Hey guys, welcome to another video in the Shopify x SEO online series. Now this particular training session is one of the most critical parts of optimizing a Shopify store. It's a strategy that we've really used quite a lot in our clients stores and our own stores. And it's highly underutilized in Shopify stores, big ecommerce stores around the world understand this strategy. Some of them use it, some of them don't. But it can be incredibly powerful when you start to make sure your collection page or if it's another ecommerce platform, your category pages are set up correctly.

And I'll explain why that is in a second. But just Firstly, Shopify, obviously we will if you're doing this course you have a Shopify store and and hopefully you you enjoy and like working with Shopify, now it's Shopify, you set up for people who want to Start a store and maybe don't have a lot of technical knowledge, it's really easy to use really user friendly, and it converts really well. But there's been some elements that have missed and you probably picked up along with the other videos we've done. There's been some element missed on the back end, that makes it a little bit difficult from an SEO point of view. And collection page optimization is certainly one of those. So if you came into the course and you were provided, or given out a proprietary app called optimizing for collection page optimization, you may have installed that already.

If you haven't picked up optimization yet. I'll leave a link in the show notes and you can go and grab that install on your Shopify store. It'll also come with its own little bit of training, but we'll go through also how to use it in a little more detail in this video. So that that was that's one of the the strategy GS or the app that makes it, you know, powers that be Shopify pages that you don't get with a native or default Shopify store. So we'll just go through now and we'll look at how we do that. So just look now at the structure of a standard Shopify store, and what generally happens with an e commerce store.

So obviously, you have your homepage, and then collections and categories are set up. So you create a collection based on a certain overall category. So in this case, collection, one collection, that'd be collection two, that'd be collection three, excuse the typo there. So then you would underneath that you would allocate products that are relevant to that particular category. Believe it or not, we see a lot of Shopify stores that just straight up build a very flat structure. So from the homepage, I just have products coming off the homepage and I don't have any collections at all, or they might have looked at the shop fi set up a default catalog.

Where you have every product in that collection, but there's no distinction of between certain categories. And this is essentially what's called a silo structure. Not not a technical silo structure, but a broad silo structure where products sit underneath the particular category. And the reason this is powerful when it's set up this way, is that the collection paid provides relevance to the products. So for example, with our toy store, the collection, the first collection you may have is action figures. And then underneath, you would have all your action figures of products in that collection, then on the collection to my plush toys, and then you have all your plush toys within this collection, etc, etc.

And you can go as deep as you want with categories and then subcategories we don't go into that so much here in this course, but it's certainly something we'll do later on, where you can build out Deep categories as you go, but the general Shopify store doesn't need to go that deep in a lot of cases, you can still get great results just by setting up this simple structure. Now, this seems pretty common sense. But like I said, it's amazing how many store owners Miss setting up this store like this. Now what also how it also becomes really powerful is when you can provide relevance and content to your collection pages, you push that relevance through to your products. So and then also, when you look at your off page optimization with building links and traffic, you you direct them to your collection pages, and then that will follow through to your product.

So what tends to happen is if you start initially focusing on your collection pages for your optimization, you'll push through that power to the products and the products will start to rank on that basis as well. Rather than having to focus on every single product individually which becomes incredibly overwhelming when you're looking at a ecommerce store without written hundreds or thousands of products. So just by focusing on on collection pages with optimization initially, it really can boost the power of your store later on. If you've got products that you want to focus on individually or really, you know, high margin products you want to focus on, you can do that. But starting with collection pages is always beneficial. So now we look at our poorly optimized store.

So this is how the default setup of a collection pages within Shopify and most themes. So you have a title for your collection page. So just what if we actually would just go back to the homepage and you can see that oops. We have our collections in the menu here and even the menu is not set up correctly. But if we got to plants versus zombies, here is our plants vs. Zombie collection. So the way Shopify does by default, you have a page title.

