SEO Category Descriptions: Here’s Why They’re Essential
When it comes to SEO for e-commerce sites, optimizing category pages (a.k.a product listing pages) is key for success. Categories are some of the most authoritative pages on a site because they are linked from the navigation and link out to important assets like products. With their high level of authority, they can be much more effective at driving organic traffic than other pages like products.
What is an SEO category description?
An SEO category description is a snippet of text that is featured on e-commerce category pages. This text will often provide details about the products that are helpful for shoppers and will include keywords that are important for SEO. Sites will feature them at the top or bottom of their categories, depending on how visible they want to make them for their shoppers.
Why are category descriptions important for SEO?
One of the best ways to optimize category pages for SEO is to include a quality category description. This snippet of text can provide search engines important context as to what keywords are relevant to the page. Without it, category pages are thin in content. They may include a header along with the page’s products but little added information.
According to a study of over 11 million search results, the average top ranking results contain about 1,447 words (source). This is not to say that more words lead to improved SEO. However, additional content can provide search engines better context about what keywords are relevant to your page.
For example, below is an example of the search results for the keyword “joggers” (135k monthly search volume). All of the top 3 results are e-commerce product listing pages that have category descriptions.
Asos ranks #1 for “joggers” even though the name of their product listing page is Men’s Sweatpants. By including context about their sweatpants in the category description, Asos is able to help search engines understand that they are also relevant to joggers.
Well-optimized category descriptions can go a long way in getting product listing pages to rank well. Without a category description, Asos would have otherwise not been able to rank for the keyword “joggers”. Including this description helped them improve visibility more keywords and ultimately drive more traffic from organic search.
How to create a good SEO category description:
A principal rule of SEO according to Google is to create content for users, not search engines. What this means is you should not try tricking search engines into ranking your page by simply inputting keywords in your category description. Creating a good category description is about providing important, relevant information about your products that is helpful for both users and search engines.
Write about what makes your products great
The category description acts as an elevator pitch for your products. It should give your shoppers a clear idea of why your products are good for them and how it serves their needs. To do this, you can provide information about the products’ different:
- Uses
- Benefits
- Types (styles, brands, colors, etc)
This is exactly the information Asos provides in their category description. They claim their sweatpants are great for “a post-work sofa sesh”, “training”, or “casual moments”. Asos also lists off the different brands they offer like Adidas and Nike as well as popular color options.
This information would resonate well with someone looking for products with these characteristics. It can spark a moment of realization and have the shopper think “This is exactly what I need!”
Pay attention to your brand voice
Since category descriptions are user-facing, they should be aligned with your brand voice. An inconsistent brand voice can leave shoppers lacking trust in your brand. Make sure the voice expressed in your category description aligns with the rest of your site. The text on product pages and the homepage, for example, should all reflect a similar voice as your category descriptions.
Establishing a good brand voice is all about understanding your audience. Ask yourself the following questions before incorporating brand voice into your text:
- Who are you writing for?
- What are their needs?
- What do they need to know about your products?
Addressing these questions in your writing will help you create content on each page without sounding unnatural or inconsistent. Asos, for example, focuses on the casual, relaxed uses of their sweatpants. They are aware the shoppers for their Sweatpants category are looking for products that fit this description.
Include relevant keywords
Page elements such as metadata and headers are very limited in space and don’t have the keyword capacity that a category description has. The category description is an opportunity to target a variety of new keywords. Here are additional keyword types you can use in a category description:
- Long-tail keywords (example: men’s adidas black joggers): Long-tail keywords are highly specific searches that tend to have more than 2 words. If there is a particular product type that you want to target on a category, it should be included in the category description. For example, Asos includes color and to help them target color and brand-specific searches.
- Keyword variants (example: joggers vs sweatpants): Keyword variants are variations of a word that mean the same thing. Including them in your category descr This is exactly what Asos did by including “joggers” (a variant of “sweatpants”) in their category description.
- Semantic keywords (example: activewear): Semantic keywords are words that have a close relationship with another word. They can help provide important context about what the page is referring to. For example, Asos mentions the word “activewear” in their category description, which has a semantic relationship with joggers.
Make category descriptions visible
When it comes to placement for a category description, it is better doe SEO to feature it on the top of the page as opposed to the bottom. Above the fold content has more weight in the eyes of search engines because it is more user-facing.
When someone searches “joggers”, for example, search engines want to land them on a page that makes it clear the page is relevant to what they searched. If there is no content that effectively does this right when they land on the page, they may bounce and look for another more relevant result. Search engines can recognize this behavior and ultimately choose not to rank a page because of this.
Featuring content above the fold will not make or break your page’s SEO, however. If you need on-page content to be at the bottom of your page for whatever reason, this is definitely preferred than having no content at all.
Use above the fold space efficiently
E-commerce sites sometimes won’t include content above the fold because it can push products too far down the page (especially in mobile).
To avoid this, you should feature the main introductory content at the top and any additional content elsewhere. The main content only needs to be about 1–3 sentences and should include important primary and secondary keywords.
Any additional content you can keep in expandable sections like Hunter Boots does with their “View More” button. This way, users can view more information if they are interested while still having easy access to products.
Closing thoughts
If you are struggling to create a category description, it can be good to look a what competitors are doing. Do a search for the keywords you want to rank for and analyze the top-performing results. Take note of what information they provide and keywords they use.
The use of category descriptions can go a long way in boosting the SEO of your e-commerce site. Without them, your pages will not be able to rank for certain keywords. Not only this, your users will be missing important information about your products.
This philosophy behind category descriptions should be applied to all pages on an e-commerce site. Product detail pages and content landing pages should also have this type of helpful information. At the end of the day, that’s what SEO is all about: providing quality, relevant information to users.
