November 19, 2020
Website structures often evolve over time. Elements are added and removed, from pages to sections to blogs to articles.
This results in websites with lots of great content, but a haphazard organizational structure that holds the site back from reaching its full potential.
An SEO silo structure is the solution. We implemented it and got a boost in rankings for competitive keywords that increased levels of organic traffic.
Here’s how we did it, and how you can benefit from an SEO silo structure too.
A website with an SEO silo structure has main topic themes or categories. Each category or main topic theme has multiple sub-topics and, below the sub-topics, content posts, creating the silo. Here’s an example:
So, in a haphazard site structure, an article on “page load speed” would be published on the website’s blog.
In a website with an SEO silo structure, this content post would fit into the silo structure, supporting its sub-topic, “on-page SEO”, and main topic theme or category, “SEO”.
Why develop this type of content structure on your website? What are the advantages? There are two main reasons: improving usability, as well as to add context for Google.
Creating organized groupings of pages on your website in a hierarchical structure helps users find the information they need, as everything is together.
Of course, many people advocate flat website structures rather than silo structures. They argue visitors should be able to find any page on your website within one or two clicks.
However, from my experience, you’ll encounter problems with this approach the larger your website gets. As you publish articles, blogs, and other content as part of your SEO and marketing strategy, the further away that content gets from your website’s most important pages, making it harder to find.
With an SEO silo structure, your website has multiple layers, but you group the content around topic areas, making it easier to find.
The other major advantage of the SEO silo structure is it helps give context about your website to Google, making it clearer which pages are the most important. An SEO silo structure also shows how different pages connect together.
The silo approach to structuring content can also help improve your site’s authority as the structure shows Google you have covered topic areas in-depth.
An important point to remember with the SEO silo structure is that it completely depends on good navigation and internal linking. Specifically, each page within a silo should link to the page immediately above it, and this link should be reciprocated.
So, in our example, the page “page load speed” would link to “on-page SEO”, and there would be a reciprocal link on the page “on-page SEO” back to “page load speed”.
Breadcrumbs are an important feature of an SEO silo structure too. Breadcrumb navigation makes it easy for users to understand where they are on your site, and it helps them see how you have linked various pages together.
Visitors can also use breadcrumb navigation to explore topic areas in greater depth more easily.
Here are the four main steps I use to create an SEO silo structure:
So, what are the takeaways?
Let’s start with usability. Many of the biggest websites on the internet have a silo-type structure, from Amazon to eBay to GoDaddy. This helps validate the strategy. It is an organisational structure that will be familiar to your website visitors.
You will also improve the usability of your website by improving the organisation of content.
There is a bit of work involved in creating the SEO silo structure, particularly if you have a large site.
However, the big payoff is organic traffic. We got an impressive boost in rankings, and you can do the same.