Website architecture plays a crucial role in determining the overall search engine optimization (SEO) success of a website. Among various architectural approaches, one that stands out for its effectiveness is the silo structure. In this article, we will explore the concept of silo structure and its impact on SEO, providing you with practical insights and tips to implement silo structure effectively.
When it comes to SEO, a well-organized website architecture is essential. Silo structure refers to a strategic way of organizing website content into distinct categories or silos, each focusing on a specific topic or theme. By structuring your website in this manner, you can create a logical hierarchy that search engines understand and appreciate. This, in turn, can lead to improved search engine rankings, increased organic traffic, and better user experience.
A silo, in the context of website architecture, represents a section or category that contains a group of closely related content. Think of it as a virtual container that holds all the relevant information on a particular topic. Silos are typically organized in a hierarchical manner, with the main category at the top and subcategories branching out beneath it.
Implementing a silo structure brings several benefits to your website’s SEO efforts. Firstly, it helps search engines understand the context and relevance of your content, allowing them to rank it more accurately. Secondly, it provides a clear and intuitive navigation system for your visitors, enhancing their overall user experience. Finally, silo structure enables you to showcase your expertise in specific areas, establishing you as an authority in your niche.
Silo structure greatly improves the overall architecture of your website by organizing content into logical and easily navigable sections. By grouping related content together within each silo, you create a cohesive and comprehensive resource for both search engines and users. This helps search engines identify the primary focus of each silo and improves the internal linking structure of your website.
To effectively implement silo structure, you need to create siloed categories that reflect the main topics or themes of your website. Start by identifying the broad topics or areas of expertise that your website covers. For example, if you have a website about fitness, your main silos could be “Cardio Workouts,” “Strength Training,” and “Nutrition.”
Once you have determined your main silos, you can further group related content within each silo. For instance, under the “Cardio Workouts” silo, you could have subcategories like “Running,” “Cycling,” and “HIIT Training.” This hierarchical organization helps users navigate your website effortlessly, finding the information they need without getting overwhelmed.
Internal linking plays a crucial role in reinforcing the silo structure of your website. When creating content within a specific silo, it’s important to incorporate relevant internal links to other content within the same silo. This helps search engines understand the semantic relationships between your pages and reinforces the topical relevance of each silo.
To optimize your internal linking within silos, pay attention to anchor text. Anchor text refers to the clickable text of a hyperlink, and using descriptive and keyword-rich anchor text helps search engines understand the context of the linked page. For example, if you have a page about “Cardio Workouts” and want to link to a specific article within the same silo about “Benefits of Running,” using anchor text like “Learn about the benefits of running” provides valuable context to search engines.
Keyword research is an integral part of any SEO strategy, and it plays a significant role in optimizing siloed content as well. For each silo, conduct thorough keyword research to identify relevant search terms that users use to find information related to your siloed topics.
Integrate your target keywords naturally within the content of each silo, ensuring that they appear in important elements such as headings, subheadings, and the body text. Additionally, optimize the URL structure and meta tags (title tags and meta descriptions) of your siloed pages to include the relevant keywords. This helps search engines associate your silos with the targeted keywords and improves the visibility of your content in search engine results pages (SERPs).
In addition to its impact on SEO, silo structure significantly enhances the user experience of your website. By organizing content into silos, you provide visitors with a logical and intuitive navigation system, allowing them to find the information they’re looking for with ease.
Improved navigation and usability lead to reduced bounce rates, increased time spent on your website, and higher chances of conversions. When users can quickly locate relevant content within a silo, they are more likely to explore other related content and engage further with your website.
Implementing silo structure involves a few technical considerations to ensure optimal performance. Firstly, XML sitemaps play a crucial role in communicating your website’s structure to search engines. Generate separate XML sitemaps for each silo and submit them to search engines to ensure proper indexing and crawling.
