High-quality website content is crucial for engagement and conversion. It requires an investment of time, money, and resources, but that investment can be wasted if your prospects and customers can’t find it.
Consider Amazon. You’re not going to buy anything there (or even go to the site more than a couple of times) if their search results don’t give you relevant, useful options.
That’s where content organization and tagging come into play.
What Is Content Taxonomy?
Content taxonomy is the categorization and classification of the content on a website. An effective content marketing taxonomy enables several important functions, such as finding and re-using content, dynamically creating web pages, and filtering search results. It also improves the results of internal site search.

When you place a coffee order, you need to specify size and your caffeine preference, but you may not want milk. And you might go off the beaten path and combine two syrups. It’s the same with a content marketing taxonomy; some categories may be mandatory (content type), while others may be optional (product). Some like journey stage might be multi-select.
How to Develop a Content Taxonomy
The first step is to determine your required categories. Many are common to content-based websites, including:
- Media format
- Content type
- Review cadence
- Persona
- Journey stage
You’ll also want to consider your company’s needs and priorities. For example, if you’re global, your content might be translated into several different languages or you might need to categorize it by world region. And you’ll likely need several categories based on your products, services, or solutions. Keep in mind that this exercise should take existing content into account as well as any potential future plans, such as expansion into other countries.
With your categories established, next, you’ll define the classifications needed under each one, again looking at both the present state and future plans.
Voila! You now have the foundation you need to enable your internal site search to find and display relevant high-priority content. With this taxonomy as your cornerstone, you can organize and tag the content on your site so your customers (and your marketing and sales teams) can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.
[If that sounds like a daunting task for your business, TA Digital’s strategists specialize in working with our clients to develop that type of framework. Let’s talk about how we can help.]
Content Taxonomy Best Practices
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you’re developing a taxonomy:
- Use unique terms as categories and subcategories to avoid confusion.
- Stay away from jargon or internal phrases.
- Be specific — don’t use terms like “other” or “miscellaneous.”
- Avoid most acronyms.
- Don’t use special characters.
- Use title case and noun-based phrases.
About TA Digital
TA Digital is the only global boutique agency that delivers the “best of both worlds” to clients seeking to achieve organizational success through digital transformation. Unlike smaller, regional agencies that lack the ability to scale or large organizations that succumb to a quantity-over-quality approach, we offer resource diversity while also providing meticulous attention to the details that enable strategic success.
Over the past 20 years, TA Digital has positioned clients to achieve digital maturity by focusing on data, customer-centricity, and exponential return on investment; by melding exceptional user experience and data-driven methodologies with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we enable digital transformations that intelligently build upon the strategies we set into motion. We are known as a global leader that assists marketing and technology executives in understanding the digital ecosystem while identifying cultural and operational gaps within their business – ultimately ushering organizations toward a more mature model and profitable digital landscape.
Recognized in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Inc. 5000 list as one of the fastest growing companies in the United States, TA Digital is pleased also to share high-level strategic partnerships with world class digital experience platform companies like Adobe, SAP, Acquia, commercetools, Sitecore, and Elastic Path.
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