Ask Yoast: Content on product category pages

Optimizing your product pages and product category pages can cause a bit of a dilemma. You want your products to shine, so they’re the first thing people notice, and in this regard, a picture usually says more than a 1000 words. On the other hand, you need to add sufficient textual content to help you rank. But adding a lot of text could direct attention away from your products, and you want to avoid that.

As I discussed in another Ask Yoast video, it often boils down to this question: do you want that product page to rank for a keyword? For most individual product pages, it’s often not necessary. But for a product category page, that’s probably the case. So, you need to add a sufficient amount of text. But you still want products on that page to catch the eye. In this Ask Yoast, I’ll discuss some options for dealing with that!

Stefan Wohlert emailed us this question:

Should I start with a long introduction on my shop’s category page? If I write 400 – 500 words, the actual products will be pushed down a lot.
Watch the video or read the transcript further down the page for my answer!

Adding content on product category pages

“This is a question we get a lot. You want content on those pages to be able to rank. At the same time, your products are more important than your content. Now I would suggest having a couple of hundred words up top and then maybe allow people to continue to read by going to the bottom of the page and having a button there that takes them there.

You can play with this. You can also do different tabs. This was a big no-no in the past, but with the advent of mobile, Google has actually started indexing both tabs, even the non visible ones, because on mobile this actually makes sense. So you can play with this, see what works, see what makes your ranking change and then make it as good as possible. I would keep up the 400, 500 words per page, though. That’s a very good thing. Good luck.”

Read more: eCommerce SEO checklist »

 

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