How do categories impact SEO?

[#1]

Hi,

Our business blog has dozens and dozens of categories that need to be cleaned up. I'd like to chop the list down to maybe 10 categories. But before that, I wanted to ask what best practices or strategies there might be for managing and organizing blog categories in HubSpot, and what impact categories might have on SEO.

Any thoughts?

[#2]

Hi @BrianASCI,

Having too many categories makes it difficult for readers, so it's definitely best practice from that perspective to use what makes sense.

From an SEO perspective, you aren't going to see earth-shattering improvements,  but can help. Here's an article from Yoast that I found particularly good at explaining this.

When you do narrow, be sure to 301 redirect your old category pages appropriately.

Josh

[#3]

Hi @BrianASCI 

Yes, I'd say less is more when it comes to ranking in search with blog category (tag - if you are using Hubspot to create your blog posts) pages.  You can use your blog category pages to target broader topic keywords and your blog posts themselves to target long-tail keywords.

I often see blog posts added to many different categories and many posts end up in the same categories from month to month. What this does is create a lot of duplicate category pages (which isn't great for SEO), as each category page pretty much contains the same list of blog posts.

You should aim to create as many category (tag) pages as you can regularly populate with unique content (generally I'd say 5 to 10 top-level categories max) i.e. your category pages don't largely contain all of the same posts from month to month. For  SEO and users, you are trying to make your category page a useful and up to date resource on this particular topic. 

If you are comfortable to do so (requires blog template edits), I'd also recommend adding a unique description at the top your category page to further differentiate it from other category pages and provide further keyword context.