Turn taxonomy pages into landing pages that rank with Yoast SEO

When creating or editing a post or page, you can assign categories and tags to it. These categories and tags are your taxonomies. And every taxonomy has a page where people can find an overview of all the posts and pages with this tag or in this category.

These taxonomy pages make excellent landing pages, but you will have to optimize them. And that’s something Yoast SEO can help you with. Our plugin analyzes the page content for both SEO and readability, but also provides you with a snippet preview and helps you optimize social sharing. That way you can make sure your taxonomy pages become proper landing pages for your visitors.

Why should I optimize my taxonomy pages?
How Yoast SEO helps you optimize these pages

Why should I optimize my taxonomy pages?

Taxonomy pages have lots of potential. But it’s quite hard to rank with them if you don’t put any effort in. And although automatically generated taxonomy pages are quite handy in giving an overview, they’re not focused on enticing your visitors and keeping them on your site. This means that if you don’t optimize these pages, people will probably not hang around for long.

✅ They can help you build a killer site structure

Your taxonomy pages give visitors an overview of all the content on your site concerning a specific subject. Or an overview of all the products on your site in a specific category. And yes, that is why they make such good landing pages. But before we go into that, let’s talk about site structure. As you may or may not already know, site structure is a key element in any good SEO strategy. It’s what helps people and Google navigate through your site.

Site structure refers to how you organize your site’s content. And taxonomies, like categories and tags, are among the tools to structure your site. By doing this right, you can build a solid site structure that helps Google index your pages and helps your users find their way more easily.

✅ They make great landing pages for your visitors

Whether you have a shop or blog (or both), you want to make sure that visitors have the best user experience possible. And that means, landing on a timeless page that provides them with the information they’re looking for. Let’s say a potential customer is looking for a t-shirt and you sell lots of t-shirts in your online shop. It would be better to let them land on a category page with an overview of all the t-shirts you sell. Instead of sending them directly to one of the t-shirts you sell, which might not be the t-shirt they’re looking for. And the same goes for blog posts about a certain topic.

Of course, this is mostly the case with more commonly used keywords. The longer your focus keyphrase is, the more it makes sense to directly send someone to a more specific page. But considering that more general (and often shorter) keywords often get more searches, it’s definitely worth optimizing your category and tag pages to rank with these keywords!

✅ They can boost your SEO and conversion rate

Taxonomy pages may not feel like a priority in your SEO strategy, but be careful not to underestimate their importance. Poor site structure can lead to both indexing issues and bad user experience. Which is not good for your rankings and click-through rate. But don’t worry! By giving these pages a bit more attention, you can turn them into landing pages that rank and provide users with the information they’re looking for!

How Yoast SEO helps you optimize taxonomy pages

Our Yoast SEO plugin helps you optimize your category pages. But how? As with every other page or post on your site, our plugin analyzes the content on your taxonomy pages. It analyzes the readability of your content and how well you’ve optimized this content for SEO. For both SEO and readability, our plugin gives you feedback on how your taxonomy page scores right now and what you can change to improve this.

With our plugin you can turn your taxonomy pages into landing pages with a proper introduction. Landing pages that will be able to rank on important tags or categories on your site. Landing pages that give your users the information they’re looking for.

Extra features

✅ We make it possible to change the social details of taxonomy pages

In our plugin, you’ll find the tab Social. And this tab gives you the possibility to change the way your page looks when it gets shared on social media. You can decide what image will be shown, what the page title will be and what description will be shown.

✅ We provide you with a Google preview you can edit

The Google preview in Yoast SEO allows you to preview and edit what your page will look like in the search results. It has a mobile and desktop view and shows elements like your title, slug, and meta description. This way you can make sure your page looks the way you want it to when people see it in the search results.