Content taxonomies-Why they are critical for meaningful content audits

By Dheeraj Saxena | February 18th, 2023

What is a content taxonomy and why do we need one?

For those of us from a data/tech background, the concept of taxonomy should sound familiar. A taxonomy is nothing but a collection of metadata elements describing an entity along various data points.

Content taxonomies are critical for conducting meaningful content audits and identifying content gaps. Attaching a taxonomy to content allows Marketers to build a bigger picture of how much content exists of each type. This in turn provides a very clear strategy to plan editorial calendars.

Let us discuss this with an example.

Suppose we wish to categorize every content item using the following data points

  • Format of content – This could be a blog post, a landing page, an inner page, a PDF flyer, an explainer video, an infographic, or an email newsletter.
  • Primary offering – A company typically has multiple products or services that it sells to its customers. Each of these would be an offering. To ensure that content is purpose-built, we need to associate each piece of content with a primary offering. Not only will this help identify orphan content, but it will also help to nail down offerings for which too much or too little content exists.
  • Content theme – Content themes are extremely relevant for advanced b2b marketing. Themes help us produce content for the right stage in a buyer journey. Examples of themes would be case studies, points of view, vendor comparison studies, analyst reports, how-to guides, trend analysis, and so on. A case study-type content item might be relevant for top-of-the-funnel customers who are still in the consideration stage and need a better understanding of how a product might help address a specific business need. How-to-guides on the other hand are meant for customers who have come much further down the marketing funnel and need hand-holding around specific product features.

Once we have categorized each content item along these data points, we have a very clear picture of where the content gaps are.

Taking a very simplistic example of an IT services company offering only two services, the resulting matrix would look something like below

Offering nameThemeFormat
• CRM development services
• Mobile application development
• Case study
• Point-of-view
• Vendor comparison report
• Analyst report
• How-to-guide
• Use case
• Blog post
• Landing page
• Inner page
• PDF flyer
• PowerPoint
• Explainer Video

This would result in 2 (offerings) X 6 (themes) X 6 (formats) or 72 content items to be produced in order to have holistic content coverage.

When we now do an audit, each content item can be evaluated against one of the 72 cells above to identify content gaps. Efforts could then be made to prioritize these content gaps and sequence them out to an editorial calendar.

What other sample data points can be included in a content taxonomy?

The rather simplistic example above has hopefully shed some light on the power of a well-defined content taxonomy.

While the three data points outlined above are most commonly used by savvy marketing teams, there are several other dimensions that can potentially be deployed. These include

  • Persona – What specific role is the content best relevant to? For example, a how-to guide written for a Senior Manager would likely be very different in its level of detail from the one produced for a hands-on configurator or product engineer.
  • Freshness– A simple measure here could be to classify content that is less than a month old, 1-3 months old, and produced more than 3 months ago. For an aggressive content marketing strategy, managers might consider pumping up production in order to have a higher percentage of content that is less than a month old.
  • Repurposing index– Content that is popular (based on search engine rankings, customer downloads, etc.) can be repurposed into other formats. A re-purposing index can quantitatively identify the number of formats in which the original content has been repurposed. In scenarios where this index is low, managers can look to focus more on repurposing existing content rather than creating new one.
  • Cornerstone content-The concept of topic clusters should be familiar to folks from the SEO world. Each cluster is built around a single cornerstone content which typically targets a highly competitive keyword. Additional content items are then produced that link back to the cornerstone content to provide ‘link juice’ necessary for a rankings boost. If multiple cornerstone content items are found for the same keyword, this could dilute rankings by distributing traffic to competing content.

What are the benefits of conducting content audits using taxonomies?

It is not uncommon for a vast majority of content audit focus to be placed on assessing the technical SEO aspects of content. Getting found on search engines is no doubt important but equally, if not more important is to do so as part of a top-down, repeatable content marketing strategy. Content audits should focus far more than they currently do on building a meaningful, highly client-centric content taxonomy and then classifying existing content against it. Some benefits of deploying content taxonomies include

  • Deep insights into content configuration and how it aligns with overall marketing goals – For example, if the focus is very much on driving traffic and not so much on client retention, the inventory should have a lot more content that is meant for a top-of-the-funnel audience
  • Clear content prioritization plan – A top-down content marketing strategy will usually have very clearly defined goals. Using a taxonomy-based approach will highlight which specific content types need to be prioritized
  • Significant cost savings in content operations – Taxonomy based content audits will inevitably highlight the need for new vs. repurposed content items. New items cost significantly more while repurposing existing content can typically be done at a fraction of the cost. For example, if it is known that the inventory only has a html blog post featuring a viral vendor comparison study, it might be far cheaper to make a video of the original blog post and post on youtube, than to make a new post from scratch.

Every b2b business is different in terms of its offering, focus, and expectations from content marketing and there can never be a cookie-cutter template that can be reused across clients. Instead, content strategists must take time to understand the client’s business environment and define a unique classification scheme that is both practical and impactful. To see how Syptus might be able to help with your taxonomy development and content audit efforts, please schedule a FREE discovery call

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