For Business-Relevant URL Categorization, Use Content Type

Any in-depth SEO analysis needs to provide business-oriented bottom lines. Whether you want to perform a structural website analysis, a full content audit or set up ongoing monitoring and problem detection, you'll want to draw conclusions that are related to :

• what's in the website (content),
• or what users want from it (types of search queries in search engines).These are interconnected, and both aspects normally translate into a categorization based on content types.

The must-have: a categorization based on page content types

A categorization for SEO can be applied at different levels:

• content type: for instance product page, product category page (such as a list of products of the same type), user comments page, article page, topic page, internal search results page, etc. This type of segmentation relies on page templates, which should reflect the website's business. Each template generally has one content type, sometimes several. Those segments can be translated into URL patterns (for instance, "begins with ‚Äò/product' and ends with <5-digit number id>.html") in the vast majority of cases.
• semantic universe: applicable if the website covers several universes that may require different strategic approaches or have very different traffic patterns. For instance, you could categorize by department in an e-commerce site that sells a wide variety of products: clothing / books / electronics etc. This complements the content-type view and can be very helpful. Its relevance really depends on the website, its content and its business model.
• domain: If you have several websites, then an additional high level segmentation at the domain level also makes sense. Even more so if the websites are based on the same structure, for instance country sites covering different markets.

The ‘content type' view is the one you should focus on. If there is only one dimension to your categorization, it should be this one. There shouldn't be a second's doubt about it.