WORKWEEK

I’m deep in the work of content taxonomy this week. In fact, it’s why I’m in Boston. I’m gathering in person with content stakeholders across the organization to align on content categorization and tagging. The goal is to walk away more aligned, and ultimately to update (i.e. clean up) our site-wide search functionality. 

It’s nerdy, and I love getting to hang with content directors from other organizations. We understand each other on a deep level, even though we report to different folks, produce different types of content, and have different goals of course. 

This group of women has been spearheading cross-organizational collaboration for the last year, at least. We’ve each come to know one another’s publishing schedule, teams, and goals. And, we work to punt projects to the right editorial team––depending on which goal it will best serve. 

All of that to say… yea, we will probably go get drinks after our half-day taxonomy workshop! 

Now for me, taxonomy work begins with keyword research. This isn’t because your category pages are necessarily going to rank, but instead because you want to know what people search for.

You want to know what words they use, how often, and what else is related to those terms. From there, you can create a topical hierarchy that maps back to your strategic narrative and information architecture. 

All of that work has already been done, and signed off on from product marketing––woohoo! Now, I’m taking it to my content counterparts where we’ll review the strategic narrative, product roadmap and information architecture, argue over word choice, use Ahrefs to Google various suggestions, and come up with agreed upon terminology and topical hierarchies we can use for the next year or more. 

This really matters. Because while our three teams work separately internally, our customers and prospects don’t see the content our company produces as different. To them, it’s all “Klaviyo content,” and to give them the best, most cohesive experience, each content team needs to be on the same page about which categories specific topics map back to, how many resources we are putting toward specific topics throughout the year (and when), and how we employ tagging––because WOW that can get out of control fast. 

I don’t have much for y’all this week (on my very, very little sleep) except for you to know that content directors at Klaviyo are spending a half day workshop focusing specifically on global content taxonomy. It’s that important. How your readers find your content matters a lot. Trust can be won or lost within your site search, or by improperly categorizing an item. That applies not just to your customer and prospect audience, but also to your sales and go-to-market teams. 

At large organizations, you run a content library, and it’s important to clean it up on a regular basis to maintain trust, and keep your regulars coming back.