Blog Categories
When you are writing a blog for your small business, you may realise that you start to have ‘sets of blogs’ that are focussed around a particular theme, area or for a particular audience.
Most blogs have the functionality to group a number of blog posts together in to ‘categories’. It is a bit like a filing system.
Let’s learn more about blog categories, why they are useful to have and explore the search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits too.
What are blog categories?
I think having categories are really important for business blogs. The date is all well and good, as is a list of the latest posts, but people about your areas of expertise.
The quickest way to illustrate that is to have a list of categories, within which each individual post sits. It will instantly illustrate all of the areas that you cover.
You will see these listed on the right-hand side of my blog on a laptop view (or at the bottom of the page on a smaller device, such as a mobile phone). You can see an example in the image here. The number represents how many blogs sit in each category.
You can choose to put a blog in to more than one category.
Why is having blog categories useful?
Apart from using categories as your own filing system, I think there are 5 great reasons to use categories on your blog.
1 – Helps organisation and navigation
If you blog regularly, it will soon become more and more difficult to find specific blog posts. Whilst there is usually some level of search functionality, putting your posts in to categories offers your readers another way to easily find what they are looking for. It also gives them a sense of the purpose of your blog and what you are trying to cover, as well as how your blog posts ‘group’ together.
If you write a series or a number of successive posts (to be read one after the other), it ensures they are neatly placed together if you create a category just for those posts.
2 – Helps SEO
A category heading is another search optimisation tool.
A category is essentially another hyperlink, another internal link and another ‘page’ for your website. If you click on a category heading it pulls all of the blogs in that category on to one page, and gives it its own URL. The category heading then appears in another website address – another place search engine ‘bots’ are looking for keywords.
Your categories are very likely to align with your keywords. They will be what your business is about after all.
3 – Helps appeal to different audiences
I think it is really important that you identify your audience and write consistently. However, I also appreciate for some business blogs you might want to speak to ‘specific’ audiences depending on the topic. For example, some blog may appeal to suppliers versus clients; or trainees (if you run workshops) versus customers (those who buy products from you).
Categories offer a simple way to help readers identify this. For example, you could have a category called ‘For Suppliers’, ‘For Trainees’.
Remember categories don’t have to be about the topics covered in a blog, as mentioned they can be based on audiences or type (i.e. resources, guides, articles).
You can also create a kind of subcategory, such as ‘For Trainees – Training Materials’ and then ‘For Trainees – Course Information’.
Category titles are very flexible! But do consider what will be keyword rich.
4 – Helps you evaluate what your readers like best
I am a big advocate of evaluating your blog and seeing which posts work well for your business. This is not just all about statistics, i.e. page views, comments and likes. It is also about what helps to convert sales and what gets your clients talking about your blog – either directly to you, on social media or between themselves (not sure how you find this out…so just ask!).
Evaluating just post-by-post can make it difficult to assess, however, if you have categories then you can make a more meaningful assessment.
Find out which category seems to work best? Which category pages are visited? Which relate to common search terms?
5 – Helps Inspire Future Blog Posts
As well as evaluation and what is working well for your business, simply looking at the numbers in the brackets next to your categories will help show you how balanced your blog is across the different categories.
If one category is a little ‘lighter’ than the others then consider writing for those categories! Simple! It’s a great way to be inspired and offer a balance of topic coverage.
Categorise and re-categorise your blog posts
As with a lot of digital publishing, nothing has to stay ‘concrete’ and the same.
Figure out what you think your categories should be, start ‘filling’ them with blog posts, but then, if there is one that doesn’t seem to be used very often or two categories that can be combined in to one, then you can easily do so.
Want to learn more about good blogging practice and SEO benefits?
There are loads of little hints and tips that really help to ensure your blog works hard for your business …including categorisation.
If you want to start a blog and want help with the best practice ways to do it (or to outsource it from the start), do explore my Blog Writing Services, 121 training and online ‘Blogging Basics’ course.