How Website Taxonomy Can Improve Your Organic Traffic and Your Sales

Need help optimizing your website for high-quality organic traffic?

Read this article to learn about the importance and benefits of website taxonomy and the lesser-known techniques you can use to boost organic traffic.

Get ready to take your website’s SEO rank optimization to the next level!

Website taxonomy is an incredibly important and poorly understood tool for improving the quantity and quality of SEO traffic. It has the obvious and better-known purpose of organizing website structure and content to help search engines understand and index your website pages. This leads to improved visibility and a higher search rank. 

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You will see a lot of content online that tells you to block search bots from crawling category pages. But there’s even more power here for coaches and e-commerce website owners who understand how to optimize category pages to maximize their impact on organic search. By tying the website’s taxonomy to your keyword strategy, you can use category pages to attract highly qualified organic traffic and boost your sales. You use this technique to organize products into pages targeting long-tail keywords.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to do this, how to use website taxonomy to attract high-quality organic traffic, share best practices for setting up your taxonomy, discuss common mistakes to avoid, how to measure success, and more.

What is Website Taxonomy?

Site taxonomy is the organizational structure that websites use to classify content into categories, subcategories, and tags.

Taxonomy helps search engines understand the website’s structure and content to offer more relevant search results.

By designing a clear and organized taxonomy structure, website owners can improve crawlability, leading to better search rankings, increased traffic, and, ultimately, more conversions. 

Best practices for taxonomy design include using descriptive and concise labels, avoiding duplicate categories, and ensuring consistency. 

Your site taxonomy guides search engines. It explains the purpose of the content on your site – enabling them to offer more relevant results in their organic searches. 

Benefits of employing website taxonomy for SEO purposes

By organizing your website content into categories, subcategories, and tags, you create pages focused on this content that are easily crawled and indexed by search engines. These pages may or may not appear in the website’s navigation, but the search bots will still crawl them.

Use our keyword research guide to develop a keyword strategy that you can use with your website taxonomy and further improve SEO performance by helping search engines associate your content with what searchers seek. In essence, with taxonomy, you can organize your content using the keywords your best prospects use to solve their problems. This technique makes it easy for search engines to match user search intent effectively, providing more precise results and including relevant pages from your domain in organic searches. When done right, taxonomy-keyword integration helps you gain higher visibility on SERPs, which gets your website discovered faster, leading to increased organic traffic and better overall performance.

For example, if you are running a website selling outdoor equipment, it is important to create distinct categories such as “Camping Gear,” “Hiking Equipment,” and “Cycling Supplies.” Each category should be further divided into subcategories and tagged with relevant long-tail keywords. For example, create subcategories that follow your keyword strategy, like “Ultra Light Camping Gear.” 

Connecting the keyword strategy to taxonomy helps search engines determine which pages should appear when someone searches for “light hiking boots” or “flexible tent poles,” ensuring that users can find the right content. This ultimately leads to better user experience, higher rankings, high-quality organic traffic, and sales.

Best practices for organizing your website’s taxonomy

Best practices for organizing your website’s taxonomy to optimize SEO performance include:

• Utilizing a logical structure: When creating your site’s taxonomy, matching how you organize the content into categories and subcategories with how users search for content is essential. This will make it easier for search engines (and users!) to find relevant content quickly.
• Optimizing category page titles: Take the time to research and include relevant keywords in your category labels. This will help search engines match user search intent to your content more accurately.
• Creating descriptive URLs: Use meaningful URLs that indicate what topics are covered on the page, which will help search engines find the right content quickly.
• Including SEO-optimized taxonomy descriptions: Add taxonomy descriptions to each category and subcategory that use relevant keywords. This will help search engines and users understand what the page is about. 
• Including Open Graph meta description and images: The meta description and OG image will entice readers to explore each section’s content.

Common mistakes to avoid when using website taxonomy for SEO rank optimization

Common mistakes to avoid when using website taxonomy for SEO rank optimization include:

• Overcategorizing: It can be tempting to create too many categories, subcategories, and tags to optimize for specific keywords. However, this can create a cluttered website structure that is difficult for search engine spiders to navigate. Consider carefully.
• Ignoring internal linking: Internal links within the website provide context around each page’s content, which can help boost its relevance for search engines. Make sure to link different categories together with relevant pages within the website.
• Neglecting descriptive titles and URLs: Make sure all category and subcategory pages have descriptive titles, descriptions, and URLs that include targeted keywords and communicate what readers can expect from the page. This will help improve visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
• Neglecting SEO optimization on taxonomy items: Don’t forget to include relevant keywords in your taxonomy labels, as this helps search engines match user search intent more accurately. Additionally, adding taxonomy descriptions will help search engines understand what users can expect from your page.

How to measure the success of your changes in SEO rank after utilizing website taxonomy

Measuring the success of your changes to website taxonomy can be done by tracking a few key metrics. These include:

• Organic search traffic: The number of visitors coming to your website from organic search and how it changes over time can indicate whether or not the changes you’ve made have been successful.
• Ranking positions: Track how well specific keywords rank over time and monitor any significant changes that may indicate success or failure.
• Bounce rate and average session duration: Monitor these two metrics for pages within the taxonomy structure to check if people are sticking around on these pages or bouncing away quickly. This could point to issues with the content, navigation, or other elements related to the page.
• Conversion rate: Pay attention to any increases (or decreases) in conversions resulting from organic search traffic after implementing changes to taxonomy structures. This will give you a good idea of your SEO strategies’ effectiveness.

Frequently Asked Questions

Use Website Taxonomy to Improve Your SEO Page Rank and Your Sales

Combining website taxonomy with your keyword strategy can reap many benefits: improved visibility, a better user experience, and improved conversions. Your WordPress website will create pages for the taxonomy. Rather than the traditional, boring labels like Marketing or Health, use your taxonomy to tie your content to your keyword strategy and harness prospect search intent.

Author: James Hipkin

Since 2010, James Hipkin has built his clients’ businesses with digital marketing. Today, James is passionate about websites and helping the rest of us understand online marketing. His customers value his jargon-free, common-sense approach. “James explains the ins and outs of digital marketing in ways that make sense.”

Use this link to book a meeting time with James.