Ecommerce website not ranking on Google for the searches that actually sell? Look at your category pages before you touch another product description. For “buy X” type searches Google usually wants a selection to choose from, so it shows category pages. And most stores leave theirs as a bare grid with a heading on top.
Here’s a message we get, in one form or another, every few months. “We’ve rewritten every product description. Six hundred words each. Still nowhere for ‘buy leather sofa Dubai’. The competitor with worse products is number two.”
So you open the competitor’s page. Turns out it isn’t a product page at all. It’s their sofa category. Grid of sofas, a short intro, a few filters that make sense, some FAQs underneath. That’s it.
Meanwhile the store owner’s own sofa category has an H1 that says “Sofas” and 48 product tiles. Nothing else. All the effort went into product pages, which Google wasn’t even trying to rank for that search.
Happens constantly. Here’s how to sort it, ideally before Black Friday on 27 November.
Why Does Google Rank My Competitor’s Category Page Instead of My Products?
Because of what the searcher wants. Someone typing “buy leather sofa Dubai” or “best running shoes for women” hasn’t picked a product yet. They want options. A category page gives them options, a single product page doesn’t, so Google goes with the category page nearly every time.
Try it yourself. Google any “buy” search in your niche and count how many of the top results are single products. Usually very few. Mostly category and collection pages, plus a marketplace or two.
That changes where your effort should go. Product pages still matter for very specific searches, like an exact model number or “Ikea Kivik 3 seater grey”. But the broad, money-making searches? Those are won or lost on the category page. Annoyingly, it’s also the page most stores think about least.
How Much Text Should a Category Page Have?
Less than you’d think. A short intro above the products, a line or two of buying help, and a few FAQs below the grid is plenty for most stores. You’re helping someone choose, not writing an essay. Eight hundred words of filler dumped under the products helps nobody, Google included.
Digitaloft looked at 300 category pages ranking first on Google UK for commercial searches. The average had about 310 words of unique content. Two thirds had under 400. And 10 percent had nothing at all beyond the heading, a lot of them big brands who can get away with it because of their authority. You probably can’t.
What actually helps? Something like this for a sofas page. Two lines up top on what’s in the range. A note on picking a size for your living room. A quick explanation of what “top-grain” versus “bonded” leather actually means, because nobody knows. Then FAQs below, delivery times, returns, whether the cushions come off. That’s useful. Google can tell.
Are Filter and Sort URLs Hurting My SEO?
They can, quite a lot. Click “blue”, then “medium”, then “under ₹20,000”, then “sort by newest”, and on a lot of platforms you’ve just made a brand new URL. Multiply that across a catalogue and Google ends up wading through thousands of almost-identical pages while your important ones wait their turn. Most of those filtered pages shouldn’t be in Google at all, honestly.
Do the maths on a medium store. Ten colours, six sizes, five price bands, four sort orders. That’s over a thousand URLs for one category. Google’s own faceted navigation guidance warns this can lead to overcrawling and slower discovery of the pages you care about.
So decide on purpose. “Black leather sofas” or “3 seater sofas” might get real searches, and those deserve their own proper, indexable pages with a decent title and intro. “Sofas, sorted by price low to high, page 4”? No human has ever typed that into Google. How you hide those pages depends a bit on your platform. Canonicals on some, noindex on others, a robots.txt rule if things are really out of hand. Your developer will have opinions.
On almost every ecommerce audit, the product pages are reasonably optimised and the category pages are an afterthought. That is backwards. Category pages are the pages that can rank for commercial queries for years, while products come and go. A pattern we see a lot on furniture and fashion stores is 600 words on every product page and a category page with nothing but a heading and a grid, and then everyone wonders why the category never ranks.
— Vishal Singh, Performance Marketing Specialist
Is Your Ecommerce Website Not Ranking On Google Because of Weak Internal Links?
Quite possibly. People forget Google reads your site’s own links as votes. Lots of your pages pointing at a page says “this one matters”. So if your blog, homepage and menus all link to individual products and hardly anything links to the sofas category, well, you’ve basically told Google the category isn’t a big deal.
The cheapest fix is breadcrumbs. Home, then Living Room, then Sofas, sitting at the top of every product page, each one clickable. Mark them up with Google’s breadcrumb structured data and they can show up in search results too. When you write a blog post like “how to choose a sofa for a small flat”, link to the sofas category, not just to one sofa. And check your main menu actually reaches your important categories without three clicks of digging.
ItemList and FAQ markup can help on category pages too, where they genuinely fit. Don’t slap FAQ schema on a page with no visible FAQs, though. Google notices.
This is the kind of structural work good ecommerce marketing services should catch in the first audit, well before anyone starts rewriting product copy.
Should I Delete Out-of-stock Product Pages?
Not straight away. If it’s coming back, leave the page live, mark it out of stock and suggest similar products. If it’s gone for good, redirect it to the closest replacement or the category page. Deleting pages blindly throws away whatever links and rankings they’d built up.
The worst version we see? A store clears out last season’s stock, deletes 200 product pages in an afternoon, and suddenly has 200 broken links and a dip in category rankings, because those products were linking up to the category and now they’re gone.
A middle path works fine. Temporarily out of stock, keep it and show alternatives. Discontinued with a clear replacement, redirect to the replacement. Discontinued with nothing close, redirect to the category. Only let a page 404 if it had no traffic and no links worth keeping.
How Long Before Category Page Changes Show in Rankings?
Longer than anyone wants. Weeks, generally. First Google’s bot has to wander back to the page, which on a big store isn’t instant. Then the new version gets processed, and rankings tend to wobble a bit before they settle. So if Black Friday matters to you, October is realistically the last month to get category changes live.
That’s the uncomfortable bit about timing. Changes made in mid-November might not be picked up properly till after the sale’s over. Which is fine for next year, not so fine for this one.
Our rough order if you’re short on time. Pick your five most important categories by revenue. Fix the intro and FAQs on those first. Sort out the obvious filter mess on the same five. Then request indexing in Search Console and leave them alone. And if you’re comparing agencies offering the best ecommerce marketing services, ask how they’d prioritise categories versus products. If the answer is “we’ll start with product descriptions”, that tells you something.
Questions We Get Asked About Ecommerce Category Page SEO
Q1. Is ecommerce category page SEO different on Shopify?
Ans. Not really, apart from the naming. Shopify says “collections” where everyone else says categories. One quirk to watch is that a product can end up reachable through a couple of different URLs, so it’s worth asking whoever built your store to check the canonicals are set properly.
Q2. Should category text go above or below the products?
Ans. A short intro above, more detail and FAQs below. Don’t push the products below the fold with a long block of text, shoppers hate it.
Q3. Does ecommerce category page SEO help on Google Shopping too?
Ans. Not directly, since Shopping runs on your product feed. But a strong category page often helps your organic listings show next to the Shopping results, which is more space on the page for you.
Written by Vishal Singh, Performance Marketing Specialist
I work with ecommerce brands on SEO and paid search, and “our products are great but we don’t rank” comes up on nearly every first call. Most of the time the answer’s sitting on a category page nobody’s touched in two years.
If you’d like help getting your category pages ready before peak season, take a look at our ecommerce marketing services.