URL structure also plays a role in supporting your silo structure. Ensure that your URLs are SEO-friendly and reflect the hierarchy of your silos. For example, a URL for a page within the “Strength Training” silo could be “example.com/strength-training/best-exercises-for-building-muscle.”
To address duplicate content issues that may arise within silos, implement canonical tags. Canonical tags indicate the preferred version of a page when multiple versions with similar content exist. This helps search engines understand that the content within a silo is intentional and avoids any confusion or penalization due to duplicate content.
If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you can take advantage of plugins specifically designed to facilitate the implementation of silo structure. These plugins provide functionality to create and manage silos, customize navigation menus, and ensure compatibility with different CMS platforms.
When implementing silo structure using a CMS, customize your navigation menus to reflect the hierarchy of your silos. Ensure that users can easily navigate through the main categories and subcategories of your website. Additionally, consider utilizing widgets or sidebars to highlight related content within each silo, further enhancing the user experience and encouraging exploration.
Regularly analyzing and monitoring the performance of your silos is essential to optimize their effectiveness. Keep track of organic traffic and keyword rankings specific to each silo. This allows you to identify areas of improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance your silo structure further.
Furthermore, monitor user behavior within silos, such as time spent on page, click-through rates, and conversion rates. This data provides valuable insights into how users interact with your siloed content and can help you identify any usability or engagement issues that need to be addressed.
In today’s mobile-centric world, it’s crucial to ensure that your silo structure is optimized for mobile devices. Responsive design plays a key role in providing a seamless user experience across different screen sizes. Make sure that your silos adapt well to mobile layouts, and navigation menus are easily accessible and user-friendly on smartphones and tablets.
By ensuring a positive mobile experience within your silo structure, you can cater to the growing number of mobile users and improve your chances of attracting and retaining mobile visitors.
While implementing silo structure, it’s important to be aware of common mistakes that can hinder its effectiveness. One common mistake is overcomplicating the silo structure by creating too many silos or subcategories. Keep your silo structure streamlined and focused, ensuring that each silo represents a distinct and significant topic.
Another mistake is neglecting to update and maintain your silos regularly. As your website evolves and new content is added, it’s essential to review and update your silo structure accordingly. Outdated or irrelevant content within silos can undermine the effectiveness of your silo structure and negatively impact user experience and SEO.
Lastly, it’s important to always prioritize user intent and relevance when creating content within silos. Avoid keyword stuffing or creating content solely for search engines. Instead, focus on providing valuable and informative content that caters to the needs and interests of your target audience.
As technology advances, so does the field of SEO and website architecture. Two future trends that will impact silo structure are voice search and advancements in AI and machine learning.
With the rise of voice-activated virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, optimizing siloed content for voice search will become increasingly important. Voice search queries often differ from text-based queries, requiring a shift in content creation and optimization strategies. Consider incorporating conversational language and long-tail keywords into your siloed content to align with voice search trends.
Additionally, AI and machine learning advancements will shape the way search engines understand and interpret content. As search algorithms become more sophisticated, focusing on creating high-quality, in-depth content within your silos will be key. Stay updated with the latest developments in AI and machine learning to ensure your silo structure aligns with search engine requirements.
Implementing a silo structure is simple at the strategic level. I’ll illustrate with the website Dietmasters.com.
As you can imagine, a site like this is aiming to be a great hub for all types of diet advice. In order to be competitive, it will need SEO-relevant content to cover all the possible pages within a topic like this.
The best SEO keyword that a site like this could target is “best diets”. That’s a broad SEO-friendly term that could incorporate any number of landing pages, service pages or blog posts.
To plan for an SEO-friendly silo structure, we have to be careful about how we set up the website and the first rounds of website content.
To make a site that’s ready for siloing you should follow these three steps:
Step 1: Start with good keyword research
Step 2: Break the topic into supporting pages
Step 3: Break the sub-topics into long-tail keyword phrases
This first step will help us learn what intent people have when they’re looking for search terms like “best diets”.
