Creating a user-centered taxonomy
Laying the groundwork for improved site navigation and technical SEO.
COMPANY
NerdWallet
PROJECT TYPE
Content strategy, taxonomy
TEAM
Product Manager: Christine Connelly
Content Strategy: Katie Glick
Background
NerdWallet has a content library consisting of thousands of articles on financial topics. The existing taxonomy for that content library was set up for internal use and was not built for or appropriate for surfacing to users. At the same time, the SEO team was looking to improve the global navigation of the website, and create new topical hubs to help users more easily find content on a variety of different pages.
A key requirement for both of these projects was organizing the content library into a taxonomy that met user expectations and matched our users’ mental model for each financial topic that we cover. As a UX content strategist, I was tasked with creating this new taxonomy. I would perform any UX research needed, create a draft taxonomy, then get alignment from stakeholders before finalizing.
The key metrics
Crawlability: Crawlability is the foundation of technical SEO health. Good crawlability provides both search engines and users easy access to and understanding of the depth and breadth of our content library. An effective crawlability strategy requires a strongly user-centric information architecture.
Page depth: A disproportionate amount of articles on NerdWallet are 10+ clicks from the homepage. This can lower their relevance to search engines and make them difficult for users to locate organically. We want page depth to be 5 clicks or less on average. A user-centered taxonomy was required to build the navigation infrastructure needed to achieve this goal.
Retention: The majority of our traffic comes from organic search, so it’s important that we meet the searcher’s specific needs. When the first page visited doesn’t answer the user’s question, they often don’t know where to go from there, so they leave and return to Google. An improved information architecture would provide a better-defined journey with clearer next steps for greater retention.
Search ranking: The better that search engines can understand our site hierarchy, the better they will understand the depth of our authority and the breadth of our content, and the higher we will rank.
The process
Step 1: Review the internal taxonomy and content library
The first step was to review our existing taxonomy to see how much of it could be translated into a hierarchy of categories for each financial vertical that we cover. To support that, I also looked at a pulldown of our content library to get a sense of how much content lives in the various topics, to figure out whether some topics could be merged together or further broken down, and to identify topics that needed to be reworked because they used internal jargon or functional rather than topical labels.
Step 2: Perform card sort tests to understand the user perspective
Next I performed some testing with a panel of volunteers that match our site demographics via Usability Hub. First I performed an open card sort exercise, where you present participants with a number of topics on cards and ask them to sort the cards into groups according to which belong together. They are then asked to name each group. I took all of the topics housed under a single financial vertical (eg, credit cards) and presented them to our panel for sorting.This test gave me an early read on how I could group topics together in each vertical in a way that our users would easily understand and navigate.
Then I took those results and created a rough draft of what a user-centered taxonomy for the financial vertical might look like and put that draft taxonomy to the test by giving users the proposed category names and asking them to sort various topical items into those categories. For example, Banking categories might include Checking accounts and Savings accounts, and items to sort might include: a compound interest calculator, a list of the best high-yield accounts, an article about how to write a check, and a review of the Chase ATM network. These results help us validate that the category names are communicating clearly what types of information users will find in each category.
Step 3: Create a working taxonomy
Using the results of the UX research, my next step was to create a draft taxonomy that reflects the users’ mental model as determined by our research, and represents all of the major topics we cover in each financial vertical. This draft taxonomy is presented to stakeholders, including SEO managers and editorial leaders along with the results from the research that was performed. Together, we review the taxonomy and make any adjustments necessary to ensure that we don’t cannibalize important SEO rankings, and that we accurately represent the contents of our library.
Step 4: Categorize the content
The final step is collaborating with my SEO and editorial stakeholders to assign each URL in our content library to the new categories. This is a big job, so we all divide and conquer, and I have built in some functionalities to working spreadsheet to help make it more efficient. Once this has been completed, the new categories are bulk imported into our content management system so that all content is programmatically tagged with the appropriate category.
The results
Sorting our content library into categories that we can reveal to users was a technical requirement for several important projects to improve the overall navigation of NerdWallet’s website, so this project didn’t have metrics that were being measured on its own. However, the creation of this taxonomy made several other projects technically possible. Since the launch of these new projects, we have seen increased search engine crawl activity, reduced page depth on more than 1,000 URLs, and improved core web vitals, which are key to any technical SEO strategy.
Here’s an overview of the new features made possible by this taxonomy:
Topical hubs
With the recategorization complete, we can create hub pages for the new hierarchical categories. These hubs serve as a waypoint for users to orient themselves to the topic and see what NerdWallet can offer them, including more articles, videos, tool pages, and calculators. This helps us surface more content to users by topic in a way that’s helpful in getting them to the specific type of content that will answer their financial questions.
Breadcrumbs
Having each article assigned to a taxonomy category allows us to place breadcrumbs within the article that lead back to the topical hub and allow a user who has come directly to a page via search to explore more of our content on that topic without having to hunt it down.
BEFORE
Global navigation
AFTER
Originally, our global header was only able to support navigation to individual pages. This meant that our global header was focused on only the top performing pages, and the rest of our content was reliant solely on organic search for traffic. With a new taxonomy for our content, and new topical hubs, our global header is able to send users not only to individual pages, but to browse entire topics and their content. This allows us to reduce the page depth of our content library, improve site crawlability, and help users better navigate our enormous library of content.