SEO Silos – What They Are and How to Create Them on Your Website

The top 3 Google search ranking factors are links, content, and RankBrain (a machine learning technology to help deliver search results). All of these factors are important, and I have emphasized the importance of each one in the past. But there’s more to SEO than these factors.

If you want to get the best SEO for your website, you have to dig deeper. You need to look at the factors that most people are not paying attention to. Only this way, you’ll have a competitive advantage.

I cover these kinds of topics on my blog. These topics are more like subtopics. Some people don’t even consider these things and expect to get rankings on the first page of Google. But when these things add up, they have a huge effect on your website’s overall SEO.

One of these topics is SEO silos.

What Are SEO Silos

Site structure is one of the most important (yet overlooked) topics in SEO. It helps search engines understand and crawl your website. So if your website structure is poor, you won’t get top search engine ranking, no matter how optimized your content is.

You can fix this issue using SEO silos.

Most websites on the internet contain a variety of products or services. With a silo structure, you group all of the pages on your site into sections by topic and build those separate groups of information. It increases the subject relevance and chances of high keyword rankings.

It is not the same as the commonly used flat structure. Most websites use the flat structure where most pages are copied into the root folder. This flat structure shouldn’t even be called structure, because everything is mixed up in one place and makes it difficult for crawlers to understand what the website is about.

Instead of copying everything into the root folder, group similar pages in subfolders. This way, crawlers will be able to understand your website’s main topics. It will make your pages relevant to search queries as well.

Visitors will also be able to access additional content on a topic easily, which makes your website user-friendly.

How to Create SEO Silos

​

I’ll let you know upfront: creating SEO silos is time-consuming. But it will pay the reward in the long run.

Take these four steps to create a silo structure for your website:

1. Figure out what the core focuses of your website are

If you are like most websites, you must be offering some products or services. These will act as the starting point.

Let’s look at it with an example. If you run a digital marketing agency, you can create separate silos for all the major services you offer, like SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing. Then, group the already built pages on these topics.

Not all pages can be combined into a silo, so don’t worry. For example, your “About Us” page will not become a silo, so leave it in the root folder.

If you are done with the main topics, and there are plenty of pages left, look for common themes among them. This way, you could group them into individual silos.

2. Organize your navigation to reflect your core topics

After selecting the core topics, it’s time to organize the website content into individual subfolders.

Let’s continue our SEO agency example from above. The subfolders will be:

www.yourwebsite.com/SEO

www.yourwebsite.com/social-media-marketing

www.yourwebsite.com/email-marketing

Then, place each of your pages into the appropriate folder. It means that if your website had a page like www.yourwebsite.com/ecommerce-SEO, it would be  www.yourwebsite.com/SEO/ecommerce-SEO.

3. Build a strong internal linking structure

So at the beginning of this post, I was talking about the important ranking factors in SEO. Creating links is one of them. But most people focus on getting links from other sites (backlinks). I know backlinks are a big authority signal, but there are other links to focus on too.

People will even add a few external links to other websites, but internal links get ignored often. A big reason to focus on internal links is they help search engine crawlers find the connections between your pages.

In the previous step, you have created the individual silos for major topics. Now add links between pages in each silo. Again, this will let search engines know that these topics are similar, and you have a vast amount of information on your website.

Not only that, but these links will also keep visitors on your site for a longer time. Most people will not visit other pages on your website unless you link them. So make this a habit for each piece of content you publish.

4. Keep adding relevant content to each silo

Making SEO silos is an on-going process. Each time you create a post, organize it with an existing silo.

You should strive to cover all silo topics in detail. Let’s continue our example from above. Review all the posts on SEO and other topics available on your website. It will let you know that if your website is the ultimate resource for learning SEO or not. If there are some information gaps, use them as ideas for new pages.

From there, the basics of SEO and content marketing starts again. You find an idea, research the proper keywords for it, and create high-quality content around those keywords. As growth continues, search engines will know that you are an expert in your field.

As I said, this is an on-going process.

Final Thoughts on SEO Silos…

Site structure and creating silos are necessary for SEO. But most of the time, these things are overlooked.

As a reader of my blog, you shouldn’t ignore these otherwise overlooked things.

So go ahead, and create relevant silos for your topics today.

And let me know what topic you want me to cover in the next blog post!