How To Optimize Content Organization for 2025: Think Context, Not Hierarchy

How do you approach content optimization?

It’s easy to get stuck working on one piece at a time — trying to make one thing rank higher, reach its conversion goal, or have the intended impact.

But what if you zoom out to optimize — or simply organize — all the content across all the channels your brand uses?

Would it help you elevate your entire content ecosystem so that all the parts work together to amplify your messages and impact?

Reorganize your content library

Optimizing an entire body of content is far from new. In fact, the renowned Greek poet and scholar Callimachus built the first Google about 2,300 years ago.

Despite common misconceptions, the Pinakes (as it was called) wasn’t simply a catalog of the works housed in the Library of Alexandria. It was a comprehensive inventory of all Greek literature that included details about each author, their other works, and biographical information.

The purpose of the Pinakes was similar to Google’s stated mission: to help “organize all the world’s information and make it accessible and useful.”

No surprise — helping people find information today requires a vastly different approach.

Organizing your brand’s body of content as a library gives people a standardized way to find a lot of information quickly — if they know what they’re looking for.

A library is hierarchical. You start with a topic or author and then drill deeper through subcategories until you find something that suits your need.

Before Google’s debut, people used the same hierarchy-based idea to organize the internet. The first iteration of the Yahoo! search engine, for example, worked like a keyword search through manually assigned content categories and subcategories.

Today, that style of organization makes less sense. That’s because the role of content is to pull audiences into a body of experiences about something they may not have realized they need or want.

Think about it. If you wanted to educate yourself about the future of business, would you start in a library? And, if you did, how helpful would it be for the librarian to simply point you to the Business category?

Yet even in 2024, marketers often default to organizing thought leadership resource centers as an inside-looking-out hierarchical library.

Worse still, I see many businesses still cataloging it by content type. I’ve seen so many B2B resource centers organized into these categories: e-books, white papers, videos, and articles.

That approach forces audiences to choose their content experience before choosing a topic or question to answer.

To meet audience needs in 2025, you must consider how to optimize your body of content for traditional search engines, AI search engines, social channels, vertical platforms, and (yes) the people who navigate their way to your content.

With all these competing needs, how do you decide what to optimize for and how to do it?

The modern content optimization framework

Historically, marketers have optimized content by some categorized hierarchy because it worked well for search engines.

But AI and other technologies, such as personalization and targeted content, make that approach less helpful.

Try this framework to help you develop a modern approach to content optimization:

• Intent
• Authority
• Internal context
• External context
• Described

Let’s look at this one by one:

Intent

Understanding your audience’s intent is almost more important than understanding who they are. Think about it. If you have 1,000 new visitors coming to your website, what’s the most valuable thing you can know about them? Is it who they are? Or is it why they came?

Optimizing the way you organize and present your content can help you understand their intent before you ask them who they are.

How do you do that? One way to start is to organize and categorize content by your customer’s objective or desired outcomes. Detailed category and content titles can help.

For example, you might have a thought leadership paper titled “Visions of a New Future for Our Industry: What You Need To Know as You Contemplate Change.” You might have a category (or metadata) assigned for that content in a category called “Understanding the Future of Our Industry.” The outcome associated with that category might be creating demand.   

The point is that somebody downloading a white paper in this category is NOT a qualified lead yet. So you’d measure awareness, not leads. And deciding all the channels where this content will live should be predicated on this categorization. In other words, you won’t need to optimize this content for a sales enablement experience.

Your goal should be to make the information that matches the person’s intent easy to find and available in experiences designed for that intent.

Authority

When you develop any content — whether the goal is to educate, inspire, entertain, or provide instructions — authority, details, and depth matter.

You can’t deliver authority in a single piece of content. Instead, you communicate it through your library of content. In other words, you link, connect, and serve relevant and increasingly in-depth content so your visitor never needs to go anywhere else.

A large, global, B2B technology organization I work with banned PDFs from its thought leadership program entirely. This means that their content will all be organized in a manner that enables cross-linking and non-linear consumption. That change creates a better experience for the brand’s audience and the ability for the brand to lead people to multiple “best-next” experiences from thought leadership. This kind of forward-leaning content optimization will contribute to content success in 2025.

Internal context

The internal context attribute is about meaning. It might be your brand’s point of view about the world or its unique take or solution to a problem. It might be the information you provide in proximity to other information.

Organizing your content by points of view (or story pillars or narratives, if you prefer those terms) is similar to organizing by intent. But in this case, the organizing principle isn’t tasks or questions but rather the disparate elements that make up the holistic argument your body of content puts forward.

For example, a technology company focused on cybersecurity might organize one section of its resource center by the brand’s point of view on the future of AI and include another section on the future of financial security in a digital world.

Your content’s clear, consistent, and differentiated point of view or meaning makes it stand out when people search for answers. How the content gets displayed also communicates a context, which can deepen the engagement.

I call this the “settle the bar bet” scenario. Someone at a bar says, “What’s the answer to that question?” You answer. They search and find something that confirms your answer. Usually, the questioner nods, puts their phone down, and moves on.

But what if your answer included even more contextual information or a “best next” step to spark their interest? They might read it aloud to their friend, saying, “Did you also know that ….” They might even bookmark it for future reading. That’s the internal context you want to achieve.

External context

Technology and AI-driven solutions also enter the optimization framework to help with conditional contexts. These might include how the content will be organized at a user or account level or whether it will be served on a mobile device or desktop computer.

You could decide that first-party data, such as location, buying history, content consumption, and device type, will inform the content’s organizational appearance.

You could optimize based on whether the content will be gated or not. I recently wrote about the new twist in the gating debate caused by zero-click and AI-oriented search. Both trends raise interesting arguments for making digital content scarcer instead of more abundant. 

If you do decide to gate, remember to consider intent. What motivates your customer to go through the gate? Perhaps instead of asking for personally identifying information, you ask, “Why do you want this content?” 

You could use the responses (the data) gleaned from this form to understand not just what you think the intent is behind accessing this content but what the customer is seeking. This can help drive insights into which stories/content should be promoted on different platforms, such as social media, vertical sites, and other interfaces, that better match what customers are actually looking for.

Described

If the external context is an attribute that helps you organize content by how it’s displayed based on consumer behavior or context, the described attribute involves creating organization systems that let audiences filter, categorize, measure, personalize, and activate content. Described elements usually fall into three categories:

• Descriptive metadata: categorical terms about the piece of content such as the audience persona, buyer’s journey phase, author, or product category.
• Administrative metadata: content management elements such as publication dates, expiration dates, rights management, legal or compliance categorization, etc.
• Structural metadata: details that help connect one content asset to others such as a set of data that reacts to a prompt like “If you like this, you might like this too.”

Move beyond Callimachus – optimize like a media company

I wouldn’t recommend using all of these methods, but you can (and should) include multiple approaches to reorganize your content.

The key is to start optimizing for humans. When you understand your audience and its intent, you can optimize content for findability.

Once you create in-depth, valuable, informative, and engaging content with authority, you can bring out the best meaning in your content and drive better internal context.

With that achieved (or in progress), you can move to the tech side of optimization with external contexts such as mobile, search, social, etc. You can describe that content so machines can understand and do more with it and use technical solutions to present it optimally.

Put more simply: The modern content marketer must emulate both Callimachus and modern media moguls. Your brand’s body of work is the poems and stories – you are the media distributor.

Your goal isn’t just to provide an information resource. It’s to engage and guide people to the best stories when they need them.

It’s your story. Tell it well.

Updated from a June 2023 article.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute