Most stores put their effort into product pages. For the searches that carry the most commercial intent, that is the wrong page.

Someone searching womens waterproof walking boots is not looking for one boot. They are looking for the set, so they can compare. The page that answers that is the category page, and on most stores it is the thinnest page on the site.

What a category page is competing against

Open the results for a category term you want. You will usually find other retailers' category pages, a marketplace, and one or two buying guides. You are not competing with product pages, so a product page will not win the slot.

That tells you what the page has to do. It has to present a set, help someone narrow it down, and answer the questions that stop a person buying.

The structure that works

A heading that matches the search. Not Boots. The phrase people use.

A short introduction above the grid. Two or three sentences that say what is in the collection and who it suits. This is the only text many visitors read.

The grid itself, with enough products to look like a real selection. A category with four items looks like the end of a clearance sale.

Useful detail below the grid. How to choose, what the differences are, what to avoid. This is where the length goes, and it is below the products because the products are what the visitor came for.

Internal links to the subcategories that sit under it, and back up to the parent. This is how a crawler understands the shape of your catalogue.

What to avoid

Do not write the detail above the grid. Pushing products below a wall of text trades a small ranking gain for a real conversion loss.

Do not create a category for every keyword. A category with three products and 600 words of introduction is a doorway page, and it will be treated as one.

Do not let filters create indexable near duplicates of the parent. Pick the filtered views that match real searches, index those, and canonical the rest.

How to find which ones to work on first

In Search Console, filter to pages containing /collections/ and sort by impressions. Pages with impressions and a low click through rate are already being shown and passed over. Those are the fastest wins, because Google has already decided they are relevant and visitors have decided they are not compelling.