Content Site Silo Strategy

Your SEO Content Site Silo Strategy

It’s not uncommon for online marketers to struggle with ranking their site, whether it’s brand new or has been in existence for quite awhile. There are a large number of competitors working against you, so you have to do everything in your power to boost your rank and overcome their efforts. Having a content site silo strategy is a smart solution. Let’s define this concept first…

A content silo is a method used in search engine optimization (SEO). It involves taking your website content and structuring it around keyword-based themes. In short, when you create a ‘silo’ structure, distinct sections on your website are created by grouping any related content together.

One way you can sabotage your site is by letting your enthusiasm to lead your niche run rampant, where you are publishing content quickly, yet lacking any type of organization and structure that makes navigation easier on both search bots and human visitors.

It’s understandable for you to be excited about the information you have to share with your audience. But if your topics are scattered and your site is not capable of allowing people to find what they need with ease, you are going to run into problems from seeing visitors bounce away quickly to not getting ranked at all.

Be sure to keep your content site silo strategy top of mind. The solution to this issue is to either start out with a strong organization strategy, or revamp your current domain. You can use a content silo strategy that will tighten up your topics into well defined organization structures that group your topics by theme and relevance, so that they’re easier to index and navigate.

Below, you’re going to find a simple four week strategy where you are implementing a task five days a week that will provide you with a good framework for your site content and give you the boost in search engine optimization (SEO) and rankings that you desire.

Week 1: Define Your Theme and Analyze the Needs of Your Audience

During your first week of silo structuring your site, you’re going to need to nail down a theme and this is uncovered as you spend time immersing yourself in the needs of your audience.

Having a theme helps you present a more effective organization pattern of your content for both search bots and your target audience. When you fail to implement this step, you end up with a wide array of content that looks disheveled, making it more difficult for you to rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Whenever you sit down to create content, you’ll make sure it’s in line with what you want your brand to be known for. But this means you have to go outside of your own common knowledge about the niche and find out what your audience wants to know – where their pain points are and what interests they have about the topic.

When you do this, you’re going to get better engagement and conversions. This week, you’re going to engage in tasks that help you achieve this goal and by the end of the week, you’ll be prepared to create the silos for your site.

Day 1: Understand How Silo Architecture Benefits Your SEO

Silo architecture is like a hierarchy of sorts. This is very beneficial to your SEO strategy because it lets Googlebots see at a glance what your site is about, what all content you have for each category, and how the navigation is set up in a way that delivers a good experience for their users.

The key is to craft a logical pathway of information where content is grouped and linked according to subtopics. This method improves your reputation as an authority source in the eyes of search engines.

It helps make your site sticky because when people land there, they instinctively see topics they want to click on and learn more about. These pages are closely related to what they came there for, so there’s no need for them to click out and find another site for information.

Today, think about how content flows from primary topics (silo pages) to subcategory pages, through to the posts themselves that support the overall silo and website theme. Identify your own SEO goals, and audit your current site rankings so you can check back four weeks from now to see how everything improves as you implement this system.

Day 2: Define Your Site’s Niche Theme

Your goal today is to be able to state your site theme. If a Google representative knocked on your door and asked what your site is about, what would you say? Ideally, you’ll have something specific like a perspective or angle that you bring to the table.

The theme is the overall topic and slant of your site. You want to strike the right balance between being broad enough to create plenty of content that caters to a large audience, yet specific enough to be recognized as an authority figure.

Start with a broad statement of your niche topic. For example, it might be about fitness. Now think about how you can (or want to) set yourself apart from the other sites in this niche.

This might be based on your own experiences or something you have a deep interest in. You might even blend two ideas together based on demographics and slants, like keto weight loss for women over 50.

For now, you don’t have to be firm in your decision – just get an idea for now. By the end of the week, you will be able to solidify your choice based on the other information you gather. This way, you’ll keep your content site silo strategy top of mind.

Day 3: Conduct an Audience Needs Assessment

It’s one thing to know what general niche you want to go into, but another to understand what the people want you to deliver to help them. Your journey or insight can be helpful, but you still have to understand their perspective.

It’s not just about their problems, either. You have to learn more about their goals and the types of solutions they want to see and how they search for them. This will help you craft content that ranks high and gets the clickthroughs you want.

Your task for today that helps with this step is to create an audience assessment and draft a persona or profile that sums up who you’re going to be serving. This begins by collecting data and you can do this with social listening, surveys, or even using analytics data to show you more about the demographic audience, their behavior and their needs.

You’re specifically looking for their pain points or obstacles that they need help with, but dig deeper. Don’t just identify these issues – write about how it impacts their life. For example, a struggle losing weight because you’re addicted to sugar has an impact in terms of pain and inflammation, lack of mobility, etc.

It can help to create segmented audience profiles, too. This may be useful in creating your various content silos. Don’t forget to include basic details as well as other things like what kind of content they prefer to consume, how they search for what they need, etc.

Day 4: Perform a Competitor Analysis

Now that you have a better idea of the needs of your audience, you want to see what competitors are doing to serve them – and where they’re lacking, too. Your goal is to be competitive with information others are providing, and step up and serve where there are gaps in content, too.

