Are Your Blog Categories Helping or Hurting SEO?

Technically, blog categories and tags can help your SEO, but most people are using them in a way that actively hurts it.

The question to ask is: Do your blog categories actually help people find what they're looking for, or are they just clutter?

1. Why keyword-stuffed categories and tags get flagged as spam
2. The retail store analogy for structuring categories and tags correctly
3. How to fix an existing blog with too many categories
4. Using Google Search Console to avoid losing visibility during a cleanup

Get this right and your blog categories start working the way they should, guiding real visibility instead of quietly working against it.

Timestamps
[0:00] Introduction
[0:30] The real problem with blog categories and tags
[1:43] Why keyword-stuffed categories are a spam signal to Google
[2:23] User frustration and how it hurts rankings
[3:37] The retail store analogy for categories and tags
[5:11] What tags are for versus what categories are for
[6:38] What to do if you already have too many categories
[7:08] Using Search Console before you prune anything
[8:38] The rip the band-aid off approach
[9:08] How to rebuild categories and tags the right way

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Transcript

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Why Categories And Tags Matter

Meredith's Husband 0:33

I'm going to talk today about how to use your blog categories and tags to actually help with your SEO. Because what I see really very often, a lot of times a new student will come into the mentoring program, and one of the things that we do is we review their blog. And I see this situation probably more times than I more times than I want to see it anyway, is somebody has a blog. And let's say on their blog, they have maybe five or 10 actual blog articles. Okay, that's not the problem. Everybody starts with a blog. We all have five or 10 blog articles at some point.

The Too Many Labels Problem

Meredith's Husband 1:05

The problem is when we look at their categories and the tags that they are using inside their blog. And what happens a lot is they hit, let's say they have five blog articles. They have 24 categories and 48 tags or something like that. And they do that because they have heard either from Claude or from other people or just in general, or they have the misconception that you want to use your blog categories and tags to help with SEO by inserting your keywords. So the more keywords you put in there, the better it, the more it's going to help your SEO. And that unfortunately is not true for a couple reasons.

Keyword Stuffing Looks Like Spam

Meredith's Husband 1:47

Number one, doing that is something that is flagged by Google as spam. So that's a spam signal to Google when you take your keywords and you create categories and tags based on those keywords, especially if you have something like 48 different categories for five different blog articles. And that brings me to my the second reason why it's not good for SEO, is it's very aggravating to users. Okay. Can you imagine going to a blog and let's say you're interested in it and you want to see what that blog has to offer, and you find that there's, let's say, two dozen categories that you can choose. And pretty much every category you go to is just one blog article. Okay, that's not really a category. And the same is probably going to be true for your tags. How aggravating would that be to click around on all these links and just come back to the same five blog articles? Okay, Google recognizes that. And anything that is aggravating to your users is not going to be good for SEO. I've said this before, but if you are doing something that is, quote, I'm using air quotes here, if you're doing something for SEO and not for your users, that's bad SEO. And chances are good that it's that it's actually going to harm your rankings. You're going to have less visibility as a result. Now, I'm not saying that blog categories and tags cannot be used for good SEO. They absolutely can be and should be, but our goal is to figure out how to do that. We don't just want to obviously stuff our keywords in there. We need to figure out a way that it's really primarily going to be helpful to users. If it's helpful to users, it's going to be helpful to Google. It's going to be good for your SEO. It's going to be good for your visibility. Now, the difficulty is how do you do that? Okay, I can't give you a blanket rule when it's going to apply to everybody's website. But I did hear from a student once who actually had a story somebody else told them this. And it's, I think, a really good way to think about

Retail Store Model For Taxonomy

Meredith's Husband 3:40

it. And the way to think about blogs, I'm sorry, blog categories and tags is think about like a retail store or a retail website, but think about retail. A category would be something like outerwear or casualware, something like that. It's a category. A tag would be something like denim. Okay. Notice that neither one of those categories is really what you sell. Okay. You don't go to a store called outerware. You go to a store, it has a brand, and maybe you do go to that store because you want some outerwear. But then the tags are not what that company is known for. You know, a tag could also be small, medium, and large. As a shopper, you might want to see, oh, I want to see all the outerwear that you have in medium. Okay, that's helpful to a user. Maybe as a photographer, these might be something like if you have kids' photos, oh, I want to see all your kids' photos that are outdoors. Outdoors could be a tag. Kids' photos could be a category. Between categories and tags, the one that is going to relate more to your keywords is probably going to be categories. If you want to have essentially a category for each of your different services, that's probably fine. But definitely, absolutely, do not have 37 categories unless you have 37 products, essentially. So short of coming to the mentoring program and walking through this, the next best thing is to use that example as a kind of guide, okay, in creating your categories and your tags.

What To Do If It’s Messy

Meredith's Husband 5:14

Now, what happens if you already, if you're one of these people, and if you are, I'm not blaming you at all. It's the misinformation that has been probably generated by the SEO industry in the first place. And that's the reason you've done this. But let's say you have, you know, a dozen blog articles and two dozen categories and three dozen tags, and you have created them around your keywords. What do you do then? Well, there's two approaches here. And I would say they're the better approach and the probably the okay approach. The better approach is you're going to, and we do this is what we do in the mentoring program, we go to Google Analytics. I'm sorry, we go to Google Search Console and we see which of those pages are getting any visibility in Google. You know, is Google displaying any of your category pages in search results? Are they displaying any of your tag pages in search results? There's a good chance they probably aren't. But if they are, and any time that something is getting visibility in Google, I'm hesitant to just get rid of it completely. I want to err on the side of caution. So what we would do then is we go through and we pick and choose the ones, how we're going to start pruning those categories and tags while trying to avoid getting rid of anything that already has a visibility, i.e., has authority in Google. Okay. That I think is the best way to do it. The other way you can do it is if you're in that situation, it's like rip the band-aid off. Just get

Prune Carefully Or Start Over

Meredith's Husband 6:41

rid of all your blog categories and tags at once and then rebuild them. Now, I the reason I say this is probably less desirable is if you're doing this and you are getting impressions in Google Search Console for your category or your tag pages, you're going to see a decrease, a short-term decline in your visibility. So it's going to essentially hurt your rankings in the short term. But then in the long term, you can build it back the right way and get rankings that are ultimately be higher and last longer.

Rebuild For Long Term Visibility

Meredith's Husband 7:11

And then when you go back to rebuild those categories and tags, again, think of the analogy of retail and begin by thinking of your categories as being similar to the services that you offer. And you might have some additional categories. Like there's a good chance you you will have some additional categories, and that's fine. But then the tags are going to be used to help your potential clients, your potential customers drill down further in terms of their style. What do they like? What do they want? Are they a small, medium, or large? And if you can do that, what I would hope to see is the visibility for your blog pages slowly increasing over the longer term, i.e., months or longer. Okay, I hope this helps.