Communicating with expertise and authority is a top priority and there’s no better starting point than outlining your content with a topic taxonomy as a way for creating content that has the best chance of ranking.
A taxonomy is a system for classifying, organizing, and naming things based on shared characteristics. It is used in science to categorize things but it’s a word that is also used to categorize anything, including topics, making it an effective SEO concept to understand.
Topic Taxonomy
In the context of content, a topic taxonomy refers to the organization of information into different topics and subtopics. Organizing content this way creates an outline of the inherent topics and subjects covered within a webpage of content.
The goal of a topic taxonomy is to provide a structured framework upon which to craft a meaningful document that is semantically relevant to a given topic.
This is a way of looking at content from a high level, seeing the forest, not the trees.
How To Build A Topic Taxonomy
Technology like deep learning, neural networks, and RankBrain have helped Google evolve away from keywords and toward understanding the topics that are in content.
Search queries are about topics can can be categorized by topic like this:
Beauty > Makeup > How-to
A webpage can be categorized in a similar way. Webpages are rarely ever about one topic because there are always subtopics.
So, when thinking about a topic, you can also think about what the parts of that topic are.