Follow your normal process for choosing keywords, and compile what you’ve learned into a research doc to help you develop content.
We’ll need to know the right keywords so that we can break the topic down into narrow SEO keyword phrases that can be used to build blogs and other content.
When we’re done, we can build content that matches the needs of search engine users and choose thoughtful anchor text.
Imagine that you performed this research using a search engine or your favorite research tool, and learned that the search terms with the most keyword relevancy for a site like this were:
These three SEO keyword phrases will make up the top-level category pages for our sample site.
For the category structure, we’ll think of these pages as lateral to one another. They’ll have their own child pages, but they won’t necessarily link to one another.
When developing content for each supporting page on the site, we want to choose keyword phrases that are even more specific. That way, we can target commercial intent.
The next step would be to take those top-level site topics, and break them down into child pages/support pages so that we can create content that will speak to more intentional audiences.
This use of keyword phrases reinforces the relevance of topics that are in the top level of the site hierarchy.
Let’s use the “keto diet” search term as an example. Your research may show you that people who are using search engines to find information about the keto diet keyword terms are hungry for content about:
These keyword terms will make up the next level of supporting content pages for our site, but we’re not quite done.
We can keep going. Let’s use the meal plan page as an example, and look at the SEO-friendly search terms that could be developed from that.
Your research may show you that people who use search engines to look keyword phrases like keto meal plans may also be looking for content about:
This will create another level of support pages (at least for our example site). These are the most long-tail SEO keyword phrases.
Using this research, we now have an idea for how we might want the site architecture to appear, and what kind of content to feature on the site.
Implementing a silo structure involves planning how the link structure will be established within the site hierarchy. Let’s jump into how to do that now.
If we were planning out a strategy for our example site, the hierarchy that we’ve developed from our research might end up like the sample website below.
This graphic establishes the hierarchy of the different topics we’re going to cover on our example site.
Starting with the top level, any one of these pages could be a blog, or a service page, or landing page prominently featuring SEO content.
To bind all these content topics into a silo, we need to properly link them together.
The link structure matters a lot, because it’s going to determine:
If all of the pages in the site hierarchy only linked to the pages below them (for example, keto diet to meal plan, supplements, and app), then the link juice would stop traveling the second it hit a dead end.
Links built to the long-tail pages wouldn’t travel at all because they’re at the bottom.
The other SEO measure—topical relevance—determines how relevant a page appears to be based on its relationship to other pages on the site. If we strictly follow the hierarchy rather than applying a silo, each page would have links from a single parent page, and no others.
Obviously, the hierarchy here is not a configuration on its own. We need to develop a silo so that we can empower and control both link juice, and topical relevance. Let’s jump right into the most popular configurations, and whether each one is right for your site.
The 5 linking configurations below will show you how to develop your contextual links within a silo system for a powerful SEO effect.
To be clear, I’m talking about the links that appear in your content—the ones that can be found scattered throughout the paragraphs in a blog or other type of content.
These siloing plans for your website structure don’t include links in your sidebars, top level navigation bars, or other site navigation.
For simplicity’s sake, each configuration we’ll cover uses the same site (our Dietmasters.com example site) as a model. This will allow me to show you how the same site can accomplish different goals with a different SEO silo.
The green arrow lines in each of the siloing examples below represent the direction that internal links will travel on the website.
The line starts in one silo page, and the arrows represent the pages that they should be linking out to.
What is it?
I call this silo configuration the top-down recycle configuration because of the way the siloing creates a continuous link juice loop. The juice runs through your website from the top, to the bottom, and then back to the top silo page.
One of the key features of this configuration is the fact that all the pages at the bottom of the hierarchy come back and link to the silo page at the top.
I call this connection “completing the loop”. It’s called that because any backlink that is pointed to any of the pages on this website is going to flow through the entire silo. Every page gets a little bit of the juice.
