A customer wrote me with an SEO question about using collections as a way to get additional, long-tail SEO traffic.
Was curious on your thoughts on creating collection pages for specific key phrases. [...] I created a collection page and used my tags [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] to populate the page.
That's an interesting idea.
It's a great use of the keyword data but how it will turn our will depend on a couple of factors.
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You'll need to make sure there's a good amount of unique content on each collection page. At least 100 words, though 300 or more would be best. Otherwise Google will consider it to be a "thin" page and not valuable rank.
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You'll also need to build links to that collection, both on your site and on external sites. Google wants to see links to know that a page is popular or useful to readers. Links count as votes, so if someone links to a page it's considered more valuable than a page without a link.
You might pick up some traffic without doing either of those, just because they target very specific keywords, but it wouldn't be much traffic.
Google also does algorithm updates and over the past few years they've been removing pages with very little content each time. It's not usually a penalty or something negative, just that the pages will no longer show up for search searches.
Definitely worth experimenting with to see if there are any results.
Once great optimization is to make sure your product's structured data is setup correctly for Google's Rich Snippets. With those you'll get more traffic and better converting traffic.
You can either audit your store's structured data by hand or install JSON-LD for SEO and have all the structured data you need.
It's already helping over a thousand Shopify stores with their structured data and it could help you too.
Eric Davis