Your website is the most important communication portal between your business and your audience. When you rely on your website content to bring in traffic, create engagement, and drive conversions, it becomes essential to ensure that it is well-organized.
A powerful way to create clarity and ease of navigation is to create a silo structure for your website and blog.
What is a Silo Structure?
A silo structure is a type of website architecture where content is organized logically. It consists of hierarchical groupings including topics and subtopics. In other words, you can think about it as creating categories and sub-categories for your site and writing relevant content for them.
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The key to silo structures is having a high level of organization. You’re focusing on a niche or a theme overall. Then, within that theme, you have highly organized ‘silos’ or categories that are distinct but related. When you develop such hierarchies, you’re able to develop content that’s specific to each topic. Creating a website in this manner has a powerful impact on SEO, which boosts traffic, engagement, and conversions. Let’s explore how a silo structure can support your SEO strategies.
How Silo Structures Boost Website SEO
There’s no way to gain complete information about how or why Google or any other search engines rank a website. However, there’s one clear and consistent message: businesses need to provide quality content.
Silo structures support your content creation activities. 72% of online marketers focus on content creation as the most effective SEO tactic. This means that your site structure will play a pivotal role in enforcing the success of your content marketing. Let’s take a look at the different ways a silo architecture helps with search engine optimization.
Silo Structures Improve User Experience
The smallest problem on your website can lead to droves of visitors clicking the back button when they arrive on your site.
One of the most important features your business website should have is clearly structured content. When customers understand what your website is about at a glance and how to get the information they need, they’ll spend more time on your site.
Using a silo structure on your site creates ease-of-navigation and will improve user experience.
They Create Keyword Relevancy and Context
When indexing a site, search engines consider the relevance of a keyword in relation to the content on the page. It also takes the context of the website into consideration as well. For example, a blog post about a healthy salad needs to come under the category ‘recipes’ to make sense. Going further, the blog post needs to fit into the site itself. In this case, it could be a blog site about health and fitness. It doesn’t make sense for a blog about home repairs to include a post about a salad recipe. Keyword relevancy and context needs to be in place to increase your chances of being found online.
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Using silos to organize your content helps you to create posts that are relevant to the overall theme and to the categories as well. You create a greater chance of appearing as a result for a keyword when you create a suitable overarching context.
Ease of Interlinking
When creating backlinks to your site, it’s important to ensure that these backlinks help users discover content across your site. A silo structure will allow you to link between top categories to posts in subcategories, which can then link back to the home page. Such interlinking is valuable since it helps search engine spiders crawl your entire site. Once your site is crawled, it increases the likelihood that relevant articles and posts get ranked for specific search terms.
No Overlooked Content
With proper interlinking, you’ll improve the chances that little to none of your website content is overlooked by search engines. Search engines use links to find more content within a site. Best practices in interlinking suggest that you link content within a silo only. This ensures that your interlinks lead to relevant content and make sense contextually. If you have to link to other silos, it’s recommended to link to top-level categories.
Examples of Silo Structures
Silo structures can be physical or virtual. Physical silo structuring refers to placing theme-related pages within a single directory. You can create a virtual silo by carefully linking between similarly-themed pages. Ultimately, the idea is to provide a clear structure to search engines and to help people understand and find content easily.
Many eCommerce websites use silo structures to help people find relevant products. Silos can help people make sense of options that might otherwise be overwhelming. Websites like Barnes and Noble and many others use content silos to help people navigate products.
Membership sites, online courses, and forums can also benefit from creating silos. If you have a digital course with gated content, creating silos will help navigate multiple themes and topics. Users will find it easier to get the information they are looking for right away.
An online dance website shows how content silos help people find the right tutorial
Online courses can make classes easy to find with silos
Support Your SEO Efforts with Silo Structures
The main takeaway from this post is that organized content will improve the user experience which boosts your site or blog SEO. Creating a silo structure for your site can give you a clear strategy to help build content that’s structured and links across the site.
If you use a CMS platform, you can use a third-party tool to help create siloed content. There are many plugins available to help boost WordPress SEO including ones for creating silo structures. You can find all-in-one SEO plugins that will guide your content planning strategies.
Now that you have looked at how silo structures can grow your website, consider strategies to restructure your site. You’ll soon improve your chances of a higher ranking and greater subject authority for the right keywords.