What to do when you want the category page and landing page to be the same thing?

[NoahsDad]

I'm working on structuring some of my content better and I have a dilemma. I'm using wordpress and I have a main category called "Therapy." Under therapy I want to have a few sub categories such as "physical therapy" "speech therapy" "occupational therapy" to separate the content. The url would end up being mysite/speech-therapy.

However, those are also phrases I want to create a landing page for. So I'd like to have a page like mysite.com/speech-therapy that I could optimize and help people looking for those terms find some of the most helpful content on our site for those certain words.

I know I can't have 2 urls that are the same, but I'm hoping someone can give me some feedback on the best way to about this. Thanks.

[NoahsDad]

Hmmm.I'm not sure I'm following what you are doing (or vis versa)

You can check out my site if you'd like, and you can see I have big buckets for things (like therapy.) But I have so many posts under that, I need to make them into child categories. But if I do I can't use the url for the main 'landing' page. (If that makes sense.)

I checked out the link you posted and it looks like when I click on one of your category names I'm taken to a page that has a different url. Is there a reason for that? From what I understand it's best to let users know where they are going when they click on a link. Was there a reason you didn't have the url the same as the catagory they clicked on in your menu?

(I'm still learning so forgive me in advance if I'm missing something.)

[NoahsDad]

Thanks for the reply Lindsay, but that's the problem I'm running into. If I use the mysite/physical-therapy, etc pages for the detailed content page I won't be able to use that url for the categories of the posts. This is a blog so there are lots of posts that go into that bucket. You can check it out here.

[Lindsay]

Hi Noah's Dad,

Would a structure like this work?

mysite.com/therapy (discusses therapy in general and introduces each of the three sub-topics)

mysite.com/physical-therapy (detailed content page)

mysite.com/speech-therapy (detailed content page)

mysite.com/occupational-therapy (detailed content page)

Let me know if I've missed the boat entirely.

Lindsay

[Klarke]

I created a similar structure for this site.  There's 4 info categories.  I enabled 'categories' for pages and assigned each "landing page" to one of those categories.  Under the hood those "landing pages" are actually a child of one of 4 parent pages, which never get shown because the categories take precedence over pages.

Then sub-pages are created which do not have categories but have a parent which is a landing page.  From there it's just a matter using wp_list_pages to ensure subpages are linked to each other and their parent landing page..

Wordpress is really flexible, you can also look into creating a custom post type that has both hierarchy and archive capability, which is basically what I did above.