalogue. Solis notes that categories with real demand often are not receiving adequate internal linking, which costs them visibility and crawlability together.

Your own site search tells you which ones deserve a link. What people type into the search box on your store is evidence about what the navigation and the breadcrumb trail are missing.

Where a subcategory runs deep enough to paginate, seo pagination sets out how to keep those pages crawlable.

Which Of Your Category Pages Deserve The Work

How Many Collection URLs A Store Publishes

When a store tells me its category pages are not ranking, I start with the list of every category URL the store publishes.

Reading all seven collection sitemaps on 7th August 2026 turned up 8,901 plain collection URLs once locale duplicates came out. Halfway along that set sits a store with 1,015 of them.

What the median hides is a range so wide it stops being a range and becomes a choice. Another way to put it: the seven named stores below span two orders of magnitude, all counted from their live collection sitemaps on the same morning.

At the bottom of that range sits Gozney, publishing 22 collection URLs in total. At the top, Ban.do publishes 3,836 of them.

The five brands in between climb steadily, from Glossier and Kylie Cosmetics in the low hundreds through Gymshark and Allbirds to Alo Yoga. Every one of those is a collection page somebody has to maintain.

The other thing the spread tells you is that nobody is writing 310 useful words for 2,401 pages. The first decision is therefore which ones get them.

The Three Tests A Page Has To Pass

A category page earns work when it has search demand behind it, stock on the shelf, and no sibling page chasing the same query. Missing one wastes the effort.

Real search demand behind the term the page targets is the first count, because without it everything below is decoration.

Another count is stock, since a category routing shoppers to sold-out products converts nothing whatever position it holds.

The other is cannibalisation, and it is the one that hides: a sibling collection of yours chasing the same head term.

Search demand is the test people skip, because the category exists and so it feels like it ought to rank.

Pulling the terms against a catalogue first is its own discipline, and our guide to finding the searches a catalogue can win walks through it.

Stock matters because a category routing shoppers to sold-out products converts nothing. What a customer buys on the second and third visit is handled by ecommerce crm, which is a job the category page hands on.

That third test reads straight out of Google Search Console. Impressions with no clicks mean Google is matching the page to queries and your meta title is losing the click.

Neither impressions nor clicks means the page is not being matched at all. Those two symptoms need opposite fixes, and treating them the same is how a quarter of work produces nothing.

The Duplicate Handle Tell

Cannibalisation between two of your own categories is that third test failing, and there is a free way to find it in about ten minutes.

Start with the count. Across those 8,901 collection URLs, 93 were duplicate content by handle. A collection sits at something like `foo-1` while `foo` still exists, because the platform appended a suffix when the collection handle was already taken.

This turns up at careful brands too, which makes it a process problem. Over at Alo Yoga, the collection sitemaps list 2,401 plain collection URLs, of which seven are duplicate handles such as `ivory-1` and `new-season-styles-1`.

Smaller catalogues carry it too. At Glossier, only 95 collection URLs exist and four of them are duplicate handles, including `glossier-favorites-1` and `glossier-favorites-2`.

Open your own collection sitemap, sort the handles, and look for the numeric suffixes. Each one is a page competing with a page you already had.

What To Do With The Pages That Fail

Collections accumulate because nobody owns retiring them. In our audits, the pages I recommend for deletion are almost always the ones built for a campaign that ended.

Consolidating two competing category pages is not a redirect and a shrug. A 301 redirect moves the URL's equity, and it leaves the terms behind.

That leaves the survivor to take on the retired page's demand in its meta title and its copy.

Another move gets forgotten. The internal links that used to feed the retired page have to be repointed at the survivor, or its own navigation keeps voting for a URL that is gone.

The other half of the job is waiting, and it runs longer than feels reasonable. Google revised its canonicalisation guidance on 10th July 2026 to be clearer about the timing:

Even after fixing content issues, Google might hold pages in a duplicate cluster for up to two weeks.

That guidance also notes pages split out of a cluster faster when the difference between them is clear and significant. That argues for genuinely merging two near-identical categories, since a light reword leaves them clustered.

Retiring URLs at any scale has its own sequence, and our website migration seo checklist covers the redirect mapping.

For what the recovery curve looked like afterwards, read the write-up of a store we moved.

What A Category Page Is For

Two things make a category page work, and the order they come in decides how much room the copy gets. Routing comes first for this page type, and ranking second.

Its primary content is the subcategory navigation and the product grid. Copy that pushes those down the screen costs the page on both counts at once.

Zyppy's analysis of what ranks puts the copy in proportion. Successful category pages typically incorporate at least four to seven components:

a custom title, user-centric copy and links to related categories and subcategories, plus a run of popular products.

Copy is one item on that list, sitting alongside the title, the links and the grid. That is the proportion to write to.

Get that order right and the ceiling is higher than most catalogues assume. Zyppy addresses one belief head on:

The idea that Google dislikes ranking category pages is false, with hundreds or thousands of examples proving the opposite.

That settles what a good collection page is aiming at. Zyppy records Diet Doctor's low-carb recipes category page taking over 600,000 organic traffic visits a month.

Moz's Whiteboard Friday category page has earned links from 1.4 thousand referring domains. Those are numbers a store would expect from its best article, and they were earned by a page whose main job is to list things and route people to the right one.

That is the ceiling worth aiming your seo ecommerce category pages work at.

Whether A Ranking Category Page Still Gets The Click

A page can be written and configured exactly as above, sit at position one, and still return less than it did.

Jeff Oxford, founder of Visibility Labs, ran the largest count of this I have seen.

20,900,323 shopping keywords, of which 2,919,229 triggered an AI Overview, a 14.0% penetration rate.

The rate rose 5.6x from 2.1% in four months, so nobody should plan on it holding at 14%. What has not moved is the other 86% of that sample, and that is the share your category pages are competing in today.

Five shopping searches in six still return a plain results page to somebody who wants to compare products.

And on a commercial head term with no AI Overview above it, the listing Google has to rank is a category page.

Somebody choosing between eight pairs of running shoes still has to look at them. A commercial intent query resolves in a grid of things to compare, which is the structural reason this page type holds up better than most.

Per-industry figures need that same care. BrightEdge tracked nine industries to February 2026, and B2B technology queries experienced a massive expansion of queries that triggered AI search results, growing from 36% to 82%.

Ecommerce is one of the nine tracked and no figure was published for it. Your own impressions on the collection URLs you shortlisted will tell you more than any industry average, because they sit on the terms you target.

Getting This Done Across A Whole Store

Reading a collection sitemap, scoring a thousand URLs against three tests and consolidating the failures takes a fortnight of somebody's attention. Then seo ecommerce category pages work needs doing again next quarter.

Mint SEO runs on eight disciplines and one job, more revenue from organic search. On-page optimisation is the discipline covering collection and product page work.

On a collection catalogue it covers the meta title and meta description on each page, the copy that helps somebody choose, and the decision about which categories should exist at all.

I run these engagements myself, and the first pass is always the inventory. Across the accounts we manage that approach sits behind £1.23M in revenue from SEO for one store, a 256% lift.

If you already know which pages need the time, our on-page SEO service covers the collection catalogue end to end.

If you want the shortlist for your own catalogue before committing to anything, that is what the first call covers. Book a free 30-minute consultation and we will go through your collection URLs together.