If the lowest pages within a silo didn’t link back to the top, the juice for any links that were built to the lower silo pages would dead end as soon as they were built. The website as a whole wouldn’t benefit, just the linked page.
Where does it excel??
The best thing about this configuration is the power it has to recycle link juice from to any of the pages in the siloing configuration. Rather than going one way, the juice for every link moves in a circuit until it hits every page on the website.
That’s no small SEO advantage. It should improve the search engine performance for every page. However, let’s consider that this siloing configuration also has some serious shortcomings that could affect your website.
Where does it fall short?
The topical relevance provided by this siloing configuration isn’t great, and it’s potential to help you in search engines is limited by that.
Also, relevant content doesn’t get the full benefit of being linked from many other pages on the website.
As an example, look at the keto diets page. It only gets one link from the best diets silo page. Again, the meal plan page below that one only gets one link from the keto diet silo page.
Also, I feel that if you’re angling for a sale, you probably want to go the opposite direction when linking in your SEO silo. It wouldn’t bother Google search engine spiders much, but there’s an issue with what live readers experience.
A website in most niches would want the content to send live visitors the other direction. You want to link people who land from long-tail SEO keyword phrases back up to content that is more commercial in intent.
What is it?
The reverse silo configuration is very close to the last siloing model we looked at. However, there are some important differences in how link juice moves throughout the website, and how the content relates to the others.
Look closely, and you’ll notice that in this configuration, the links move in both directions from the silo pages. Not only are the parent pages all linking down to the child pages, but each one also links back up to the next closest parents.
If backlinks were built to any of these pages, the juice would empower the pages above and below. Additionally, each page appears more topically relevant because multiple related pages in the content silo link back.
Where does it excel??
I’ve used this model on more than one website in the past. It’s one of my favorites for two main reasons.
First, I appreciate all the value that the relevance provides. The silo pages are only linked to website pages that have content directly relevant to them (unlike the last model). That’s a plus for search performance.
Additionally, this siloing model has the power to point live readers to more general and commercial pages on the website even if they land on a longtail page that’s at the very bottom of the structure.
I think this siloing model is great for beginner websites that have to be really careful with their internal linking for the sake of their SEO. It may help their content perform better on search engines with less risk.
Where does it fall short?
I don’t think this particular siloing model has any dangers for your website associated with it.
Google Search engine spiders can easily navigate it, and readers should glide easily toward more commercial topics and landing pages from whatever content they’re reading.
That doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
It could be the case that it just doesn’t do enough for your website depending on your niche and SEO needs. There’s more you could do to achieve search supremacy.
The following models will cover some more complex ways to empower your website.
What is it?
The serial siloing model is named for the way it interlinks pages to create topical relevance laterally in addition to up-down. The silo page interlinking strategy for this configuration plays out like this:
In this one, a parent page links down to one child page on the website. That child page then links to all of it’s siblings, and one in the sequence links back to the parent page again.
Like in the past content silos, the link juice is free to flow to the entire website. It flows along a different path, but will still hit all of the pages in some order.
Where does it excel?
To be perfectly honest, I don’t see much search or human value in this siloing model.
It’s not going to confuse Google search engine spiders, and your living visitors won’t get lost, but your website isn’t likely to see SEO benefits except in some rare cases.
You will see some sites employing this model for their content, and that’s typically in cases where a parent page has so many topics underneath it (50+) that it’s impractical to link all the content together.
In cases like these, linking laterally could help search engines understand your site a little better. I can imagine that there are some rare situations where this works out for the content.
However, even in that case, I don’t think that linking all the various child pages to one another instead of the parent is the best way to solve the problem. I’m sure some sites could defend the choice, but I’d look to other siloing configurations.
Where does it fall short?
This is not one of my favorite silos. I think it falls short in most respects.
First, linking your website pages laterally locks you into only getting two topical relevance links (a lower one and a lateral one) for each piece of content. That’s not much, and it won’t help your search performance.