Because you’re using the silo structure to improve your SERP ranking, you have to look at who currently occupies those top spots. You need to analyze their content, how it’s organized, the on-page SEO elements they’re using, and the engagement they get, too.

As far as the content, don’t just look at topics covered, but how it’s presented. What slants are they using? What titles and storytelling seem effective in helping them get top rankings?

Read comments to see if someone mentioned something they still need answers to – or offered praise for something done well. You can also feed their content into an artificial intelligence (AI) tool and ask for a competitive analysis for their keyword strategy and more.

Start with an analysis of about 3-5 competitors in the top ranks on Google for the keywords you want to rank well for. Look at the other issues discussed as well as formats being used (embedded video, images, etc.) and how frequently they post to their blog.

Day 5: Carry Out Keyword Research Fundamentals

Today, you’re going to conduct some in depth keyword research for your overall strategy. This is specifically for your silo structure. You need to have silos that represent the broader keywords you want to rank for.

You can use paid or free keyword tools (include artificial intelligence) to zero in on relevant words and phrases in your specific niche topic and theme. Have a mix of broad and longtail keywords so you can rank more easily as you work for top spots in the SERPs.

By the end of today, have a set of keywords for each silo. One for the primary keyword and a cluster of keywords related to the broad one. The primary ones will be your seed keywords, and you can explore more specific ones from those.

Week 2: Structure Your Silos for Optimal Appeal

You’ve finished your first week of silo organization for your site by conducting the preliminary strategic tasks that determine the topics and basic strategy for ranking. Now it’s time to move on to the actual structuring process.

You’re going to be conducting some technical steps as well as strategic ones to help make navigation easier for search bots and for your target audience as you set up the content silos.

Day 6: Plan Your Primary Silos

You’ve researched your theme and audience needs and conducted some keyword research, too. Now you need to plan the silos with a bit more detail, clearly defining the main core topics for each one.

The key is to have your main domain home page with silo pages that then lead to your subcategories. So the primary silos will be the broad topics, yet carefully segmented without blurring the lines.

For example, if you want to create a survival silo structured site, your primary silos would be the broad topics such as food, water, defense, communication, navigation and so on.

You want them broad enough to be able to create subcategory pages for each one, which we’ll be doing in tomorrow’s lesson. If your theme is broad, like “digital marketing,” then it should be easy for you to pinpoint the silos.

They will be things like traffic, monetization, research, etc. But what if you already have a more narrow theme, such as Organic Traffic for Marketers on a Budget? In this case, you have to carefully see if you have enough topics for your subcategories. Be sure to keep your content site silo strategy top of mind.

In this instance, you might have blogging, SEO, social media traffic, multimedia content, email marketing, etc. These will all help support the main theme of your domain in some way, yet still allow you to break these topics up into smaller concepts.

Today, just map out your core topics for the main silos. If you need help, you can look at competitor sites to see how their navigation is set up or ask AI to give you core topics for your niche theme so you can being planning the rest of the elements of your silo structure.

Day 7: Identify Your Sub-Category Topics

Once you have your main silos are mapped out, it’ll be time to identify the sub-categories you want on your site. Each silo will have multiple subcategories. So for instance, if you were covering water for survival, you might have subcategories for water purification, water collection, storing water, scouting water sources, and so on.

Every subcategory needs to carefully support the primary silo topic. It’s like a mind map that you’re creating where you keep branching out on the topic in levels. Take your survival shelter category, for example using the survival prepping niche.

You might have subcategories for types of shelters, safe rooms, weather proofing shelters, camouflage or concealing, security, and more. How do you come to these conclusions of what your subcategories should be?

Start by thinking about and knowledge needed or skills they need to have. Then consider questions that are commonly asked about the topic. See if you can think of any tools or supplies, strategies or other elements that give you ideas.

When it comes to survival food, you might be able to think about identifying wild plants for consumption as the knowledge or skill, how do you can your vegetables as the question commonly asked, and dehydration machines as the supplies.

That gives you a starting point. You can also start looking at social media. Look up the main silo topic and see what people are discussing or asking. Visit forums in your niche, too. This way, your content site silo strategy top of mind.

Before moving, make sure you don’t have too many subcategories. You want to group similar topics that can fit under the same umbrella. For example, if you see topics like knot typing, fire-starting and other concepts, you might group these under Survival Skills because you probably won’t have an entire silo dedicated to either of those.

Day 8: Plan Your Primary and Subcategory Content Pages

Now that you have those topics ready, you’re going to develop a specific page to represent them. These silo primary category pages and subcategory pages will all be working together to help your site rank as an authority page in that niche.

These pages should be highly optimized for SEO using the target keyword cluster you decided on for each category. If you haven’t yet conducted keyword research for your subcategories, you can do that today to support those topics.

You can use a keyword tool or AI to help you pinpoint the words and phrases you need to be using to get that page ranked for the overall concept. A primary silo category page will be focused on a more broad concept (like survival skills) and then your subcategory pages will be optimized for longtail phrases like fire starting technique or basic survival wilderness skills.

