4 Steps to Building a Website Silo Architecture

To boost your website’s SEO performance in the search engine results pages (SERPs), you need to know how to use the silo content architecture. If your website is like many others, it might have several pages that have unrelated pages.

To help the search engine understand your website, you need to put together related information within your website. The importance of creating silos is that search engines may give relevance to your webpage and other relevant pages. This boosts the evaluation of your site on Google using the E-A-T quality factors (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).

• 10 Web Design Mistakes That Can Hurt SEO & How to Avoid Them

There are several websites out there with quality content, but because they’re not logically structured, they fail to get the attention of Google’s crawlers. Attaining a website silo structure requires quality investment both in time and good expertise. To help you improve your website SEO silo structure, here are key steps that you can take.

1. Define Your Website Theme

You need to determine the purpose of your website and the kind of information you should be publishing. This is critical as it makes your website clear and structured in a way that search engines can understand. Even though siloing a website isn’t the only factor affecting website ranking, it’s important to establish on-page relevancy. To identify the themes of your website, study its history. Relevant sources of history themes are Google Search Console, keyword research, PPC programs, and tracked keyword phrases. From these sources, you’ll be able to know who visits your website and the reason.

From Google Search Console, you’re able to see the queries that made your webpages rank high in the search results and those that resulted in click-through rates within the past three months. For more analytics, you can use Google’s tools for webmasters and Google analytics. Conduct page analysis of the phrased keywords on the title, meta-description, and subtitles. You should also compare with other sites’ keywords. From the data that you gather, you can structure your content to match the keywords that Google is rewarding.

2. Building Physical Silos

Physical silos group together pages with related content in one directory. It’s generally accepted that you should have at least five pages named in a way that reinforces the subject. A site devoid of a proper directory structure makes it difficult for search engines and visitors to identify the purpose and the theme of your website. Think of your website the way you would a book library. Related books are arranged on the same bookshelves. For instance, if your website deals with clothing, you need to have a structured way of organizing your pages.

In that case, you can have silos for different types of clothes. For instance, silos for gents’ clothes, ladies’ clothes, children’s clothes, and baby clothes. Moreover, under each category, you may have more subclusters such as gents’ tops and for ladies, trousers for both gents and ladies, and skirts and dresses for ladies. You may also go ahead and build smaller silos for children and baby clothes.

Sub silos will help you to create keywords and keyword synonyms. As much as possible, you need to subdivide your silos into more specific clusters and avoid broad subjects. Specific topics guarantee specific keywords, which improves search visibility.

3. Creating a Theme with Virtual Silos

The internet is comprised of millions of different websites. Within these websites, thousands deal in similar products and services. When it comes to a single website, it’s made of several pages that might be having similar content or dissimilar. At this stage, you need to create virtual silos through backlinking and external linking. Your landing page is supported by other pages on your website that link to it.

You might have more than one landing page on your business website. Regardless, each of the landing pages is a representation of a different silo. As a result, ensure all related pages are linked to the landing page. For pages that don’t get linked directly to the landing page, you should link them to other pages with similar content. When search engines encounter pages linked to the landing page, they’re interpreted as supportive information to your landing page. If you have more than one website, you can create outbound links too.

4. Optimizing Your Content with Keywords

This is a key step in creating silos for your website. For your physical and virtual silos, ensure that your content is well optimized with short and longtail keywords. Additionally, use keywords in your meta-description, meta-title, and in your subtitles. Keywords are an important aspect when it comes to the visibility of your website.

When your content is well optimized, searchers can easily find your website.  Here is a pro tip: every silo should capitalize on using related keywords and keyword synonyms. It’ll ensure that your keywords and internal links complement each other in showing search engines the clusters of your silos. 

Keyword marketing is probably the leading digital marketing strategy that can help you rise quickly in search engine results. As a result, you should invest in this strategy as much as possible. Use professional tools for your keyword research. Some of the recommended tools used in keywords research include KeywordTool.io, Moz Keyword Explorer, Google Search Console, Ahrefs Keyword Planner, Soovle, SECockpit, and Jaaxy. 

Depending on the kind of marketing you want to carry out, there are other keywords that you can leverage. You can use market segment keywords, customer-defining keywords, mid-tail keywords, head keywords, product keywords, geo-targeted keywords, competitor keywords and branded keywords, among other types of keywords.

Conclusion

Clustering your web pages into related categories is key when it comes to showing search engines the structure of your website. A good structure makes your website readable and visible online. To obtain a well-siloed website, you need to implement the proven steps illustrated in this article.

When your website is categorized in a logical manner, it shows web crawlers that your website is credible and relevant. External linking especially to your other business website or sites with similar content boosts your website authority. When you’re linked to high authority sites your website stands a high chance of winning the admiration of search engines.