And then you can add a description. Now this description can actually be as long as you want, you can add as much content as you want here. But in a standard store, what will happen or theme is obviously, all this content will just fill up this page. And it makes for a very poor user experience when a visitor comes to your store, and ecommerce stores are highly visual centric, so you need to maintain that, that element to help conversions. And so what most store owners do, they'll have a even if they do have some quantity, many don't, which is not a good thing. They'll have maybe a line of content or even a small paragraph and then you have your product grids.

Okay? And then as the as We saw in the the duplicate content video, if you watched that already, then you have the pagination. So you can have, say 10 products on page one, and then pagination goes to page two, page three, page four. And that's how the collections are set up. But the way we like to set up our collection pages and the way that a lot of people understand ecommerce stores, in general, like to set up big category or collection pages, is by having a little bit of content here explaining simply what the collection of categories, then you can have some products, that's fine, but then you can add in content underneath. So if you can see here, we can scroll down.

And we've got a heap of content here. And we'll go through this in detail in a second. But as I mentioned, Shopify doesn't do this naturally. So you have to you have to get coded in by a developer or coder if you like. So this is where our app optimization comes in. So by installing these in, it will automatically add the ability to add this content underneath here.

So what this does, like I mentioned before, you can add the content and you create a huge amount of relevance for that particular category. And when we look at the internal linking video later on, you can also use your internal links here to link out to certain pages and products of the store. You can add in your H tags, which we know are really important. And we're going to add in the table of contents here, images, etc, etc. So while it seems a really, really simple strategy, it's incredibly powerful and it's certainly powerful compared to a lot of Shopify stores that don't have this is function store as a don't understand it. And just by doing this and adding in quantity on your collection pages, you'll start to see improvements in boosts in your overall organic rankings just by adding in content Little I'm what we're going to look at with schema and some other bits and pieces that we can pair up this page even further.

By the way, this is a plant versus zombies toy collection. And you can see we've just got some other products in here to fill it out. And these are not relevant to the collection. So but just to show that we can have how many, you know, there's eight different products here. And we can just do just an example we can just pretend these are actually all to do with plants versus zombies. Okay, so we'll go through the anatomy and the structure of the collection page now.

So the first thing we need to do is just like we do, we did earlier, is use our tools to go and do some market research. So first one you can use is Iris. I'm not going to go through in detail how to use this. You already know how if you watch the other videos, and we're just Gonna see where our volume is of our keywords, look for extra variations of keywords. And for plants versus zombies. One of the terms that I found was PVC.

This is a term I wouldn't have thought people were searching for and have a great deal of search volume. But obviously, within this market, it's a huge volume search term. So that's a term we're going to use when we're optimizing or a key word part of a keyword. We're gonna optimize when we're optimizing our collection pages. Then you can also go and look at and to the public, which we've been through before. So you put in your keyword and then it can pull back all the questions and prepositions and comparisons that we went through in the other video.

So again, we we accumulate keywords where we we know the market And then also looking at the term PVC said, we can see there's a huge amount of content IDs here that you can write about. So the more relevance you can provide for the particular category, even if it's not completely related to the products you're selling, you're going to pick up a lot of search with longtail keywords, information on the general category, which we like to do when we're building out a collection pages. And you can also use Google answer box in sem rush like we did in the previous video. So now we'll just go through and look at the optimizing the particular page itself. And now we've got an idea of our content and our keywords. And it'll make a little more sense as we work through it.

Okay, so here is our collection page dashboard. So, generally, what we like to do is create a short collection page title That page title will actually be like she create the Euro as well, a URL also. So we'll just open that up. And we can see that it's collections slash, Plants vs. Zombies, so it's quite broad. And then we can add in, within the products that come after it. There'll be relevant to plants versus zombies.

So if we click through from A to A plants versus zombies product from this collection, you'll see that it adds, it's got plants versus zombies slash products, and then plants versus zombies. They should action figure. Now, in ideal terms, this is a this is not ideal, the way this URL is actually structured. And this is another little issue with Shopify from a technical perspective, but you do have the Euro or sorry, the collection name in URL and in the product. But when you think about it, and you get back to it In the previous videos, and we discuss what that canonical URL is, if we look at the source code of this particular collection product page, we can see that the canonical is actually the product page. So Google knows to only take into a cat this URL as the the actual only piece of content for this particular product, so we don't end up with duplicate content.

