5 Minute Blogging Tip: Check Your Categories

​Websites are living breathing things. They should evolve and change over time. Sometimes that means that you have to go through your content and tighten it up, check for freshness, or fix mistakes.

​There’s something that you can take in the next five minutes to make sure that your blog is the best that it can be.

​Review your Blog Categories

This post is inspired by a mistake that I noticed the other day on my own website. When I was publishing a new blog post, I noticed that I had two nearly identical categories.

​This is a problem that happens all of the time on blogs, particularly if your blog has a number of contributors, and if you lack a plan for how you will use categories.

Why Do We Need Categories Anyway?

Here are a few reasons that blog categories are helpful: firstly, it makes it easy for a reader to find more information on the same topic.
 
Secondly, when you add a category you are creating a landing page for content related to that category. That can be helpful when you want to send someone to a series of blog posts, like we do on our homepage.

A promo for a blog post series on our homepage.

This could potentially also be a tactic used to create keyword-optimized landing pages for search engine optimization.

​What to Look For When Reviewing Blog Categories

There are a few things that you should look for when reviewing blog categories:

1. Near duplicate categories – in my case, when I took a look at the content on each of the categories listed in my blog, I realized that I had only posted one blog post to “Social Media Audits”.
   
   
2. Categories that only have one post in them – categories are meant to group similar posts, so if you only have one or two posts in a given category, it might not be worth having a separate blog category defined.
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3. Categories that are no longer relevant - For example, you may have categories related to events that have passed, or products or programs that are no longer relevant to your business or organization. In general, it’s better to only have categories that are “evergreen” in nature—which never go out of date.

How Do I Remove Duplicate Categories?

This varies based on your content management system, but it’s typically doesn’t take much effort to fix. Here are Wordpress instructions on managing categories. 

​In my case, I simply went into the erroneously labeled blog post and removed the incorrect category from that post. Categories that aren’t being used won’t be displayed on your website.

Final Tips

It’s easier to manage categories if you are checking them on a semi-regular basis, such as quarterly. ​

Larger organizations with many contributors may wish to document categories that should be used in their editorial guidelines, as part of their content governance practice.

What questions do you have about categories, or blogging? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Sarah Best

CEO + Chief Strategist of Sarah Best Strategy, a boutique agency that makes social media work for you.  Award-wining social media, SEO, advertising, & marketing consulting services. We supercharge teams and extend bandwidth. Follow us on Facebook, connect with me on Linkedin.