Where the intent lives
Product pages rank for exact products. Blogs rank for questions. Category pages rank for the middle, which is where the volume and the wallets sit: the person who knows roughly what they want and is choosing where to buy it. That's a category search, and most stores barely try to win it.
What a strong category page has
A crawlable structure that doesn't bury products behind filters. Genuinely useful copy that helps someone choose, not five hundred words of keyword porridge hidden below the grid. Internal links from content and navigation. And enough products to deserve the ranking it's asking for.
Facets: the silent SEO killer
Filtered URLs multiply into millions of near-duplicate pages that exhaust crawl budget and dilute everything. Decide which facet combinations deserve to be real, indexable pages (usually the ones with search volume, like 'black ankle boots') and close the door on the rest.
Blogs still matter, but in service
Editorial content earns links and catches early-stage searches, then passes authority to categories through internal links. Content that doesn't eventually route a reader or a crawler toward a money page is a hobby. Nothing wrong with hobbies. Just don't fund them from the SEO budget.