Okay, so we'll just go back to our help. In terms of the title, as I mentioned, the top level collection page, we will keep the URL short, and we just call a broad so this would be Plants vs. Zombies, then a description. We generally what we like to do is have a few lines or a short paragraph. So just a bit of a summary of what the actual what the actual collection is doing. About the internal links, we'll go through that in the internal linking video, and it'll make more sense. But just a short summary of what the collection is.

Then you've got your image, if you go back to the image video, need your images set up correctly with filename and alt tags, and you would use a an image that makes sense to the collection. Then you've obviously got your products that are allocated to this collection. And then our search engine where SEO title and description which we'll go through in a second. Okay, so now we'll go through optimizing how it works. So essentially how we're going to set it up to add content underneath our product grid. So the first thing you do is install a plug in if you haven't installed it yet, and you don't know how that's in the other video.

But under apps in your back end dashboard. It'll show all your apps here. Here is opt in here. So we're going to click on that. And it'll open up opt in itself. Now what it does, any collection pages you already have created, they will be automatically added to the dashboard here.

So you can see these are added. And then any new collections you add, that will be added to the bottom as well. So doesn't matter how many collections you have, they'll continually you'll add an editing section here. So that's how simple it is to and this is all it is, is nothing else at the moment, we've got some other features we're going to add in and keep building out opt in to be an incredibly powerful SEO tool. But at the moment, it's just your editing dashboard to add content below your product with on your collection pages. So this is here you can see for plants vs zombies, we've got that content in here, and that's where it is.

So you literally add your content in using the editor. You can see, you can use source code here to view your source code and add in different elements as you need. And you literally add in your content and then click Save. So the content you're going to add within our present. Okay, so looking at the content, you're going to add in a present, what we generally like to do is using and to the public or other terms you found with your keyword research. We like to ask some questions.

So find out what people are asking about a particular category or product and add those questions in and then answer them. So you can see here, we haven't filled this out, obviously, but who created pvz What are plants versus zombies, and you can add, you know, five or six questions here and then add to them and this is when we Go through the schema video later on. It's a really good way to, to utilize keywords and terms that a lot of other stores are. And you'll pick up a lot of search just by doing this. more content, little more work, but certainly highly, highly beneficial. So that's how we like to set up the questions.

And then then what will normally do is, if there's maybe five or six products within a collection that that are, what we really want to target will actually talk about these particular products. Now this content here is not the same as on the product page that we'll talk about a particular product that we're trying to push or trying to target. So we've got them here with heading tags as well. And it's really important that these heading tags are not the same as the titles for your for the products, but you'll you'll mix it up a little bit. So just a bit of a general overview of a particular product or a particular product type. We like to then add in Get the rest of the content here.

Then also really good idea is to add a YouTube video youtube is a Google property. So any relevant YouTube video, just make sure you have the rights to use that. If it's the you have the ability to grab the embed code from YouTube, then you can actually just go and grab it and the owner of that video is giving you rights to do that by Google's guidelines. So now that the structure of the particular collection page that goes into the collection grid, so what we generally like to do is because the page title is actually an h1, the will create an h2, which is out has partial core keywords in it. And it can be a question or it can be just a title, but not obviously identical to your h1 which is your page title. Just your next priority in terms of your key word and key Word phrases.

So that's an h2, then a little bit of content, paragraph or so, and then a table of contents. Now, table of contents are actually explained, I've explained how to create that properly, we've jumped to links in the blog video, I'll just go and grab a blog now. And we'll we'll have a look at that. So with the here on one of the blog posts, here, it has a table of contents. And the way this is set up is and it's explained in detail in the blogging video. But if you click on one of these table of content links, it'll jump to that particular section within the blog post.

And there's implications with that with the URL it creates, and the keywords that are used. Again, it's explained in detail in the blogging video. So you can go and look at the blogging blogging video to understand how to set this up. But what we want to do is use the same strategy with Just go back. to opt in, you want to use the same strategy with your table of contents here to jump to these headings. So that's the next section we like to set up, then maybe you can add an image, you can add an image anywhere you like within the content.

