Information Architecture with Topic Maps for Better SEO

Topic maps can be used to visualize your SEO strategy as well as building awesome internal navigation. Combined this makes for great internal and external findability. Get found in the search engines. Customers can easily navigate once they land on your website when proper information architecture is applied and connected with semantic topic maps.

A topic map is basically a visualization of connected concepts. Concepts could be locations, brands, or even people. A topic map is these concepts structured via associations. In Crystallize you have the possibility of defining any number of topic maps and each topic map can have any number of concepts that are associated.

Topic maps make it easy to manage different hierarchical concept structures. Below you can see a simple geological topic map. Simple and clean.

In the scope of Crystallize, you are able to attach any topic to either a product, document, or folder. One topic can be attached to any number of products and are called occurrences. Topic maps are a key mechanism in the product information management (PIM) in Crystallize.

The usage of topic maps is mainly intended to create better findability in your ecommerce solutions. Navigation, the association between products, or complex relations are easily built by using topic maps.

There are different levels of findability like internal navigation and visibility in Google. In any solid content strategy, you should have ecommerce SEO as one of the main priorities. Of course, as always make sure you have frontend performance as a technical requirement when building our awesome ecommerce experiences. Check the ecommerce SEO checklist for a detailed list on how to become visible in Google.

When creating a content-driven marketing strategy it is important to keep track of the main keywords and associate them with content. We find it super useful to add a topic map specifically to track SEO.

Simply put we create a hierarchy of keywords we want to make visible in Google. We track these using Moz and use Crystallize to visualize the keyword hierarchy using topic maps. Below you can see an excerpt of the topics used for SEO in Crystallize. We add these keywords to content and can easily track which keywords are used where and which topics to cover in our content. Nice. Simple and focussed.