Shopify Tags and Categories: Best Practices to Organize your Product Listings

Your Shopify storefront needs to provide a great user experience. After all, customers will be deterred from buying your product if your site is confusing or difficult to use. 

It gets trickier as your SKUs grow in number. Customers often have a certain thing in mind when they’re shopping, and it can be frustrating having to pick through hundreds of products to find what they’re looking for.

That’s where Shopify’s collections, tags, and categories come in. These functions allow you to organize your products effectively, creating a seamless buyer journey. 

Grow your Shopify store with affordable product photography >

What are Shopify product tags, categories, and collections?

Shopify tags serve to describe your products, and narrow down a customer’s search. Tags are used to label your products with more detail, so they can be narrowed down even further, within the same category or collection. An example of this could look something like this:

• Collection: Best books of 2024
• Sub-collection: History
• Tags: 21st century history, first world war memoir

Shopify categories are the product taxonomy, otherwise known as how it’s displayed on the navigation menu. Shopify collections are how you group your products based on similar attributes. In short, collections and categories group your products broadly, whereas tags are much more specific. 

{{shopify-ad="/external-components"}}

Shopify categories vs. collections

While categories and collections serve the same purpose—grouping your products—there are slight differences that influence how and when you use them. 

Collections are related by a similar characteristic, allowing online store owners to better manage inventory. These then appear on a collections page. Using the above bookstore example, you might create collections for “best books this year” and “as seen on booktok”, or “beach reads.”

Categories, on the other hand, serve to filter your products based on how you want them to appear on the main navigation bar, according to Shopify’s product taxonomy. So, in addition to the categories, you might create custom collections for your customers to navigate, such as “new this year,” and “top rated.” These can also appear in your navigation, by nesting the collection page link. This way, customers can easily see what you offer, and select the appropriate category to browse through. It all comes down to how you wish to streamline your inventory, and what feels right for your store.

The importance of Shopify tags and categories 

It can be easy to simply choose a few collections or categories and add your products to those, especially if you run a store without much product diversity. While this might be an effective way to organize your storefront at the beginning, it’s not efficient when you’re looking to scale, add new products, or even adjust your audience and messaging.

By having your products in collections or categories, and using tags for specific criteria, you’re helping customers find the products they might not have found, otherwise. Try to envision your store if it were physical—if a customer wants a new pair of blue jeans, they’ll have a much easier time of it in a store like Zara, rather than at a yard sale.

Grow your Shopify store with affordable product photography >

Shopify tags

Once you have your collections, subcollections, and categories all in place, it’s time to start tagging your products. Tags are essentially labels you can assign to products to help organize your Shopify store. 

Including tags in your store structure can help improve the customer experience, as they can easily search for the exact products they need. This is especially important as you scale your business to grow. The wider and more diverse your product inventory, the harder it is to maintain it. Tags are a quick and easy way to organize yourself, while also helping the customer.

Pro tip: Not all Shopify themes display tags on the product page. If you’re looking to include tags as a large part of your UX and SEO strategy, check whether your theme has the functionality for it. If you already have an established theme or website, don’t worry! You can also edit the code to allow for this.

How to add and remove tags in Shopify

Once you’ve established your tag strategy, and chosen which tags to use, it’s time to add tags to your products. Follow the below steps in the backend of your Shopify store to add a tag:

1. Open the product page.
2. Under “tags”, enter the keyword, or tag, you wish to assign to the product. You can also select this from a list of existing tags.
3. Save.

To remove a tag, the steps are:

1. Open the product page.
2. Click “x”, on the tag you want to remove.
3. Save.

It’s as simple as that! You can also add or remove the tag from the “manage” section of that product page.

Shopify categories

Categories filter your products based on how you want them to appear on the main navigation bar, according to Shopify’s product taxonomy. In addition to categories, you might create custom collections like “new this year” and “top rated,” which can also appear in your navigation by nesting the collection page link. This allows customers to easily see what you offer and select the appropriate category to browse through.

How to add Shopify categories

Adding categories to your Shopify store involves organizing your products in a way that enhances the shopping experience. Here’s how you can do it:

1. Log in to your Shopify Admin.
2. Click on “Products.”
3. Click on “Collections” and then click “Create collection.”
4. Enter a title and description for your collection. The title will be the name of your category.
5. Set your conditions.some text
   1. If you want the collection to automatically include products based on specific criteria, select “Automated” and set your conditions. For example, you can create a condition to include all products with a specific tag.
   2. If you prefer to manually select products for the collection, choose “Manual.” You’ll then need to add products to this collection manually by selecting them from your product list.
6. Optional: Add an image that represents the collection. This image will be displayed on the collection page.
7. Click “Save.”