Also, the pages that end up not receiving a parent link (such as the paleo diet page in the example above) only get a single link from a sibling. The result is that not much relevance is passed on.
The content that’s being linked together in silos that are structured like this isn’t even that relevant. Keto and Paleo don’t have much to do with one another, and your website won’t benefit from connecting the two pieces of content.
Other silos just have a better chance of passing on that crucial topical relevance.
What is it?
I’ll confess, YOLO silo is a name that I invented for this configuration, but that doesn’t mean this one is a fantasy.
You will see silos like this on a lot of new websites. I theorize that it’s because new SEOs think interlinking = relevancy regardless of how well the content in them matches. I don’t think Google search engine spiders are fooled.
When applied to a website, the YOLO silo looks like this.
Don’t hurt your eyes trying to map out the siloing in this graphic.
The simple idea is that every single page is linked to as many other pages on the website as possible, regardless of their content or place in the hierarchy.
Like the other silos, the link juice is free to move throughout the entire website. However, it’s not going to move along any particular path.
Where does it excel??
Honestly, it doesn’t. At least, I’ve never seen any real evidence that it does. Search engines won’t treat you better just because every page has dozens of connections to other pieces of content. There’s little SEO benefit.
I included it because you’re definitely going to see it on websites in the wild, and I don’t want you to wonder if I’m hiding something by not covering it. I know it exists. I just don’t think it’s effective for SEO.
I think it’s fair to say that some sites will get away with it because of other factors in their favor, but the YOLO silo doesn’t offer any advantages on its own.
Where does it fall short?
This siloing configuration doesn’t even offer the pretense of topical relevance. You’ll see content connections like “keto breakfast plans” linking to “women’s vegan diets”.
Search engines may not penalize you for this alone, but good luck creating anchors to link this many pages together without making your content look spammy to readers.
It just doesn’t make any sense for this example website, and it won’t work on any other site unless every page was somehow highly relevant to every other one.
This configuration also falls short because no page on the website is in a better position to rank. You want to set aside some kind of SEO priority for your service pages or landing pages, right?
In this one, every page has an (equally small) chance to rank, regardless of how important they are or how likely they are to make you any money.
There are better silos for almost any kind of website.
What is it?
The priority silo is one of my favorites. Compared to other silos, I think it’s the one that offers some of the best possible benefits for experienced SEOs, especially the ones who are using websites to move products.
To fully explain what it involves, I’m going to use two different graphics of silos in sequence.
It starts with the reverse silo configuration that I showed you earlier. Note that in this one, two pages on the website have been color-coded gold.
The two gold pages represent the ones that I’ve identified as most important.
They could be marked that way because they have a lot of money-making potential. In most cases, it will be because they’re my landing pages and I have a lot of links to affiliate products on them already.
After the reverse siloing configuration has been implemented, we’re going to go through and manually link up the website pages that have the best relevance to one another.
Let’s see what that looks like.
The second step here isn’t based on following a siloing architecture. All the pages that were linked were hand-picked because they had potential or an existing or beneficial relationship to the pages that were linked.
Where does it excel??
Compared to other silos, the reverse-silo is already really effective at applying topical relevance. Search engines will respond positively, as long as you don’t make other SEO mistakes elsewhere.
This configuration improves on that effectiveness by giving SEO priority to the site pages that need it most. These (gold) pages are your money pages, and they should get the most page links.
This example only includes a small selection of pages, but you could easily increase the number of internal links to your favorite pages. I’ve seen sites build silos that point as many as 30 links toward their priority pages.
That doesn’t come with SEO risks unless (as in the last example), every page is like that.
Where does it fall short?
This model doesn’t really have any standout limitations. Compared to the other silos, it doesn’t come with any particular risks for your site. Search engines aren’t likely to be put off, and it’s user-friendly enough for live readers.
