Your website is integral to getting to your visitors and customers – as it is the bridge between your business and your audience. Thus, organizing your website SEO architecture to drive leads, boost conversions, generate revenue, and increase your bottom line is essential.
For that to happen, your website needs to have an information silo to enhance your business’s optimization. If your website is improperly siloed, everything will be mixed up, and your brand goals won’t be achieved.
You may have heard about website silos but haven’t been paying attention to them. So, you might ask, ‘What is the meaning of silos?’
We all know silos are cylindrical structures for storing feeds, seeds, or harvest. Now, relating it with website content simply means a folder where specific web content is arranged for users to spot and access.
This article will discuss all you need to know about silo structure, its importance to SEO structure, and how to build one for your website.
What Is Silo in SEO?
SEO silo is simply the idea of organizing or grouping different web pages hierarchically. This arrangement makes for easy navigation by a visitor and improves SERP rankings.
Your website may contain different products, topics, and services. Without proper organization, all this information will be all over the place. Imagine walking into a library, looking for books and research on colonization, and discovering that there’s a section for various topics. So, you’d have to painstakingly pore through every shelf looking for those specific books.
With an SEO silo structure, you’d be able to group them accordingly, making users locate your content easily and place your website as a place your website a reputable source for different information.
In plain terms, content silos SEO create categories and subcategories and curate content into them.
Why Are Silos Structures Important?
You know what silo structures are. But why are they important? We explore some of the reasons below:
Excellent User Experience
One relevance of silo contents is that they create a great user experience. It is an important aspect of your digital marketing efforts. Silo structures ensure your website can be easily navigated by users looking for specific content.
Users who cannot easily find specific content would be tempted to leave. With siloed structures, they will remain on your website longer, which is often a great sign to search engines like Google and Bing.
It Makes Your Website Stand Out
Search engines consider the indexing of your web pages for SERP rankings. With content silos, you know exactly what web content to create and optimize the page for specific keywords.
Thus, when people search for specific queries, Google crawls through your web pages and structure within split seconds, revealing the results to them. Keyword-based silo structures also ensure that your web pages rank higher than your competitors.
Website architecture establishes your website as a resource for specific content.
Easier Interlinking
Another reason siloed structure is important in SEO is that it is easier to interlink between web pages. It is easier to interlink or backlink different pages if they are related to the same thing.
It also increases the possibility of ranking higher on SERPs for specific keywords when the content is siloed.
Zero Room or Overlooked Content
Silo contents ensure that no content is overlooked by search engines. Every web page has a place and is properly indexed to a category. When users search for specific keywords, search engines thumb through your website for the content to display for them.
3 Types of Silos
Silo structures are important to every website, and you’ve seen why. However, it comes in different types: physical, virtual, and organizational. We discuss them below.
Physical Silos
Physical silos are the process of creating categories into the directory of your website. Thus, it gives a literal edge to it. Say, for instance, you own a website that explores cooking recipes for people of all ages. If you want to create specific recipes for people looking to lose weight, you can do so under the category Lose Weight Recipes.
It’s going to look like this:
Cookingrecipes.com/lose-weight-recipes
Physical silos essentially create ‘folders’ on your website where you can create and curate specific content within that folder. So, let’s say you made an article called ‘Diet for vegans,’ the URL will look like this:
Cookingrecipes.com/lose-weight-recipes/diet-for-vegans
This is an example of physical silo structure, with content indexed under Fiction and Poetry in The New Yorker:
Virtual Silos
Virtual silos structure creates a silo by interlinking different web pages on a website. This is quite different from physical silos, where you’d have to place content under a silo category.
In a virtual silo structure, all the corresponding pages will link to the category page and vice versa. The supporting pages also link to each other, so long as their content is related. This adds to the relevance of their landing pages.
This also ensures that those pages are linked with rank for the specific keywords on SERPs. If your category page bears a particular keyword, you should also ensure that the supporting pages are optimized for them. The SEO content structure makes it easier for users and Google bots to crawl and navigate through them seamlessly.
Organizational Silos
Organizational silos allow your web pages to rank for different keywords and topics. With this silo structure, search engines have an idea of the topic of each web page.
These silo structures are quite beneficial for B2B, B2C, or e-commerce businesses where products and services can be indexed according to the category.
How to Build an SEO Silo
Creating an SEO content structure is beneficial for your website. If you haven’t done so, how do you start?
1. Determine the Core Aim of Your Website
Before thinking about creating website architecture, you need to identify the core aim of your website. Put yourself in the mind of your audience’s shoes and imagine the kind of content they’d be searching for.
You can also look at Google Analytics and see the web page generating the most views. After which, you can create related content.
2. Decide the Silo Type to Use
Now that you’ve identified the theme of your website, you need to choose the type of silo structure to implement on your website.
Your choice of silo structure SEO will depend on the website and brand needs. While physical and virtual silos are suitable for content creation, organizational silos are perfect for eCommerce.
3. Organize Your Navigation
After deciding on the silo structure for your website, you need to ensure smooth navigation for your visitors to access different content.
Suppose your website name is PlanetNews – a news agency; you can arrange your categories into:
Planetnews.com/breakingnews/
Planetnews.com/sports/
Planetnews.com/entertainment/
Planetnews.com/tech/
This ensures that news articles that fall into the breaking news, sports, tech, or entertainment are properly indexed.
4. Conduct Keyword Research
You also need to conduct keyword research about your website and its offers. Conducting keyword research gives you insights into what visitors are looking for and how to incorporate it into your blog.
You can use tools such as SEMRush, KeywordTool, Ahrefs, and Keyword Kegs to run some keywords search.
5. Create High-Quality Content
Ranking higher on SERPs is mainly dependent on the content you publish. While creating silos for various categories and topics, you must ensure that your content is engaging, authentic, and fun to read.
You can create content centered on your website if you offer products and services. You should also interlink between content to encourage visitors to remain on your website. Your web design also needs to be on point, too.
SEO Silo Structure Example
Below are common SEO silo structure examples from websites.
SEO Silo Strategy
SEO silo strategy is deciding which silo structure works for your website. This is essential to ranking higher on SERPs, improving user experience, and establishing your website as a relevant resource.
There are 3 major SEO silo strategies to implement for your website architecture. They include:
● Physical silo
● Virtual silo
● Organizational silo.
You should select the silo strategy that is suitable for your website.
Conclusion
Silo structure is a must-have for your website. While it makes your website more logical and organized, it also improves your SEO and makes you rank higher for specific keywords. It also helps you create relevant content – as there’s a category you can add it to.
You should practice the highlighted tips to get started.