Editorial
The Gist
- Taxonomy as CX foundation. Structured categorization helps customers quickly find what they need and strengthens their relationship with your digital platforms.
- AI enhances taxonomy management. Natural language processing and automated tag suggestions speed content organization while preserving consistency and logic.
- Better organization boosts results. Well-managed taxonomy improves personalization, SEO, search usability, and content analytics—driving engagement and business goals.
Exceptional customer experience means customers can quickly and easily find what they are looking for on your website, online community or other digital platform whether through information architecture, AI-powered search, chatbots or other features. This experience helps the customer to build a relationship with your site and all it has to offer and keep them coming back again and again.
Using a predefined, structured taxonomy to organize content helps support the customer and leads them to the information they need (content, products, support and more), creating a meaningful digital experience. With the explosion of AI in daily lives, AI-powered tools and natural language processing offer ways to save time when creating and managing taxonomy. They can also provide support to content editors, making recommendations for tags based on the content.
Table of Contents
- What Is Taxonomy and Why It Matters for Customer Experience
- Best Practices for Building and Managing a Digital Taxonomy
- How Effective Categorization Improves Customer Experience and Business Outcomes
- How Is AI Transforming Taxonomy Management and Personalization?
What Is Taxonomy and Why It Matters for Customer Experience
The father of modern taxonomy is Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish biologist who created a system for classifying living organisms published in the book Systema Naturae in 1735. Since then, we’ve been using taxonomies to classify all sorts of things outside of the animal kingdom, and they are everywhere! Across the internet, from CMSWire to media outlets to shopping sites, content and products are classified using facets and terms to guide users to what they are looking for.
There are complex taxonomies with many facets and levels and simple ones that are flat with just a handful of terms. What makes sense for your use case depends on customer needs, the breadth of information available and what experiences that taxonomy supports (e.g. shopping, content, customer support).
Digital Taxonomy Best Practices
A quick-reference checklist to align structure, language and governance with user needs.
| Principle | What to Do | Why It Matters | Primary Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Understand the Audience | Match taxonomy depth to user goals and content breadth; avoid unnecessary terms. | Reduces friction and speeds path to content, products and support. | UX/IA Lead |
| Use Customer Language | Base terms on search data, keywords and audience research; include synonyms. | Improves findability, SEO relevance and voice-search alignment. | SEO & Content Strategy |
| Keep Logical Hierarchies | Place terms in a single best-fit location; avoid duplicate placements. | Prevents confusion and maintains predictable navigation and facets. | Information Architecture |
| Design for Flexibility | Plan for additions/changes; version and document update rules. | Enables rapid response to new topics and changing standards. | Product/IA |
| Be Consistent Across Channels | Apply the same taxonomy across web, community and support systems. | Supports omnichannel experiences and coherent recommendations. | Platform Owner |
| Govern Tagging Practices | Train editors on facets, specificity and over-tagging; use AI suggestions with human review. | Improves data quality for search, related content and personalization. | Editorial Operations |
Best Practices for Building and Managing a Digital Taxonomy
Whether creating a brand-new, structured taxonomy or assessing whether an existing taxonomy puts the customer first, there are four things you need to consider. Here's a more robust explanation of the chart above:
- Understand your audience. Align complexity with the needs of your visitors. Only include the complexity that the customer (and content needs). A large online store with a broad range of products will need a complex taxonomy with many facets and several levels of hierarchy. A website with content on a small range of topics might need a flat taxonomy with 10 tags. Don’t include 300 terms when only 10 are needed.
- Pay attention to how customers use words. The language and terms you use should reflect how customers use words and search for content and should also include synonyms to accommodate variations in language between regions and groups. Look at your keyword and search data to make sure top terms are represented to support your SEO efforts and consider the impact of voice search (which brings a more conversational approach). Audience research can help to understand how YOUR users search, browse and interact with content and what words resonate with them.
- Don’t lose sight of logic. Taxonomies can be complex and span an array of topics. Use logic when placing terms in a hierarchy. It would be strange to go to a shopping site and find the term boots nested under jewelry. Think about where something best fits — and don’t place a term in multiple places in a taxonomy.