The only real point of failure here is choosing the pages that you want to prioritize poorly. If you pick the wrong pages, this configuration would still work—the SEO results just wouldn’t be worth anything.
I see silos like this on some of the most successful sites online. Most SEO pros understand that they shouldn’t be relying on mimicking any model too closely.
This lets them apply their personal experience.
That covers the 5 top siloing configurations.
In the following sections, I’m going to make my personal ruling on which siloing configuration is best for your site, and answer some of the most common questions I hear about silos.
Some topics I cover are more conditional, but for this one, I think there are some pretty clear standout siloing configurations depending on your level of SEO expertise.
For beginner websites, I recommend The Reverse Silo. For advanced SEOs with aged websites, I recommend The Priority Silo.
I think that The Reverse Silo offers some of the best advantages to new SEOs who have a young website.
I’m choosing this one for several reasons.
First, it’s super easy to implement and maintain. You just need to make a map of your topic, subtopics, and longtails, and then apply two-way internal links to each page.
As long as you have it written down somewhere, it’s hard to mess this siloing model up. You should see positive attention from search engines shortly after implementation.
Second, this siloing model is comprehensive. Every page is included. No pages are left out or orphaned by this strategy. Link juice flows throughout the site and can move from page-to-page in a way that is intuitive for both crawlers and users.
Finally, this siloing model has decent topical relevance. Without needing to apply too much thought, you’ve linked pages together that have a close topical relationship to one another.
For advanced users looking to boost authority sites, I’m going to recommend the priority silo. Again, I have several reasons to believe that this is the best siloing option for the advanced SEO who cares about their website’s performance.
First, the link juice is excellent. You have all the benefits of the basic reverse silo, but on top of that, you’ve also provided more direction. The most important pages on your site get juice more often, from more directions.
Second, the topical relevance is also excellent in this siloing model. It allows you to prioritize your landing pages, and make sure they attract the most topical relevance.
The pages are closely linked to others of the same topic, but you’ve also applied human intelligence (and your personal experience of how your content was built) to manually link the most topical pages on your site.
The only downside of this configuration is the amount of management it takes, and the amount of experience it takes to make good choices about which pages on your site deserve priority.
That’s why I’m recommending it to pros. At this point, you’ve probably developed enough websites that those decisions are easy for you. You know what landing pages perform, and how to choose the best support pages that will provide page links.
You may have some more questions about silos, and how to implement them on your website. In the next section, I’m going to do my best to cover the siloing questions that I get most often.
Silo structure is a powerful technique that can significantly enhance your website architecture and SEO efforts. By organizing your content into silos, you create a logical hierarchy that search engines understand and appreciate, while also providing a user-friendly navigation system. Implementing silo structure requires careful planning, keyword research, and attention to technical details, but the benefits are well worth it. Take the time to implement silo structure effectively, and you’ll reap the rewards of improved search engine rankings, increased organic traffic, and better user engagement.
The number of silos you should have on your website depends on the depth and breadth of your content. Aim for a manageable number that allows you to cover your main topics comprehensively without creating unnecessary complexity. Generally, having 3 to 5 main silos is a good starting point.
While it’s best to keep content within silos distinct and focused, there can be instances where some overlap occurs. Just ensure that the overlapping content is relevant to both silos and serves a purpose in each context. Use canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of the content if needed.
Regularly review and update your silos to ensure they reflect the most up-to-date and relevant content. Aim to review your silo structure at least once every few months, or whenever significant changes or additions are made to your website.
Silo structure can benefit a wide range of websites, from small blogs to large e-commerce sites. However, the implementation may vary depending on the type and size of the website. It’s important to adapt the silo structure to suit your specific needs and goals.
While using a CMS makes implementing silo structure more convenient, it’s still possible to implement silos manually without a CMS. You would need to create a clear and organized directory structure for your website and ensure that internal linking within silos is implemented effectively.
Source:
https://diggitymarketing.com/silo-structure/#For_Beginners_The_Reverse_Silo
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