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Website Taxonomy Best Practices

A Website Taxonomy is a way to organize your website content, so it’s easy to find and understand. It groups similar content into categories, subcategories, and tags, just like a shop has sections for clothes, shoes, and accessories. This structure helps users quickly find what they’re looking for and allows search engines to better understand your site.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Makes it easier for users to find information: Related content is easier to surface, increasing time on site. For example, showing “related articles” or grouping similar resources can lead users deeper into your content ecosystem.
  2. Helps search engines understand your site structure (ie. improves SEO)
  3. Improves navigation and user experience
  4. Keeps your website clean, scalable, and easy to manage (As your content grows, taxonomy ensures it doesn’t become a cluttered mess. This is crucial for long-term expansion or content marketing strategies.)

Faceted Website Taxonomy Structures

There are 4 types of website taxonomy structures, the main type we use and focus on is called ‘faceted.’ Faceted Taxonomy allows users to refine their search or browsing options by applying multiple filters based on content characteristics. This is highly effective so that content can be categorized under several attributes, such as region, topic/issue and type. This multidimensional approach helps users customize their browsing experience according to their specific needs.

Best Practices for Creating a Website Taxonomy

Understanding Key Elements

Creating effective taxonomies starts with a deep understanding of the existing taxonomy and identifying areas for improvement. This is crucial to categorize new pages correctly and update crucial category pages to maintain a cohesive structure. Organizing content within the main categories should follow a logical order that reflects how users interact with the site.

Conduct a Content Analysis

This step uncovers patterns and guides how content can logically be grouped, merged, or repurposed. Before you build anything, take stock of what you already have:

  • List every page, blog post, product, or content item (Screaming Frog is a great tool for gathering the pages on your site and ranking them by your Google Analytics.)
  • Group them based on topics, types, or formats
  • Identify duplicate, outdated, or underperforming content
  • Spot gaps where new content might be needed

To ensure your taxonomy caters to both user needs and search engine algorithms, consider how your site’s taxonomy mirrors your audience’s search habits and preferences. This alignment helps users find the content they’re looking for faster and more efficiently, leading to better engagement. The concepts should also be sourced from existing user data, such as that resulted from interviews, usability testing, or search logs to ensure that you don’t build out branches of the taxonomy that won’t benefit users.

Build Around Topics Over Keywords

Gone are the days of keyword targeting. Thankfully, Google has moved away from this practice in favor of topic focus. A topic focus includes multiple keywords per page. These pages will then be categorized in a way that ties into the larger topic, whether that’s through categories or tags. 

Incorporating relevant keywords into taxonomy elements without compromising the natural flow of information requires careful planning and understanding of SEO. A website’s taxonomy structure can significantly impact its search engine rankings. Effective taxonomies improve SEO by aligning closely with search patterns and keyword usage.

  • Use intuitive, familiar language
  • Avoid jargon or overly technical terms unless your audience uses them
  • Make sure categories are mutually exclusive

Tags can drive related posts, power filtering systems, and improve user journeys without complicating the navigation. These are powerful when used right as they allow for content discovery across unrelated categories.

  • Don’t over-tag, 3–5 tags per content piece is usually enough
  • Use tags for themes or attributes like Accountability, How-To, Justice
  • Tags should be user-relevant and SEO-friendly

Leveraging User Feedback

User feedback is an invaluable resource in optimizing taxonomy categories. You can adjust your categories and taxonomy to better meet user needs by engaging with and listening to your audience. This practice ensures your content remains relevant and easily accessible, enhancing the user experience.

Review and revise your taxonomy with your stakeholders, internal subject-matter experts, and content strategists. This process is likely to involve iterative refinement.

Challenges to Consider

  • Consistency Across Categories: Ensuring consistent terminology use across subcategories can be challenging. Discrepancies can confuse users and dilute the effectiveness of the taxonomy.
  • Integration of New Content: As new page content is added, it must fit seamlessly into the existing taxonomy without disrupting the current structure.
  • Balancing Detail and Accessibility: This is delicate to provide enough detail in categories and subcategories without overwhelming users with too many choices.
  • Maintaining Relevance: To keep the content meaningful for users, it is necessary to ensure that all parts of the taxonomy remain relevant as the site evolves and as external conditions change.
  • Navigation Efficiency: Users need to move quickly through layers of content, and poorly structured taxonomies or vast lists of terms can hinder this process, affecting user experience.
  • Updating Taxonomy: Regular reviews and updates are essential to maintain taxonomy properly, which can be resource-intensive.
  • Controlled Vocabulary Usage: Vocabulary mismatch problems happen a lot on websites that use branded terms, acronyms and abbreviations, jargon or cute labeling instead of generic terms. Some websites can benefit from adding synonyms for words in other languages, too.

    Also, it’s easy for tags and categories to get out of hand. You can make this less likely by formulating a controlled list of terms that can be used to classify content in the future. For example, “US” as opposed to “U.S.A.” or “United States.”

Ongoing Maintenance

  • Creator Training: This step ensures long-term consistency, which is critical for a clean, user-friendly site. Your beautifully designed taxonomy is only as good as the people using it.
    • Create a taxonomy style guide with naming conventions, rules, and examples
    • Train writers, editors, and product managers on how to assign categories and tags
    • Automate part of the process, if possible, by using CMS plugins for suggested tags
  • Adapt to Site Growth: As a site expands, its taxonomy must evolve to accommodate new content and topics without becoming unwieldy.

    Taxonomy isn’t a one-time job. Your website evolves, and so should its structure. An up-to-date taxonomy keeps your site fresh, relevant, and user centric.
    • Review the taxonomy quarterly or bi-annually
    • Remove unused tags or merge redundant ones
    • Add new categories or update labels 
    • Monitor user behavior and search trends to identify shifting needs (review analytics)
  • User Interaction: Observing how users interact with the site provides critical insights into how well the taxonomy serves its purpose. A simple taxonomy might suffice for smaller sites, but a more complex structure, such as a network taxonomy, may become necessary as the site grows. Continuing to review site search terms will help with this as well.
  • Gathering and Utilizing Research Data: Collecting data on user behavior and search trends can guide adjustments in the taxonomy to better meet user needs and enhance discoverability.

The ultimate goal is to implement a taxonomy system that supports effective content organization and meets the needs of all users. When this system is well thought out, it enhances user experience and supports the website’s strategic objectives.

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