Content taxonomy is an important concept for content marketers to understand. It’s a way of organizing content into categories to make it easier to find and use and streamline content development. There are several benefits to implementing a content taxonomy, including improved navigation, enhanced search functionality, and better content management. This article will provide an overview of taxonomy’s benefits, explain how it can help content marketers, and offer tips for creating your own taxonomy for content.

What is content taxonomy?

Content taxonomy is a content marketing category that organizes content into categories and labels. It’s a hierarchical structure that helps to organize the way content is presented on a website or in a content management system. Content taxonomy is used to describe the structure of a website or the way content is categorized and labeled within a content management system.

There are four main types of content taxonomy: hierarchical, faceted, non-hierarchical, and flattened. Hierarchical taxonomies are organized into parent-child relationships, with each parent having one or more child categories. Faceted taxonomies allow users to break down content into multiple dimensions, such as topics and tags. Non-hierarchical taxonomies are not organized into any particular structure, while flattened taxonomies have no hierarchy and all content is stored in one flat list.

It’s important to understand the difference between taxonomies and metadata. Metadata is data about data, while taxonomies are organizational structures that categorize data. Taxonomies can include metadata, but they don’t have to.

In a content management system, taxonomies are typically set up as tag or keyword fields. This allows users to quickly and easily find the content they’re looking for by searching for specific tags or keywords.

Why is content taxonomy critical for brands?

A content taxonomy is an important tool for brands as it helps to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of content management, as well as the user experience for those interacting with the content you’ve created. It can also help to strengthen a brand’s identity and messaging. Here are the most important reasons:

• Improved user experience: A well-organized content taxonomy can help users find the information they are looking for more easily and quickly, which can improve the overall user experience.
• Enhanced search functionality: A clear and consistent content taxonomy can improve the accuracy and effectiveness of search functionality on a brand’s website or other digital platforms.
• Better content management: A content taxonomy helps to organize content in a way that makes it easier to manage and maintain over time.
• Increased discoverability: A content taxonomy can help make content more discoverable by search engines and other discovery tools, which can lead to increased traffic and engagement.
• Stronger brand identity: A consistent and well-organized content taxonomy can help to reinforce a brand’s identity and messaging.

How content taxonomy can help content marketers

Content taxonomy can be incredibly useful for content marketers. It can help streamline content development by categorizing content into specific topics or themes that make it easier to find and use.

Taxonomies can also be used to organize content with tags and keywords, making it easier for users to find the information they’re looking for. This makes it much simpler for users to find the specific pieces of content they need without having to sift through a large amount of unrelated information.

Content taxonomy can also help create a clearer content strategy. By categorizing content into specific themes or topics, it becomes much easier to plan out which pieces of content should be created and where they should be located within the website or content management system. The productivity and value of texts is also increased by the Nuxeo content management platform.

Benefits of content taxonomy

A content taxonomy helps people find content and makes it easier to get content to different platforms. On top of that, content taxonomy helps brands organize a lot of data by personalizing and streamlining it, which makes the customer experience better.

Here are some ways that taxonomy can help you create content:

Content’s availability

One of the biggest benefits of using content taxonomy is that it improves the search relevance of the document.

A brand with a product/service repository might have different documents, pictures, and videos. The increasing number of documents in the repository will definitely make things more chaotic, which will lead to less work getting done and a bad experience for customers.

Taxonomy on this kind of website lets users use filters or search for terms to make it easier to find what they want.

Segmenting campaigns

Content taxonomy can segment your audiences for your landing page or campaign audiences. By adding filters like demographics, languages, and interests, marketers can reach the right customers while keeping campaign costs low.

Growing business

Managed metadata helps with content taxonomy by putting files, images, and documents into different groups. Which makes it easier to sort. Nuxeo, e.g., uses this classification: you can add the names of folders to these documents as tags, which lets you scale your business process even more.

Use cases of taxonomy

For successful content marketing, an understanding of content taxonomy is crucial. It can make content creation more efficient, assist users to discover the information they need with less effort, and clarify the content strategy. Let’s explore some applications and examples of taxonomy that may help you grasp the subject more fully.

