Why Content Taxonomy Is Key To Going Headless

Creating terabytes of content spanning blogs, social media platforms, and other customer-facing channels isn’t uncommon for modern enterprises. Unfortunately, it can also be quite complex. As such, the ability to find and reuse content is critical for maximizing the ROI of any omnichannel content marketing strategy. 

An effective content taxonomy enables marketers to create high-quality, channel-agnostic content for headless delivery to a multitude of devices and touchpoints. In this article, we will examine the benefits of taxonomies for headless content management and explain how to structure your taxonomy most effectively.

Content Taxonomy In a Headless CMS

Content taxonomy refers to the hierarchical structure of content and the metadata that describes the content itself. It is a structured classification system that organizes content into categories and subcategories based on shared characteristics or themes.

In a headless CMS, content taxonomy provides a framework to categorize and organize content, making it easily navigable and retrievable across various channels. Many headless CMSs also use structured content, which breaks down content into reusable, predefined elements that can be dynamically delivered to different platforms and devices. 

From there, content modeling defines the structure, attributes, and relationships of content types within the system, creating a blueprint that ensures content is consistently organized and easily managed. Together, these components enable a headless CMS to deliver seamless, personalized experiences across multiple touchpoints while maintaining efficient and scalable content management.

Benefits of Content Taxonomies

Effective content taxonomies help maximize the ROI of content creation efforts and lead to improved customer experiences.

Reusability

While a headless CMS usually enables reusability with its flexible content delivery via APIs, the extent of this reusability is largely determined by the structure of content. If the content is created for specific channels, for example, it could still have limited reuse in an omnichannel marketing approach. 

On the other hand, a headless approach enabled companies to create content without the constraints of the web, but they still need a content taxonomy in place. That’s why channel-agnostic content modeling with flexible taxonomies is critical for maximizing the use of content across channels. Reusing content also brings benefits beyond efficiency and cost savings because it reduces brand inconsistencies.

Findability

It’s possible to have highly reusable content that’s not easy to find. However, speed and discovery are critical to omnichannel marketing and achieving a personalization strategy. 

With proper taxonomies in place, marketers can find the content they need quickly via search and filtering, and the system itself can automatically retrieve relevant content to tailor digital experiences to the individual. Findability prevents content silos from forming and content from being lost while also improving the customer experience. 

Why Enterprises Can’t Afford to Ignore Content Taxonomy

Despite the benefits of reusability and flexibility, there are also a few reasons why enterprises can’t afford to ignore content taxonomy.

• Challenges of Going Headless: Managing and organizing content in a headless CMS can be somewhat chaotic without a robust content taxonomy. The result is difficulty in delivering consistent user experiences across various platforms. 
• Artificial Intelligence: AI-driven tools rely on well-structured data to provide accurate insights and automation and are filtering into the entire martech space. Content taxonomy ensures that content is categorized and tagged correctly, enabling these tools to analyze, recommend, and personalize content effectively.
• Google Search: The Google Search algorithm continues to evolve and change every few months. With Google adding new AI features, proper content taxonomy improves SEO by ensuring content is systematically organized and tagged. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index, enhancing visibility and rankings.
• Omnichannel Experiences: Delivering seamless experiences across multiple channels requires easily accessible and adaptable content. A well-defined taxonomy enables efficient content reuse and consistent delivery across different touch points so that brands can create the omnichannel experiences their customers expect. 

How To Structure Your Content Correctly

With the importance of content taxonomies clear, you may be wondering what an effective taxonomy looks like. For a headless CMS, the most critical aspects of taxonomy are the metadata and relationships used to describe the content. You should initially define these elements while implementing your CMS, but you also want to continue testing and optimizing them.

Metadata

All information within the CMS should include basic metadata that makes it easier for humans and the system to organize and retrieve the necessary content. This often includes structural, descriptive, and systematic information.

• Structural: This is the most basic information that describes the content itself. Structural metadata could include a title, summary, author, and more. This critical data is usually based on the requirements of the system or front-end app or site where the content will be delivered.
• Descriptive: This information describes the purpose and audience of the content. For example, the CMS could have tagging and categories to group content into specific areas of interest. This is crucial for facilitating a personalization strategy.
• Systematic: This information is usually generated by the system itself to streamline information management. It could include unique identifiers, permissions or access rights, or different versions of the content.

Relationships

Defining content types in a hierarchy is often useful for organizing content efficiently. This could include a category and subcategory system or parent-child relationships between content types. 

By leveraging related content types, companies can avoid duplicate efforts and reuse specific portions of “parent” content for multiple “child” pieces. Although hierarchical taxonomies help make content more reusable, you must choose the correct levels to maximize searchability and manageability.

Building Powerful Taxonomies With CrafterCMS

To maximize the efficiency of your headless CMS for an omnichannel marketing strategy, you need effective taxonomies to repurpose and re-distribute content across many channels. Using taxonomies with CrafterCMS, however, makes content dramatically more findable and reusable. The platform has powerful content modeling, inheritance, and search capabilities that fuel headless content delivery.

CrafterCMS provides flexible content modeling capabilities that fuel headless content delivery. In addition, with a marketer-friendly visual content type editor found in the Crafter Studio interface, content authors can quickly define new content types with properties, data sources, and more to create a taxonomy that meets their specific business requirements. Structured content is usually stored as XML, so it’s not constrained to the web. These content types, therefore, can be structured to enable maximum content reuse across channels.

Along with flexible content modeling, CrafterCMS supports content inheritance out of the box. Since the platform stores content as structured markup — often structured as a tree — inheritance is intuitive. Enterprises, therefore, can further define an information architecture that aligns with their business.

The platform also leverages open source OpenSearch to make content more queryable. Using these technologies, CrafterCMS indexes the content and makes it available via complex queries. By defining tags and categories for content, it’s possible to filter or further narrow down your search results to find the most relevant information. The metadata you utilize also enables Crafter Engine to retrieve content for personalized digital experiences.

A CMS with headless content delivery is only half the battle. You still need to implement effective taxonomies and processes to find and reuse content for an omnichannel marketing strategy. CrafterCMS’s powerful content taxonomy capabilities can, therefore, drive personalized digital experiences across a multitude of devices and touchpoints.

Learn more about how CrafterCMS provides personalized content experiences in our webinar: Personalized Digital Experiences for a Cruise Liner.