Hi All - we are migrating to Shopify and we have a lot of high level categories our products fall into. We will reduce the amount so the dropdown navigation is not overwhelming, but how is best to handle the longer tail of categories that our products fall into? They will surface in our search (we use Searchspring). I do think for SEO/GEO having those collection pages makes sense and I imagine Google, etc. will pick them up via our sitemap (right?).
I also thought we could maybe list all collections (with links) that a given product belongs to to help discovery. Is that easy to do and recommended?
I’d keep the main navigation limited to your primary categories and let the long tail categories exist as collections. That keeps the navigation clean while still allowing users to find them through search and helping search engines discover them.
If those collection pages are included in your sitemap and contain useful, unique content, Google should be able to crawl and index them.
Showing a few relevant collection links on the product page is also a good idea for discovery. I’d avoid listing every collection the product belongs to, though just the most relevant ones to keep the page clean and useful.
Long-tail categories: Keep them as real, published Shopify collections. Just exclude from dropdown nav. surface via searchspring facets, footer link and internal links (not sitemap alone, orphaned pages rank worse).
Sitemap: Yes, active/published collections auto-include in Shopify’s sitemap.xml, so Google/AI-GEO engines will crawl and index then even without nav placement.
Product > collections links on PDP: Yes, easy and recommended. Use product.collections in Liquid to loop and display links, helps internal linking (SEO/SEO) + discovery.
Additional Must-dos:
Unique title tag, meta descriptions and some unique intro copy per collection (avoid thing/duplicate content).
Add collection/Product schema markup (structured data) for SEO + GEO.
Ensure real internal links point to these collections (footer, related-collections, PDP) not just sitemap inclusion.
For LLM visibility specifically, collection pages with clear, descriptive content tend to get cited when people ask AI tools about product categories. The key is that the page actually explains what the collection is and who it’s for, not just lists products. A short intro paragraph like “Our X collection includes products for Y use case” is enough to give AI crawlers context to reference you.
The internal linking point Anshul made is important for this too. Orphaned collection pages that only exist in the sitemap get indexed but rarely cited. Pages that are linked from your product pages, footer, and related collections get treated as authoritative
Your approach makes sense. I wouldn’t recommend putting every category into your main navigation, as that can make it difficult for customers to browse.
A common Shopify setup is:
Keep only your primary categories in the main navigation.
Create additional collections for long-tail categories and let them be discovered through search, internal links, and search engines.
Include those collection pages in your SEO strategy by giving them unique titles, descriptions, and relevant content. As long as they’re published and not excluded, Shopify will include them in the sitemap, making them discoverable by search engines.
Displaying the collections a product belongs to can also improve navigation and internal linking. Shopify makes this possible with a small Liquid customization by looping through the product’s collections and displaying links. Just be selective—show only the most relevant collections to avoid cluttering the product page.
Overall, this is a solid strategy for both user experience and SEO.
@budbks I would not rely on the sitemap alone for the long-tail collections. Keep them published, but make sure the important ones have at least one internal path: a category hub, related collection links, or a small set of relevant links from product pages. Listing every collection a product belongs to can get noisy fast, so I’d show the 2–4 that help shoppers choose the next step. Also prune or noindex very thin/duplicate collections before launch, otherwise migration creates a lot of crawlable pages without much reason to rank.
The navigation and internal linking advice above is solid. The one thing I would add on the SEO side is that those long tail collections only earn rankings if the pages are not thin. A title plus a grid of products reads as near duplicate to Google once you have a lot of similar collections.
Someone already mentioned a short intro paragraph, which helps, but pair it with a unique meta description on each one you actually care about. Two or three sentences on what the collection is and who it is for, then a distinct meta. That is usually what separates a collection that ranks from one that just sits in the sitemap and gets ignored.
I would also not list every collection a product belongs to. Keep it to the two or three most relevant, otherwise the links start diluting each other and the product page gets cluttered.