You want to make an outline today for the topics that are going to be covered on these pages. This makes it easier for you to write them in full later. Each page should adhere to strong on-page SEO practices.

That means your title is optimized, you have a meta description that’s optimized, headers with keywords, and the right kind of domain URL. These are things you can prepare ahead of time so that you can have them ready before writing and publishing.

Later, you’ll be interlinking pages, but for now, focus on the quality of the value you’re going to be covering for readers. Even though these are more broad topic pages compared to the individual posts you’ll be making, you can still ensure that your audience is satisfied with the coverage you gave them, and the links you’ll add later will enhance everything. Be sure to keep your content site silo strategy top of mind.

Day 9: Structure Your Website for Silos

Today, your task is to set up the navigation menus and category pages that you’ll be using to help people and search bots navigate. In your navigation menu, they can follow the links not only to find what they need, but also to see what topics are related.

You want to have a consistent layout for the navigation of your pages so that it’s easy to spot links and content at any time. Marketers often use breadcrumb navigation to help take visitors  go to new pages and even backtrack if they want to return to one they were just on.

Today, you’re going to log into your blog and create the categories and pages for the primary silo topics and subcategories. The first thing you can do is click on Pages and create a page placeholder for the main silo.

What you add on here may depend on the theme you’re using or plugins that you have installed. These pages will often be visible in your navigation area, whether it’s under your header or in a sidebar.

You’ll be working on the content next week, but for now, you can create the title of the page and have it waiting for content. You can keep it in draft mode for now. Next, you can create the subcategory pages, only this time, you have the option in the sidebar to select the Parent page.

This can be found under Page à Page Attributes. So if you created a primary silo page called Survival Skills, and your subcategory page is Woodworking, you could select Survival Skills as the Parent page.

That way, whenever someone lands on your site and sees Survival Skills, they can click on it and either go to that specific page or choose from the drop down menu where the subcategory pages are listed.

You may want to map this out on paper so you can see the navigation structure before you start creating pages. Another thing you want to do is go to Posts à Categories. This is going to help you rapidly categorize your content.

Your page navigation menu is similar to the actual post categories. Each post (not page) that you make still belong to a specific category, and these can be named the same as your silo primary and sub-category pages.

For example, let’s say you have a survival domain and a primary silo category parent page called survival skills. Your subcategory pages might be woodworking, fire-starting and knot-tying.

You can have categories that are set up the same way. When you go to posts and categories, you’ll see the option to Add New Category. You’ll give it a name. You’ll set the slug (which is the URL) and then if it’s a parent category, like Survival Skills, you’ll leave Parent Category as None, give it a description and save it.

If it’s a sub-category like fire-starting, you’ll name it, slug it, and choose Survival Skills as the parent category. That way, just like your menu navigation for pages, visitors can click a drop down menu and navigate easily.

You can also go to Appearance à Menus and edit the menus for your pages, posts, and categories. It’s a good place to handle everything if you need to make adjustments to how you’ve set things up. Be sure to keep your content site silo strategy top of mind.

Day 10: Do Some Content Calendar Planning

Today is content planning day. You should already have the plans ready for your primary and subcategory silo pages. But you want to be prepared for content posts now, with more than just the topics.

A content calendar will help you with a publishing schedule that ensure everything is spread evenly across the silos and subcategories. You don’t want to accidentally focus too much on one or two silos while abandoning the others.

Today, you’re going to build your content calendar based on the topics that support each subcategory in a silo. How do you figure out what needs to be written about? This will stem from a combination of your audience profile, niche and competitive research, keywords and more.

You can even go to AI and prompt something like this: “I have a survival website with a silo SEO structure, For my main silo called Survival Skills, I have a subcategory on fire-starting. Give me topics for five good posts on this topic to start with based on the most common needs of consumers in this area. Make sure the title is optimized for a keyword phrase for that topic.”

AI will give you results with the title, what your focus should be, and keywords to target. Here’s an example: Top 10 Fire-Starting Techniques for Survival. The focus is on various methods that highlight different tools and techniques. Keywords to be targeted include fire-starting techniques for survival, flint fire-starting, and ferro rods dire-starting.

Make these plans brief like that for now. You’ll be using them to flesh out the ideas when it’s time to create the content fully next week. You might also want to add other elements to your notes at this time, such as monetization options, goals for the content (maximizing your online sales or list building, for example), and so on.

Remember to put the content in a calendar format so you can forge ahead whenever it’s time to begin publishing. You’ll know what you’re writing on which day of the week and have the basic details waiting for you.

Some people have a schedule where they do everything on one day while others may prefer a batch work schedule where you research the week’s worth of posts one day, outline them another day and create the content to publish on another. Whatever works best for you is fine, as long as you keep your content site silo strategy top of mind.

I’m USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, publisher, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and would love to connect with you. If you are new to the world of online entrepreneurship please check out my comprehensive training on how to set up Funnels That Click and learn how to gain an unfair advantage when it comes to building a lucrative online business.