How do I get good SEO for collections filtered by tags?
Many shops are set up to have their collections filtered by a single product tag or multiple product tags.
For SEO, the issue is that when filtering a collection by tags the filtered collection will often have the same page title and meta description as the unfiltered collection page. Duplicate page titles and meta descriptions- bad for SEO.
One solution is to say that the collection is the canonical url for all filtered collections. That means that search engines will only index the collection and not all of the filtered collections- missing a big SEO opportunity.
Page titles
With Plug in SEO Plus you can generate unique page titles and meta descriptions for the collection and each of its tags using templating. The setup is straightforward.
Let's say we have a 'Ties' collection. Products in this collection are tagged 'Formal', 'Cartoon' and 'Casual'.
This means we'll have the collection page on the URL:
/collections/ties
and when filtered by tag:
/collections/ties/formal
/collections/ties/cartoon
/collections/ties/casual
In your Shopify admin go to Online Store > Themes > Customize theme > SEO - Page Titles
Under 'Collection' enter this:
%% current_tags || join: ', ' || prepend_not_empty: 'Buy ' || append_not_empty: ' and more ' %% %% collection.title %%
This will give us four unique page titles:
/collections/ties
Ties
/collections/ties/formal
Buy formal and more ties
/collections/ties/cartoon
Buy cartoon and more ties
/collections/ties/casual
Buy casual and more ties
We now have unique page titles for the collection and filtered collection!
The code we have here is pretty straightforward and can be customised to however you want these page titles to read.
Remember with Plug in SEO Plus, you can set the collection page title template either in your theme settings as we have here, or for a single collection. And in all places use our extended Liquid code.
This code:
%% current_tags || join: ', ' || prepend_not_empty: 'Buy ' || append_not_empty: ' and more ' %% %% collection.title %%
means:
join: if there is more than one current tag, join them up with commas like 'cartoon, casual'
prepend_not_empty: if the collection is being filtered by tags, prepend 'Buy '
append_not_empty: if the collection is being filtered by tags, append ' and more '
If you don't want to tweak this, simply copy and paste it into your theme settings and it'll work perfectly.
Meta descriptions
Similarly for our meta descriptions we can make them unique in a filtered collection like this:
/collections/ties
Ties. Fred's Ties for every occasion: high quality, best prices.
/collections/ties/formal
Ties including formal styles and much more. Fred's Ties for every occasion: high quality, best prices.
etc.
In your Shopify admin go to Online Store > Themes > Customize theme > SEO - Meta Descriptions
Under 'Collection' enter this:
%% collection.title %%%% current_tags || join: ', ' || prepend_not_empty: ' including ' || append_not_empty: ' styles and much more' %%. %% collection.description || strip_html %%
As with page titles, if you want this to be different for per collection, you can edit the collection in your Shopify admin, setting the 'SEO meta description' using Plug in SEO Plus extended Liquid code as above.
Need a hand with what you'd like to do with your collections filtered by tags? Email us at help@pluginseo.com and we'll help you out as a Plug in SEO Plus customer free of charge.