If you are a professional service firm marketer, you know your firm’s blog is often one of the most heavily frequented sections of your website. A good blog can help you stay top-of-mind with clients and prospects, increase referrals, and build brand loyalty overall. Your blog should be rich with content, and that content should be easy to find by your site visitors. But Categories and Tags, two basic blog functionalities that really help your blog’s usability, are often misused, over used, or ignored completely. By following a few simple steps, you can improve your blog significantly and enhance your visitors’ experience considerably.
BEST PRACTICES FOR DEFINING CATEGORIES
Always start by defining your categories. Think of categories as your main topics, like the chapters in a book or main sections of a newspaper (Top Stories, Local News, World News, Sports, Food, Culture, etc.) If your blog focuses on one very specific subject, you may not need categories since all of your posts will reside under that single umbrella. However, most service firms have a main blog where all of their content resides. Thus, categories are important to help readers find what interests them most.
For professional service firms, categories may mirror the core industries you serve, such as Corporate, Technology, Government, Education, Life Sciences, etc., as SMMA Architects does on their blog:
If your clients target the services that you offer, you may want to look at your services or practice area list on your website when creating categories. Law firms often use this method, with categories such as Employment Law, Litigation, Intellectual Property, Trust & Estates, etc. But be sure you limit practices to just the main ones you will blog about regularly. Ruberto Israel & Weiner mixes practice areas with content topics:
THE IMPORTANCE OF TAGS
There are several kinds of tags that are used on websites, and there for the term can be confusing. When administering sites, you can (typically) add “Meta Tags,” “Title Tags,” “Header Tags,” and “Blog Post Tags.” In this article I am specifically speaking of blog post tags, but for information about all types of tags, this article is a good resource.
Post tags are used for more granular classifications than categories. Think of them more like a book’s index, tags should help visitors find information that your blog often covers. Tags can be single words or phrases. If you use words like News, Events, Awards, etc. for category headings, then tags should include the major industries you serve and main services you offer. Tags can be used for topics like Projects, Employees, Recruiting, Sustainability, and anything else that may apply to multiple blog posts.
CATEGORIES, TAGS & SEO
Categories and tags can improve your search return rankings, but unless your firm relies heavily on B2C sales and new business from Google searches, I would not focus too heavily on SEO when choosing words and phrases for tags and categories. Concentrate on what your site visitors will benefit from most, and don’t try to second-guess Google. One tip: If your clients are primarily regional, you may want to include local town and city names as tags, but only when they make sense. For example, if a post is about a project in a town you work in regularly, include that town name as a tag. Visitors may be interested to read posts about work you’ve done in their area, so adding location names is logical as well as helpful in terms of SEO.
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