Collection descriptions are worth the effort

The amount of content you need to create for your Shopify store can seem overwhelming at times. From product pages, to blog posts, to emails, to social media. You can easily reach a point where you ask yourself, "do I really need to?" and "can I skip this?"

One area often lacking with content are collection pages. Every collection page has the ability to have content and I feel that every collection page deserves content.

You might say "my products are full of content, surely I don't need content to help someone on a collection page too, right?" The problem is a lot of people browse stores by collections and they probably won't know the difference between all of your products.

Without content to guide them, they'll be clicking back and forth on each product until they find what they are looking for or use the back button to abandon that search. Either way wastes their time and causes frustration. Both things lose out on sales.

Also bots, like Google's crawler and LLMs, need page content to know what a page is about and if it's relevant. Landing on a collection page with no content, only product images, is almost as bad as a blank page. They see your usual links and then links to products but without content they don't have enough to classify the page. Oftentimes collection pages won't even get indexed for this reason.

Collection content becomes especially important when your product catalog changes rapidly like in pre-loved items or collectibles. If an individual product page only sticks around for a few months before it's gone, it won't build up that much SEO authority. If you remove or hide the page next season, then you'd be starting everything over every time a new product rolls around.

If you added content to the collection pages to help them rank, then as products come and go the collection page can keep its ranking and start to pull in new visitors.

Creating content for collection pages doesn't have to be difficult. They don't need all that much, maybe a couple of paragraphs. Maybe an image or a list.

If you're looking to improve your collection pages, I recommend reading through this extensive and thorough guide all about optimizing Shopify collection pages.