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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!
Table of Contents
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.
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.
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.ย
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.ย
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 to optimize SEO performance include:
Common mistakes to avoid when using website taxonomy for SEO rank optimization include:
Measuring the success of your changes to website taxonomy can be done by tracking a few key metrics. These include:
Site taxonomy uses categories, subcategories, and tags to organize content hierarchically. This helps search engines understand the content structure, which boosts SEO rank.
Watch for improvements in metrics such as organic search traffic, ranking positions, bounce rate, average session duration, and conversion rates to understand what’s working and not working.
The benefits of website taxonomy include improved visibility, user experience, and conversions. And, by combining website taxonomy and keyword strategy, you link website content to search intent.
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.
How to use taxonomy to improve page rank and increase high-quality traffic.
Content that’s useful to readers is more likely to rank. Easy to say and understand, but much harder to do. We have some ideas that work for us.
In this article, we provide a how-to guide to effective keyword research.
Since 2010, James Hipkin has built his clientsโ 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. โJames explains the ins and outs of digital marketing in ways that make sense.โ
Use this link to book a meeting time with James.