Website categories serve a specific purpose. They help structure content in a way that is helpful to readers and search engines. However, the problem many people are faced with is not knowing how to choose categories for niche sites.
That is because they neglect several important factors or simply don’t deem them necessary.
But knowing how to categorize each piece of content is vital for niche site success.
This article will teach you everything you need to know about choosing niche website categories.
How to Choose Categories for Niche Sites
Knowing how to select categories for niche sites involves several factors:
- Examining the needs of your audience
- Structuring your content in advance
- Limiting the number of categories per site
- Picking easy-to-understand category names
Targeting the proper categories for a niche site helps determine the site’s main topics.
It also assures the readers that they found the information they need.
Preparing and thinking ahead is important before choosing your niche site categories. The categories need to be broad but relevant to your niche.
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Consider the needs of your audience
There are often three reasons why you would create a niche website:
- You are doing it out of personal satisfaction and want to show your expertise
- You are doing it to help other people by providing helpful information
- You are hoping to make money from it
The second reason is the most important out of all three.
Even if you want to create a brand through a niche website and make money, you eventually do it for your readers. They are the ones who will bring traffic and profits to your site.
Consecutively, it’s vital to consider their needs and main points before deciding on the niche site’s content and categories.
Performing an audience analysis is an excellent way to find what readers are looking for. You can do this through several essential aspects like:
- The size of the audience
- The audience expectations
- The audience’s knowledge of a topic
- The demographics
- The psychographics
You can create targeted categories and plan your content by analyzing these aspects of your target audience.
Plan your content in advance
Having a well-developed content structure is important for two things:
- Helping your readers easily navigate your content
- Drive more organic traffic to your site
Before you choose categories for a niche site, you need to plan your content and content structure.
This means knowing what topics/keywords to target and in what direction your content structure will evolve.
Why is this important?
Because both your content and your niche site will develop over time, so you must lead that development and know exactly what you want to achieve with your content.
For example, you may want to start addressing individuals or small businesses with your niche site at the beginning.
But as the site grows, you may shift your focus to extensive and more profitable companies. So your content must be adapted to their needs.
Categories will help significantly with this, but only if you have a clear content plan and structure. And to have it, you need to focus on topical map and authority.
Limit the number of categories you choose
You may think having a category for each topic on your niche site is the preferred option.
But this often does more harm than good because it can:
- Make it more difficult for you to organize your content
- Overwhelm the readers with too many category choices
That is why most advanced niche sites benefit by using as few categories as possible.
So how many categories should a niche site have?
There is no standard rule to follow regarding the number of categories. It all depends on the number of topics, but even sites with thousands of topics can assemble them between five to nine major categories.
This means newly created niche sites should have three to five categories, each divided into particular subcategories if needed.
Another essential thing to remember is to assign one content piece to one category only.
Adding an article to several categories can confuse readers and search engines, hurting your site’s SEO performance.
Pick category names that are easy to understand
Knowing how to choose categories for niche sites also involves picking names that are easy to understand.
This is important for SEO, but more importantly for your readers.
Try to use clear, not too-specific names. People who visit your niche site should immediately know what it is about. The category name must be the signpost guiding the reader to the desired content.
There is no ideal length for the category names. You should keep them short, with a maximum of three words.
From an SEO perspective, choosing keyword category names is a good practice. This can help search engines understand and crawl even better content.
Why are Niche Sites Categories Important
Help your audience find the right content
Earlier in this article, we said that organizations create website content primarily for the readers.
That said, the readers need to know they’ve found the right content.
This is where categories offer their assistance. They are the primary indicators of what your content is about and whether or not it’s relevant to the readers.
Let’s say readers have found the content they were looking for on your niche website.
How will they proceed after reading it? Do you want them to remain on your site?
If so, you need to have proper website navigation, which is one of the reasons why categories exist.
No one wants to keep scrolling post after post, looking for a piece of information important to them. That kind of website structure is ultimately responsible for a high bounce rate.
What categories do is a group similar content topics together. This makes it easier for readers to navigate the site and quickly find the information they need.
Improve your website’s SEO
Categories are also beneficial for a niche site’s SEO performance.
They help with website structuring and adding hierarchy to your content and pages.
By doing so, search engines will better crawl and index the site, know what each page is about, and rank it in the SERPs.
Creating a broad category and adding relevant topics with internal linking will increase topical authority.
This will improve rankings, meaning new readers can easily find your site.
Conclusion
Using categories when designing and structuring a website is paramount.
But even though they are important, people still neglect to use them in their website structure. This results in poor performance and no traffic to their site.
Now that you know how to choose categories for niche sites, use them in your content strategy, and elevate your niche site to an improved level.
What is your take on website categories? Do you find them mandatory and helpful when structuring content?
Let us know in the comments below.