• The customer service department is a classic example of an end user. With the use of a new organizational strategy, a tech product company hopes to improve accessibility to its customer service and knowledge base. They’d like to sort everything into different folders depending on its topic. Taxonomy was utilized to let people see the dynamic stuff on the sites.
• A large-scale marketing firm may wish to maintain individual databases for each of its customers. Content taxonomy is used to categorize the information according to client, role, and application. They may now better categorize their files, making the information they need much more accessible.
• A major rebranding effort is underway for an online store that recently combined with another similar site. The website has also had a thorough redesign as part of the rebranding. By employing a content taxonomy, they were able to organize the data and display it in a logical fashion. Aside from that, companies could get a significant search engine optimization boost from utilizing tags in metadata.

Creating a content taxonomy strategy

Creating a taxonomy for your content can be a time-consuming process, but it’s worth the effort if you want your content to be organized and easily found by your audience. The first step is determining the scope of your taxonomy; this will help you decide how many categories you need and what labels you should assign to each one.

Also, you need to identify categories for your taxonomy. This could be based on topics or themes related to your business or industry, or it could be more general categories such as “news” or “opinions”. Once you’ve identified your categories, you’ll need to assign labels to each one that accurately describes the type of content it contains.

In addition, you’ll need to set up your taxonomy in your content management system. This will involve creating tags and keywords for each category, as well as setting up the structure of your taxonomy within the system itself.

Here are five easy steps on how to carve a content taxonomy strategy:

Get information and keywords.

You should start by gathering information from the following two main sources:

• Users in the end: Find out how your end users usually search for different kinds of content. Set aside time to talk to them directly or make a survey where they can enter those keywords.
• The subject matter: What better way to explain what’s in an asset than to talk about what’s in it? Keep in mind that simplicity is a key part of content taxonomy, so the more literal the keywords, the better they are often.

As you gather this information, it’s important to look at not only the keywords and search terms that were used, but also the types of keywords.

Create a taxonomy model

Once you’ve found keywords that fit the topics of your brand’s content, the next step is to organize them into concepts that will give your taxonomy a structure.

Your terms will likely be set up in one of the following ways:

• Hierarchical structure: This is the most common way for content taxonomy to be set up (the animal kingdom comes to mind). When you use this structure to make a draft, you put the most general term at the top and then related terms that get more specific as you go down.

When your main idea and the terms that go with it are clear, this structure is usually the best way to go.

• Faceted structure: This is a less common structure, but it can be helpful when the ideas in your taxonomy aren’t as clear. In this case, there is a more linear path of defining characteristics for each overarching idea.

This could be how you build your taxonomy if, for example, you have a group of products that are mostly the same but have different parts that can be changed.

Use metadata taxonomy

Once you have a design for a content taxonomy, you can use it as a framework to improve a metadata structure and tagging taxonomy. Metadata taxonomy is like a language that tells people why your content is important. It mostly talks to your content management system (CMS) and makes searches more accurate.

Test and look back

After making your content taxonomy, you’ll want to test different parts of the structure. Are the search results for the terms and tags what you’d expect? Make sure to use a variety of the tags that have been made throughout the taxonomy structure, from the top down, and across each concept.

As testing goes on, keep in mind the use cases that were used during the information-gathering process to make sure that what has been built is meeting those needs.

Governance and getting things right

You’ve clearly put in a lot of effort to collect this data. During this process, your documentation should record the details of your work at each step. It should also keep going as problems come up and are solved.

You should use this data to inform the development of taxonomy guidelines and a policy outlining the process by which new material should be contributed using the right taxonomy tags.

Conclusion

Content taxonomy has enormous potential for content marketers but it requires some effort to unlock its full potential. From streamlining development to making it easier for users to find what they need, a taxonomy can take your content strategy to the next level. Learning how to create a successful taxonomy can lead to supercharging your content marketing efforts.

Also, a content taxonomy can hell if you’re tired of struggling to find the right information on your website or platform. By organizing and categorizing your content in a clear and consistent manner, you can make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for and create a more effective content strategy.

Finally, content taxonomy is the secret weapon of successful content marketers. By defining the scope, categories, and labels of your content, you can streamline development, improve navigation and search functionality, and create a stronger content strategy. That said, it’s worth learning how to create a winning taxonomy for your own content.