If you check a draft's relevance, you need to choose whether you are assessing its subject, audience or another aspect of the brief. A taxonomy is a named set of categories covering one dimension: subjects, audiences, industries, products or locations. OppAlerts provides 11 taxonomies containing 25,622 categories. Comparing writing against several of them asks several different questions about the same piece.
Why the dimension matters more than the category
Most content review asks one question: what is this about? That is the subject dimension, and it is the least interesting of the available ones, because writers are usually right about their subject.
The mistakes happen in the other dimensions. A piece is about the right subject and addressed to the wrong reader. It is about the right subject from the wrong industry's perspective. It names a city without reading as being about that place.
Those failures are invisible to a subject check, because the subject is correct.
What each dimension answers
| Dimension | The question | The failure it catches |
|---|---|---|
| Topic or subject | What is this about? | Drift into a related subject |
| Audience | Who does this read as being for? | Written about the supplier rather than to the buyer |
| Industry | Whose field does this sit in? | Framed from the wrong side of a transaction |
| Product | What thing is this about? | A page meant to sell one product mostly describing another |
| Location | Where does this read as relevant to? | A city named repeatedly with no local substance |
The audience row is where most useful findings come from, because the supplier's perspective is the natural one to write from and the wrong one to publish.
Why one category per taxonomy
You select up to three categories, each from a different taxonomy. Selecting two from the same taxonomy is refused.
The reason is structural rather than arbitrary. A result reports a position within one taxonomy, and two categories from the same taxonomy have no single position to report. Asking whether a piece is nearer to one subject or another within the same set is not a question the report is shaped to answer.
The practical effect is that you state three separate intentions before measuring: what it is about, who it is for, and where or what it concerns.
Choosing categories honestly
Choose before writing, or at least before reading the result. Choosing afterward invites picking whichever category the draft turned out to match, which measures nothing.
Choose the specific category rather than the safe general one. Selecting a broad parent category will usually return a comfortable result and tell you nothing, because most writing in the field sits somewhere near it.
Where no category fits your subject well, that is worth noticing rather than working around. It can mean you are writing about something unusual, or that the piece is too broad to have a subject.
What a taxonomy comparison is not
It is not a classification of your page for anyone else's benefit. No search engine or assistant sees these categories, and nothing about the result is submitted anywhere. It is an editorial tool.
It is also not a ranking of category importance. The order returned is by proximity, not by which category you should have chosen.
The list stops at ten per taxonomy. After the first few matches, remaining categories may have little relevance. Focus on the first few results.
A practical routine
Select a subject and an audience category before writing and note them in the brief. After the first draft, run the comparison on the opening section and on the body separately.
The opening is where drift starts, and checking it alone frequently locates the problem in one paragraph.
Choose the taxonomy when you define the editorial check. The resulting comparison can then answer the specific question you have about the draft.
See how comparing meaning helps you edit, reviewing writing against an audience, or Content Optimizer.