Content Siloing
What is content siloing and how can you apply the technique to your overall blog or newsletter structure?
Do you like this featured blog image? Become a paid subscriber and get access to our Canva template library of images like this one, that you can edit in seconds!
If your digital marketing strategy involves improvement of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing, what would be the first thing to do? Most people run into creating blogs without paying attention to a strong website architecture, this ends up diminishing the potential impact that the blogs would have on the performance of your website. Many have created flat web structures; they count among the people who have websites or blogs but are organized in a manner where content hierarchy is blurred. The blogs, covering wide range of topics with little organization and completely unique URLs end up taking the readers all over the website chaotically crossing topic lines. Creating these links is synonymous to linking just for the sake of linking.
What should be occurring is a strategic, organized structure to improve SEO. Google advises designing webpages in a manner where conceptual hierarchy is clear. With an establishment of a strong architecture, the potential impact the content is meant to achieve will occur ‘naturally’ through search engines. Search engines will identify you as an expert in a given area, recognizing the depth of experience and ability to provide users with answers in a given topic. This is achieved effectively through developing content silos.
What are Content Silos?
Content silos are basically a way of arranging related content together with an aim of establishing keyword-based themes or topical areas. Think of what happens in a library, the old school way of finding books. If you are looking for a certain book, you use catalogues, where the books are arranged into categories. For example, fiction or nonfiction. Just like in a library, content silo structuring helps you arrange your content on the basis of relevance.
There will be several layers of content for any given topic. At the top there will be materials that represent general content which attempts to answer the broad question. With each layer, the general topic will be dissected into content which delves deeper into a given topic. Additionally, content will be arranged for user needs and search patterns to be taken into consideration. The primary goal here is for maximizing traffic. This will help you establish your website, getting recognition as an expert, and as an authority in your field.
Importance of Content Siloing in SEO
Content silos as a SEO tool helps you to build an efficient and stronger website. With your site arranged in silos, Google will more easily understand how the site is organized, mainly by following the internal links. In essence, this assists Google to identify the expertise you possess on a given area.
With silos at the center of all this, where thoughts and ideas are organized around a given topic, you clearly show your competence. This essentially assists in establishing domain authority, an important aspect in raising your stakes in the search engines and general SEO strategy.
Recent Google updates have greatly emphasized content development. Before this, keywords played a great role in assisting the understanding of relevance in a given topic, but with RankBrain and Hummingbird, there was a shift towards understanding the user context and intent, or basically the semantic search.
This means that the interest is not just match keywords, instead they are using semantics to comprehend text through looking at the language used in the material with an aim of getting its meaning and relevance.
By creating silos, texts and visuals are naturally developed around the common queries within a specific thematic area. With the content being connected, Google “sees” it as an authority in the given subject and ranks your material as highly relevant for the topic or semantic web. A content silo assists in making your content attractive to the intent centered guidelines of the new Google algorithm.
Creating a Content Silo
Creating content silos starts with a thorough review of the content in your web as well as any future content with guidance by keyword research. Keyword research data will guide down through a path leading to production of tangible results. The following data points should be considered:
With a keyword research data, you will be able to know the type of keywords that are appropriate for your site. You ought to be guided by the target audience in this exercise.
Review the existing content structure and get a glimpse on how it needs to be structured to give the desired results.
What are your future content needs?
Think of places where content silos can be placed. For example, pages, product categories, blog categories among others.
Consider places where structure need reinforcement, such as in menus, links, etc.
Structuring process need a breakdown of the material into different categories and ranking the pages into top, secondary, and tertiary pages. Each category should be based upon such factors as search volumes, user patterns and the conversion path. The main focus for silo creation is to enhance the experience of users while on your page. Search engine should be a secondary target.
Conclusion
In additional to these factors, it is important to consider these points in order to make the process successful. These points revolve around the relevant topics, what the visitors would be looking for, whether the site need restructuring and how you can support the topics through links. Content silos are a great strategy for increasing the site ranking in the search engines, and will help around link relevancy and boosting overall domain authority. Using content silos effectively, a business can boost its digital marketing endeavors, adding great value to its performance and success.
Until next time!