Well-built user experience and seamless navigation features on your website are probably some of the essential prerequisites for significantly improving your SEO efforts to attract quality traffic.
This is exactly what taxonomy SEO helps you take care of – website structure, categorized pages, and interlinked content are all part of this equation.
Let’s have a closer look at this topic and discuss taxonomy SEO – what it is, how it helps you, what types of taxonomies there are, and the best practices you can implement in your business today.
Let’s Start With Definitions – What Is Taxonomy SEO?
Taxonomy SEO refers to a process of categorizing and organizing your website’s links, pages, and content in order to enhance your user experience and improve rankings on search engines.
This process involves a whole set of activities, such as creating a hierarchy of links, grouping similar content pieces together, optimizing URL structures, interlinking pages, and creating descriptive titles that are relevant to the content of the site.
Think of it as going through your wardrobe and labeling different shelves by the categories of clothing you are putting there. It will make the process of finding what you’re searching for much easier, won’t it?
A well-executed taxonomy SEO strategy gives you an edge on the market and provides your website with:
- More intuitive user experience
- Improved analysis of your content
- Better rankings on search engines
- Higher conversion rates from visitors
Besides, as a result of taxonomy SEO activities, your team will have a more organized structure when it comes to populating websites with relevant content.
Why Is Taxonomy SEO Important?
There are lots of moving pieces when you’re trying to optimize your website for search engines and make it rank for the appropriate keywords that your audience is searching for.
Well, taxonomy is one of the essential parts of this process. Having this aspect of your website all figured out means that your user experience is top-notch, and your online visitors have the ability to easily navigate through your pages to find exactly what they are searching for.
This kind of seamless user experience never goes unnoticed by search engines like Google and Bing. In fact, they consider it as one of the main ranking factors when it comes to giving you positions on your desired queries.
We all know what higher rankings mean – more opportunities to grab attention, higher traffic, and a better number of leads on your website that are likely to convert as customers.
So, in essence, a well-executed taxonomy SEO strategy leads to a better user experience on a website, which brings more traffic and higher growth in the long run.
What Types of Taxonomy SEO Are There?
There are four major types of taxonomies when it comes to organizing your website. Each one of them offers a unique set of advantages that businesses can use to drive more relevant traffic to their websites.
However, it is important to keep in mind that choosing a taxonomy type for your website entirely depends on your specific case and business needs that your company has.
Let’s go through all of the taxonomy SEO types and see all about the benefits that each one provides:
Flat Taxonomies
We can describe a flat taxonomy as a straightforward system of the website that only uses top-level categories as pages on the navigation.
Imagine a homepage that has a simple list of subcategories as pages, and there are no levels within those subcategories. This means that all of these pages represent a list that online visitors can choose from to visit.
This system makes the user experience easy as your prospects are not getting overwhelmed with all of the subpages and categories to navigate through. There are no hierarchies between pages in this case.
Who Is This Taxonomy Type Ideal For?
Flax taxonomy website structure is ideal for relatively smaller websites with no need to have too many pages displayed.
For example, freelance designers need a simple and easy-to-navigate website where they can display their work samples, blog, list of services, “about me” page, and contact page – flat taxonomy is an ideal website structure for that.
Hierarchical Taxonomies
A hierarchical taxonomy is a more complicated system where you need to arrange different categories based on their levels of importance.
It is a multi-layered system, and all of the pages must be organized into parent categories and their subcategories. This way, you create a structured framework on your website that is more clear and arranged for visitors.
This kind of structure is important because it allows your prospects to understand what categories your website has and what exact information they can get under each bracket in the navigation menu.
Who Is This Taxonomy Type Ideal For?
Creating a hierarchical structure on the website is applicable for businesses that have a massive library of content and offerings under each category of their website.
A good example would be a content marketing agency that needs to have a sub-page for each one of its offerings, a blog with many sections, case studies, industry-specific pages, careers pages, and more.
Network Taxonomies
Another classification system for websites with a lot of content is called a network taxonomy. This is where you can organize content into interconnected categories that apply to the topic of a specific piece.
Imagine having items on the website that fit into many categories, and you’d like to display them in different places on your site. This is exactly the problem that network taxonomy solves – it helps you interlink pages and guide visitors easily from one section to another.
Who Is This Taxonomy Type Ideal For?
Network taxonomy is widely used by big publications and news outlets that are constantly publishing content pieces on their website and have many different categories to place their content into.
This structure offers them the flexibility to put a specific article into many different sections of their website.
Faceted Taxonomies
As the name suggests, this kind of taxonomy organizes content on the website into multiple facets. The approach is used to divide categories of content based on a specific attribute of a particular piece.
The advantage of this taxonomy type is that it offers customized experiences and allows you visitors to sort content however they wish. This way, your prospects are free to combine different options and find exactly what they are looking for.
Who Is This Taxonomy Type Ideal For?
Faceted taxonomy is a widely used website structure among eCommerce stores that have large product catalogs with many subcategories.
This allows their online visitors to go through the products and filter them by price, size, color, collection, and more. It is almost unimaginable to find the product you are looking for in an online shop without the ability to filter out options.
6 Best Practices for SEO Taxonomy
When it comes to creating a proper structure for your website and ensuring a smooth user experience for your prospects, there are many aspects to take care of.
Let’s have a look at six essential elements to consider when thinking about your website’s taxonomy SEO:
- Understand Your Audience’s Navigation Habits: learn all about your audience’s behavior and intent – what are the first pages that your ideal customers are looking for? What information do they need to learn more about your brand? Which elements would make it easier to navigate through your website?
- Research Relevant Keywords and Terms: understand what are the most searched keywords that your audience is looking for when searching for solutions that your business is offering. Use tools like Google Trends or Ahrefs for this kind of research.
- Create a Logical Structure for Your Website: take the insights you’ve gained from your audience research and apply it to creating a solid, easy-to-navigate website structure. Choose the taxonomy type according to your needs and map out pages to get started.
- Categorize Your Website Pages and Content: apply your new, updated website structure to the pages and content pieces and categorize them in a way that fits the new navigation system.
- Make Sure to Add Metadata to Your Pages: take your time to go through your priority pages and add meta descriptions, meta titles, slugs, and other SEO components to them, which will increase their likelihood of getting ranked.
- Interlink Relevant Pages to Each Other: make your website experience even more seamless by interlinking relevant pages to each other and helping your online visitors instantly get the information they are looking for.
Level up Your SEO Game With PRNEWS.IO
After properly building your website structure and streamlining its overall user experience, it is important to think about different ways to attract an audience to this website and show them what your company is all about.
One of the most effective ways to achieve that is through publishing content on various well-known publications and media outlets.
PRNEWS.IO offers a full range of services when it comes to dominating Google search rankings with your content. Our platform allows you to maximize the outcomes of your press releases and publish your articles in top publications, such as Forbes, Bloomberg, and others.
Sounds interesting? Have a look at the list of publications for your potential placements, and let us know if you have any questions.