Then now we have out the rest of our headings and content. So we've got one h1, one h2, and then the next heading, headings are going to be h three. So h3, h3, h3, and on you go, you can add an h4 h5 if you like. And if you want to change the size of the heading titles, etc. You can do that within the HTML. Just to be aware Title One is h1, title two is h2, title threes, h3 etc.

So we'll go and have a look at the collection page. Now. We'll have a look at the source code just to make sure it's correct. So, image out particular headings, etc. And the video. So now go ahead with the source code oops h1 So there is our h1, the page title.

So there's only one h1 h2 two. There's our first question and then you can see the rest of the headings are H three. So that's how we like to set it up. Now in terms of word count, anything sort of up to 1000 words or more I think he's a good place to start. And the more content the better. Obviously, if you add it, you're adding in 3000 or 5000 words, that's going to be beneficial.

But it does have a little bit of an impact on the user friendliness of the of that particular page when people have to scroll down all the way to the bottom. But the more content, the better, the more keywords and phrases and relevance you can add into the category, the greater it's going to rank. Now, the great thing about using this strategy also, as mentioned before, it doesn't only push relevance and power to your products to rank, you'll actually find that category pages or the collection pages actually rank really well on their own. So and that's a really powerful strategy to stop pushing and rank for a hell of a lot of keywords when you start to to optimize them off page as well. Okay, and then the last section we need to set up is an SEO title and description. So using The keyword research we've done, we've worked out that PBS ed is a really good search term.

So we're going to have that in the title. They're also going to have plants versus zombies. Now keep in mind that the URL is actually Plants vs. Zombies. So keeping in mind, we're just mixing it up a little bit and using variations we're going to put in verses instead. So that's not accident by accident. That's strategy in brackets, because it means the same as pvz essentially.

And then we also we want to make sure that's optimized for both action figures and plush toys because they are the two particular types of toys we'll be trying to target. Now later on if we end up with 100 different TVs and plush toys, which I think they're on the market anyway. And 100 different action figures. We could then further break down the collection to have subcategories, which is again tricky in Shopify, but it can be done, but for the amount of product We've got we're just going to target both those particular subcategory categories within the one collection. So that's how I'd set the title up to make sure pick up as much as a market as we can, but not being identical to the URL. And generally, what I like to do first is just leave the the meta description blank and let Shopify and Google pick up the content.

Pick up this section here from the particular content on the page. What Shopify generally does is pick up the scroll up, picks up the first part of the description here. So if you've written this correctly, and it's relevant, and also not not overly optimized, it's going to work pretty well anyway. You can put the description in if you want, but you just want to be careful you don't over optimize it too much. But having said that, what I do find is Even though Shopify will pull the description, the meta description from the first part of the description up here, Google a lot of the time, we'll pull relevant content for the meta description from the bulk of the content. So, for example, if someone is asking the question, scroll on down to where content is.

Who created pvz? Actually, that's a good example. What are plants versus zombies? If that if if someone's searching for letting Google it'll Google will actually then look at this part of the content under the hashtag and possibly show that in the meta descriptions. So even though with your meta description, you can encourage Google to actually use that meta description. A lot of the time, Google itself will decide what it's going to show.

So and that can that can be a little more dynamic and help search terms when you you know, put your meta description in and it's Little bit too highly targeted sometimes that can actually prevent Google from showing your results for those broader terms or other other search terms that people put into Google. I think that makes sense. So that's it for the basic setup of the collection page or collection pages. In the other videos, we're going to go through the internal linking, and also the schema, and two really powerful strategies that go with it. But I can't emphasize enough the importance of putting in the work and effort into building a strong and relevant collection page. And every time we do it, we see big jumps and big boost in rankings and organic traffic, it's worth going going through the effort of setting them up correctly.

A lot of other Shopify stores are not doing it. So you get ahead of the curve, and you'll start to see big improvements. And of the optimization is free, if you've joined the course, and so there's no there's no reason why you just don't install that. makes it really easy. Okay, thanks for seeing the next video.