If you want to add the collection to your navigation menu, do the following: 

1. Go to “Online Store” and then “Navigation.”
2. Choose the menu where you want the new category to appear.
3. Click “Add menu item,” enter the name of the category, and link it to the collection you just created.
4. Click “Add” and then “Save menu.”

Shopify collections

Collections are related by a similar characteristic, allowing online store owners to better manage inventory. These appear on a collections page. For example, a bookstore might create collections for “best books this year,” “as seen on booktok,” or “beach reads.”

How to create Shopify collections

When it comes to creating new collections, you have an option of doing it automatically, or manually.

Automatic collections add any related products to your collection through conditions. As we discussed earlier, conditions are criteria, or a set of rules, that Shopify pulls from when assigning products to a collection. This is a great way to manage your collections if you have a large inventory, as you only need to set up your conditions once, and then Shopify will do the rest when new products are added.

Manual collections, on the other hand, require you to assign the products to a collection yourself. This gives you more control, but can be tedious & takes extra time. You can fully customize what goes into your collection or category, but need to update it regularly, and by hand, individually adding products. This can be useful if you only have a small number of products, or are not looking to scale any time soon, such as seasonal offers.

How to add products to Shopify collections

Now that you know how to create your collections, it’s time to add some of your products. As mentioned, you can do this either manually or automatically.

1. First create or open a product.
2. Click “product organization.”
3. If you’re doing it manually, select “collection” and choose which one. If you’re doing it automatically, you can skip this step.
4. Save.

Grow your Shopify store with affordable product photography >

Shopify tags best practices, plus tips for collections and categories

Create a tagging strategy

Think of your tags like keywords. It’s fine to add obvious and relevant tags where you can, but having a strategy in place when tagging your products will be more impactful on your position in the search rankings. 

The biggest thing to keep in mind is your audience, and understanding what they want. If you can research and pinpoint your customer’s pain points—in the instance of our online bookstore, perhaps they’re going on vacation and want a quick and fun book to read on the beach—you can then choose your keyword and create custom tags appropriately.

Use sub-collections

Creating sub-collections is a great way to narrow down your inventory even further, and help your customers find exactly what they’re looking for. This works similarly to our collections and categories, wherein you first create the sub-collection and then add your products to it. Again, this can be done either manually or automatically, with preset conditions.

You can also display your sub-collections in your main menu, if relevant.

Perform bulk actions

Another great thing about tagging your products is that you can perform bulk actions. Rather than go through and individually add tags to every product, you can bulk add tags, as well as bulk remove them, all in one go. This frees up time for you to focus on things that really matter to your business.

Go broad for categories and niche for tags

A best practice to keep in mind when creating your categories is to ensure that they aren’t too niche. It’s great to have collections for exactly what you’re selling, but the more specific the collection name, the less searchable it becomes. Think of these as keywords, from the perspective of your customer. Collections such as “best books 2023” are widely searched, while still being specific enough to filter out some of your inventory, whereas a collection such as “presidential autobiographies” might be too detailed—unless of course, you specialize in autobiographies from political figures. Again, it’s all about knowing your own business, and your audience. You can also create custom collections for specific things. For instance, during the wedding season, a clothing store might have a collection of “wedding guest dresses”.

Consider SEO

When creating your collections, or categories, you’ll need to choose a title and a description. The description is optional, but can be beneficial for SEO, as it’s another way to insert keywords and improve your search ranking. The title, however, is mandatory and requires some thought. 

If you’re struggling to come up with tags that suit your products, revisit your keyword list, and pull from there.

Think about what your customers are searching for, and which keywords they might be prone to using when looking for that product. For instance, if you have an online bookstore, you might use category titles such as “audiobooks”, or “ebooks”. Then, you might use a product tag like “autobiography” or “supernatural thriller.” 

So, a customer looking for a book about the First World War, and a customer looking for Obama’s autobiography won’t need to scan through all books marked e-book, or even all books in a “nonfiction” collection. This is an easy way for your customers to weed out what they don’t want, and quickly find what they do.

