High-quality content is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your website. Consumers are drawn to content that is valuable to them. And the more time they spend on your website, the more trust they develop. This trust enables you to generate leads and maximize your ROI.
70 percent of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. Therefore, if you want to win the content game, you must create content that is appealing to your target audience.
But there are few challenges you’re going to face, including deciding what content to create, where to distribute it, and how to measure its success over time. This is where a well-defined content taxonomy comes in.
What is content taxonomy?
You may have heard the word ‘taxonomy’ a lot during your biology lectures. Taxonomy, in general, refers to the words or terms we use to categorize and find information without having to go through every file or document.
It’s the same concept in content marketing as well. Content taxonomy is the classification process of the terms that are categorized and applied to the content.
In other words, the content taxonomy revolves around the names and categories that help organize the content and make it more discoverable in the web and digital space.
A taxonomy for your content supercharges it, improves its findability, distributes it across various digital channels, and analyses its overall performance.
With that, let’s learn more about the significant benefits of using taxonomy, its examples. And the tips for creating an effective taxonomy for your content.
Why use a taxonomy for your content?
Content marketing isn’t just about delivering the content; it’s about reaching the right audience and building relationships.
Customers expect an easier way of discovering your content. About 88% of the users are less willing to return to the website with a bad experience.
Therefore, a bad experience finding good content can ultimately affect the customer’s perception of its relevance and usefulness.
Hence, the content taxonomy has become one of the primary aspects of content marketing for brands and enterprises.
Significant benefits of a taxonomy
A content taxonomy serves as a channel for content discovery and improves the delivery of content across platforms.
In short, content taxonomy assists brands in organizing large amounts of data by personalizing and streamlining it, resulting in a better customer experience.
Here are some ways through which taxonomy helps you improve your content marketing.
It makes your content easier to navigate
One of the major advantages of using the content taxonomy is to improve the document’s search relevancy.
A brand with a product/service repository may have various documents, images, and videos. The growing number of documents in the repository will undoubtedly make things more chaotic, resulting in lost productivity and a poor customer experience.
Taxonomy in such a website allows users to apply filters or search for terms to improve discovery.
It helps you create a segment for your campaigns
Content taxonomy can segment your audiences for your landing page or campaign audiences.
Marketers can reach the right customers while lowering campaign costs by using enhanced filters such as demographics, languages, and interests.
Enables you to grow your business
Content taxonomy is assisted by managed metadata, which generates multiple classifications of files, images, and documents. Which makes the sorting easier.
Metadata allows you to add folder names as tags to these documents, allowing you to scale your business process even further.
Taxonomy examples
To understand the whole concept even better, here are some examples and use cases of taxonomy.
- One of the most common use cases is of the customer support department. A tech-product company plans to structure the knowledge base section and customer support center. They want to categorize each of the information by subject. They used taxonomy to allow the users to display the dynamic content on the pages.
- A marketing agency at the enterprise level wants to keep track of the files of each of its clients separately. They use content taxonomy to organize the data by client, role, and use cases. It enables them to organize and sort the files making these documents easier to find.
- An eCommerce website has merged with another and is going through a complete rebranding. As a part of the rebranding, they have also re-designed the website completely. With content taxonomy, they have seamlessly structured the content and the way it is displayed. Apart from this, they could see a major boost in SEO by using tags in metadata.
These are some of the most common use cases of taxonomy for content. Now the question arises — how do you create a successful content taxonomy strategy?
How to create a content taxonomy for your brand?
Before creating a strategy, you should ask these questions:
- What is the main objective of creating a taxonomy for my business?
- What kind of content is suitable for reuse, and which should I use to personalize the recommendations?
- How should I segment my customers or define the user journey?
After you’ve answered these questions, go through this five-step procedure for a solid content taxonomy strategy.
1. Collect the relevant information
When organizing the digital assets together, the critical component is to understand the products’ role in peoples’ lives and how they will search for them.
As a result, there are two key questions to ask before gathering information:
- The first question is — how would your customers or audience search for the different types of content they need?
- Second, how would you define your product and its assets?
After collecting the information with these two questions, you can use the taxonomy’s relevant keywords and search terms.
2. Draft a design
Once you have collected the keywords related to your brand, it’s time to draft your content taxonomy. In this process, you need to organize each search term in a structured way by using any of the formats given below:
- Hierarchical format: Refer to your old biology classes where you learned about the different hierarchical levels of the animal kingdom. That is how you can organize your search terms to form a tree-like structure with branches pointing out. The broad terms are at the top, while related keywords and terms spread out like branches, becoming more specific.
- Faceted structure: This type of structure is relatively rare and complex. It uses semantically related categories to form the classification.
Once you have decided the type of taxonomy structure, it is time to create metadata for your taxonomy.
3. Create metadata
Metadata, as we know, is defined as “data that provides information about other data.” It improves search relevancy and makes it easier to find a piece of data.
Here is an easier way to understand metadata. Let’s say you have taken 20 photographs in different locations. To sort it into a functional and organized structure, you need to name these photographs according to the location they are clicked.
Customers can navigate to the right location on the business website and complete their goals using metadata. Thus, the metadata taxonomy drives more discoverable searches and creates personalized content across a system like CMS.
4. Test your taxonomy concepts
With the final drafting, you’d want to test if the tags and terms you have used return the content you’re expecting.
Make sure to use and test every tag that you’ve used throughout the taxonomy. These steps are vital for validating the concepts and structures and identifying if they serve the right purpose.
During the tests, any misalignment can be detected and updated in the taxonomy for validation.
Conclusion
Taxonomy is an essential aspect of bringing the right audience through the right channel. Before making any changes, make sure that you’ve understood the requirements and the impact of taxonomy.
Finally, make sure to check for any system specifics during this course. All of this would ensure the long-lasting impact of taxonomy.