- Flexibility is essential. Given the pace of change we all experience, assume that you’ll be adding and changing terms in the taxonomy regularly, and build it to accommodate shifting standards. When a new topic (think Covid-19 in 2020) that didn’t previously exist appears, make sure you are able to quickly accommodate so that customers can find relevant and important content or products.
- Use your taxonomy consistently across customer experiences. Use your taxonomy consistently across digital platforms; don’t have one taxonomy for the website and do something different with your community platform. You want the taxonomy to support the omnichannel experience.
- Ensure teams are tagging information consistently. Most content management systems have an option for global taxonomy management, allowing for easy updating and application across content types. But just having the taxonomy is not enough; content editors need to be trained on how to correctly use it. They should know to be as specific as possible, not over-tag and understand the role of each facet of the taxonomy and what it drives on your digital platform (e.g. search filters, related content etc.). AI tools can speed up the tagging process by suggesting tags, but for many industries it is still important to have a person review these recommendations.
Related Article: Best Bets on Content Taxonomies
How Taxonomy Drives Outcomes
Linking taxonomy choices to CX impact, KPIs and where users experience the value.
| Outcome | What to Implement | Metrics To Track | Where It Shows Up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Related Content Discovery | Topic/attribute tags and cross-link rules powered by shared terms. | Related-click rate, session depth, time on topic | Article/product “related” modules, topic hubs |
| Personalized Experiences | Profile- and behavior-driven rules mapped to taxonomy facets. | CTR on recommendations, conversion rate, return visits | Homepage slots, feed modules, email triggers |
| SEO Performance | Clean hierarchies, topic hubs, structured URLs and metadata. | Organic sessions, ranking on topic clusters, impressions | SERP listings, topic pillar pages |
| Stronger Site Search | Facet filters and synonym dictionaries tied to taxonomy terms. | Zero-result rate, refinement use, search-to-click rate | Search results pages and filters |
| Content Intelligence | Analytics by category to find gaps and overperformers. | Topic share of engagement, content gap fill rate | Editorial dashboards and planning |
How Effective Categorization Improves Customer Experience and Business Outcomes
Understanding how a well thought out and managed taxonomy can help your visitors find and navigate your digital platform is important. Here's a more in-depth look:
- Allow users to access related content. A well-structured taxonomy enables intuitive content grouping, making it easier for users to discover related articles, products or resources. By connecting content based on themes, topics or attributes, users can explore additional relevant information without needing to conduct separate searches.
- Deliver personalized content. Categorization and tagging help power personalization by allowing content to be dynamically served based on user behavior, preferences or demographics. When visitors interact with specific topics, an effective taxonomy enables systems to surface recommendations tailored to their interests, improving engagement and satisfaction.
- Improve SEO performance. A strong taxonomy improves website structure, making it easier for search engines to understand and index content. Clear categorization, optimized metadata and well-structured URLs enhance keyword relevance, increase discoverability and improve rankings, ultimately driving more organic traffic. Creating topic-based pages, collecting all content on one topic also helps drive SEO performance.
- Support the search experience. A pre-defined, structured taxonomy enhances site search by ensuring consistent language and driving filters and facets that help users refine results and find content efficiently. By incorporating common user queries and terminology, taxonomy-driven search improves usability and reduces frustration.
- Use analytics to identify popular content areas and content gaps. Categorization enables better content analytics by revealing which topics generate the most engagement and which areas are underserved. By analyzing trends across categories, organizations can refine their content strategy to better meet customer needs and create new content that visitors will find valuable.
How Is AI Transforming Taxonomy Management and Personalization?
Even in the age of AI, a well-structured taxonomy is still essential to maintaining an exceptional customer experience. AI still needs a structure to understand the relationship between your content, products and services.
And with a strong taxonomy, AI can better interpret user intent, recommend more relevant results and generate content that aligns with the needs of the customer. Don’t forget to pay attention to taxonomy. It is a building block that supports your customer's journey and drives a positive (or negative) digital experience.
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