Leverage automations

If you’re growing your business, and don’t have time to individually title or tag all your products, you can also set a condition on Shopify, which is a set of rules that groups any new products into the relevant collection or category. For instance, you can hide any products that go out of stock by setting a condition to hide any products with an inventory stock level of 0.

To ensure that your tags are working as effectively for your store as possible, there are some best practices to keep in mind when tagging your products. Shopify recommends sticking to the below guidelines:

• Characters: avoid special characters, and stick to using normal letters and numbers
• Length—try to keep your tags as short as possible. If you’re finding that you can’t fit it all into one tag, try splitting it into two. For example, the tag “blue ceramic dishwasher-safe mug” isn’t optimized. Try instead “blue” “dishwasher-safe” and “mug”
• Keep your tags simple to understand and easy to read
• Be clear in your tagging. Remember that certain themes show your tags in the drop-down menu, so try to avoid keyword stuffing

Audit regularly

Do regular audits of your tags and website as trends change, so you can move around products or amend tags, to remain up to date in your industry. Make sure you remove any tags that are no longer relevant.

Manage your tags and collections

While getting all of your products into the relevant collections, adding to your navigation, and tagging them all appropriately is a massive feat, the work doesn’t stop there. It’s now up to you to maintain your tags and collections as new products come in, old products go out of stock, trends go in and out of season, and as your store grows and changes over time.

Then automate this process by bulk adding tags to your products as they come in. This is when having a good tagging strategy comes into play, as you won’t need to analyze each individual product and come up with a tag to add to it. You’ll have your predetermined tags just in reach, or already in an existing list. For example, if you add all your white t-shirts to your store at once, you can bulk add the tag “white t-shirt,” in one go.

Then, you can set up your automatic collections to add products according to specific tag criteria. Of course, it’s also best practice to spot-check and manually upload any outliers, as they come along.

Tools for managing Shopify tags and collections

It can be difficult to juggle all this, while also running a business. It’s simple to add a tag here and there, or create a collection every now and again, but if you have a rapidly growing inventory, keeping on top of adding them to the website—let alone organizing or even optimizing them—can become impossible. Luckily, there are many tools available that automate this process and can free up the time that you need to focus on growing and expanding your ecommerce store. 

Shopify offers third-party apps that can help with the organization process, to streamline your inventory management. Consider installing apps that can automate tagging or sorting. We recommend researching all the tools available and choosing the right one for you, that solves your specific pain points.

Moving forward with your Shopify website

Now you know how to organize your product listings with Shopify tags and categories. There are endless pieces of information and resources about keeping your Shopify store in tip-top shape. 

Interested in getting amazing product photos for your Shopify store? We’ve got everything you need. 

{{shopify-ad="/external-components"}}

Shopify tags FAQs

Do Shopify tags improve SEO?

Shopify tags themselves don’t directly improve SEO. However, they help in organizing your products, collections, and blog posts, which can indirectly enhance the user experience. A well-organized site can lead to better user engagement, potentially improving your site’s SEO. For SEO improvement, focus on meta tags, keywords, quality content, and backlinks.

Are tags important on Shopify?

Yes, tags are important on Shopify because they help in organizing and categorizing your products, collections, and blog posts. This makes it easier for customers to find what they're looking for, enhancing their shopping experience. Additionally, a well-structured site can positively impact your store's overall performance and user engagement.

How to optimize HTML tags in Shopify?

To optimize HTML tags in Shopify, do the following:

• Title tags: Ensure your title tags are descriptive and include relevant keywords.
• Meta descriptions: Write compelling meta descriptions that include target keywords and entice users to click.
• Header tags: Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content, making it easier for search engines to understand.
• Alt text for images: Add descriptive alt text to images to improve accessibility and SEO.
• Canonical tags: Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues.
• Internal linking: Use internal links to help search engines crawl your site more effectively.

How do I choose tags on Shopify?

When choosing tags on Shopify, consider the following:

• Relevance: Ensure tags are relevant to the products, collections, or blog posts they are associated with.
• Keywords: Use keywords that customers are likely to use when searching for your products.
• Specificity: Be specific rather than broad to help narrow down search results and improve the customer experience.
• Consistency: Maintain a consistent tagging system to avoid confusion and ensure a well-organized store.
• Search trends: Analyze search behavior and trends to choose tags effectively that align with how customers search for products.