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What’s the Best Way to Categorize your Blog Posts?
You want to have categories on your blog that are meaningful for your readers.
Let’s imagine that one of the groups that you like to work with is people who are suffering with depression. If that’s the case, then on your website, you want to have a blog category for depression.
When people come to your site, and they get to your blog, they can click that category in your blog, and that will take them to a page where they’re be able to see all the blog posts that have to do with depression on your website. From there, they can navigate through those and read any of those posts.
Another example is if you have a specialty in working with eating disorders – if that’s the case, then you want to have a blog category for eating disorders.
Blog Post Categories and Specialty Pages
You’ll also want to have a specialty page for every one of your specialties.
In the previous example, you’ll want to have a specialty page for depression. In the second example, you’ll have a specialty page for eating disorders, but you’ll also have a blog category for each of these topics.
In the video above, we have an example of an eating disorder specialty page. You’d have eating disorder treatment at the top, and then the whole page is going to be optimized around eating disorders and addressing that topic.
To ensure your specialty page shows up on Google for eating disorder treatment searches in that area. And then this therapist also has a category, eating disorder treatment, and in that category for her blog post, she has a number of blog post that are sitting there, okay?
If I’m searching for on help on eating disorders or eating disorder treatment and I come to your specialty page, I can read over the content. Also, I can look over at the right side bar, everything related to eating disorders (see also ‘Eating Disorder Training For Therapists‘) on your site is in this eating disorders category for your blog. The person can easily click on one of your blog posts.
The key here is visitors don’t have to hunt around the site and to find information that’s of interest to them. It’s very easy to find what they’re looking for with this kind of setup.
Can You Have Too Many Categories?
You do want to be mindful that you don’t have too many categories. This is a mistake many therapists making: they’ll have 25 – 30 categories because they include everything under the sun.
You specifically want your categories to correlate with your specialties on your website. We recommending having a maximum of 5 – 7 categories for blog posts.
By keeping your categories to a minimum, you ensure your visitors won’t have to go through a long list. Instead of finding the content that interests them, they’ll just leave your site if you make them work too hard.
Blog Posts in Multiple Categories
You want to be mindful that you’re not putting your blog post in more than 2 categories. We often see therapists with categories for mindfulness and depression, and depression treatment, and bipolar, and feeling down, and mental health, and counseling – many of those categories are too vague and it’s a mess for people to navigate.
If you want to learn more about blogging for your therapy website, be sure to check out our free report: The 7 Creative Ways to Get Ideas for Blog Post Topics.