Silo Page Content Writing
Your website is arguably the most important communication portal between your audience and your business. If your business relies on the content on your site for traffic, engagement, and conversion, then you should do all you can to make sure it’s well-organized.
Creating a content silo structure for the site helps site readers and crawlers with easy navigation across your important pages. Having a well-defined silo structure will bring lots of benefits to your website. It is a powerful tool that both enhances usability and improves a site’s SEO.
Have you recently been hearing about silo pages and wondering what they really are? This post will show you all you need to know about the topic and how you can create content for a silo page. So, let’s get started!
What is a Content Silo Structure?
A content silo structure is an SEO term used to refer to a way of grouping related content or web pages together in a hierarchy, based on the theme. Think about content silo as a local library. Before the era of Kindles and iPads, how were you able to easily find books of interest from the several books present in a library?
The library staff simply grouped the books into sections, such as fiction or nonfiction to make it easy to find any book. That is exactly what a content silo does in this modern internet world.
If you have a website, especially when you have tons of content on the site, you should consider creating a silo structure to help organize the contents. Let’s see some real-world examples of content silos to better understand the term.
There Are Two Different Principles of Creating Silo Structures
When it comes to creating silo structures, you can either create:
- Physical content silos (using categories)
- Virtual content silos (using internal linking)
Physical content silos
Here, you will be using folders in the URL structure of your website to create categories. For example, if your site is a travel site that is solely dedicated to Paris, you can have three categories on the site: Paris restaurants, Paris hotels, and Paris attractions.
To use your URL structure to create a physical content silo in this case, you would have something like:
- www.myparissite.com/restaurants
- www.myparissite.com/restaurants/restaurant-a
- www.myparissite.com/restaurants/restaurant-b
- www.myparissite.com/restaurants/restaurant-bc
The folder structure in your URLs is what will tell Google and your visitors how your content is organized. On the other hand, if you don’t want to use categories in your URLs, you may need to go for virtual content silos.
What is the SEO Value of Content Silo?
#1: It helps search engines better understand your website
Just like silo structures help real human visitors, they also help search engines too. Like human visitors, search engines also want to understand what your website is all about through the content you provide on the site.
They want to understand how your site is structured and how to locate your content. By providing easy navigation and clear structures on your site, content silos can greatly boost your site’s SEO.
#2: It creates keyword relevancy
This is another important way content silo structure can benefit your site’s SEO. When search engines index a site, they consider the relevance of a keyword in relation to the content on the page. At the same time, they consider the context of the website. That is why it is easier for a tech site to rank well for a post about mobile reviews than a health site.
Google will ask why a health expert should create better content reviewing a tech gadget than a tech site. At the same time, it will be easier for the tech site to rank even much more if it has a section that talks about mobile gadget-related topics – and not just a page.
Using silos to organize your content will help you create posts that will come highly relevant to the categories and overall theme of your website. That means you will have a better chance of ranking for a keyword when you create a suitable overarching context.
#3: It makes it easier to interlink
One of the importance of creating backlinks to your site is to help users find content across your site. With a silo structure on your site, it will be easier to link between top categories to posts in subcategories, which can then link back to the home page.
Such interlinking is very helpful to search engines when crawling your entire site. And when your site is crawled, there will be a better chance of having relevant articles and posts get ranked for specific keywords and search terms.
#4: It increases the chance of having more of your content crawled
When you properly interlink your posts, it increases your chance of having search engines crawl your content. Almost all your content will be crawled because search engines will use the interlinks to locate more content within the site.
To make the most of this, consider only linking content within a silo. Link each post to another relevant post within the same silo or category. If at all you will have to link out to another silo, make sure you are linking to a top-level category.
Virtual content silos
Here, you will be organizing your content by creating a category structure through internal linking. In the example above, you will have a general “Restaurant” category page that would explicitly talk about Paris restaurants in general. You will then link the page to the other pages that talked about individual restaurants.
That means the main page about Paris restaurant will link to restaurant a, restaurant b, restaurant c. also, the individual restaurant pages will also link to themselves.
How to Create a Content Silo Structure for Your Website
Let’s consider how to create a silo structure on your site using the two principles mentioned above.
Step 1: Get a full list of your posts or keywords
The first thing to do is to download and install a plugin that allows you to export your WordPress data to XML/CSV. Once you have it, use it to export a list of all your published blog posts as a CSV file.
If you are creating the structure for a new site, then you will need to get a full list of the keyword you would likely use to write each post.
Step 2: Create a spreadsheet and import the CSV file
Open a new spreadsheet in Google Sheets and import the CSV file you earlier exported from your WordPress site. Now add a new column to the right of the column containing the post tiles in the Google Sheet and label it as ‘content silos.’
Do the same if you are creating silos for your keywords.
Step 3: Group the posts into an individual silo
Identify which of your blog posts can go under one single topic cluster. For example, you can have articles such as post about Paris restaurant a, post about Paris restaurant b, and post about Paris restaurant c all go into one content silo about “Paris Restaurants.”
On the other hand, you can have posts like post about Paris hotel a, post about Paris hotel b, and post about Paris hotel c all grouped in “Paris Hotels” silo.
Once you are done assigning each blog post to a content silo, sort the table so that articles can be grouped by content silo.
Step 4: Create WordPress categories
Now, you will need to create a category for each topic cluster in WordPress. For instance, in the above example, you can create a category for ‘Paris restaurants,’ ‘Paris hotels,’ etc. That means every time you finished writing a post, you would need to assign the post to the relevant category.
That way, you will be having category pages where each of them will only contain articles of relevant content. You will also need to link from each article under the same category to the category page and also between themselves. That is ‘post about Paris hotel a’ should link to the ‘Paris Hotel’ page and also link to ‘post about Paris hotel b’, etc.
You have just created content silos based on WordPress category pages. However, be very careful when linking between the posts. Never link to a post outside the silo except when you link out to a higher-level category or the home page – known as vertical linking.
Silo Page Content Writing
Now you understand how to create a silo structure for your site. You know why you need a silo page and how to create one. So, let’s talk about how to write content for each of your silo pages – the main category pages.
You need to master how to write this page because it is very important to your whole silo structure thing. So, create a WordPress page content on each of your silos. Note that this is a WordPress page and not a WordPress post.
Keyword research
Do your keyword research well and create an evergreen content that will be able to stand the test of time. The content needs to be evergreen, so you don’t have to be updating it every time.
Create a long content
Try to aim for an epic 4000 to 7000 words content for the page. This is going to be more like a pillar content on your site, so invest enough words into it.
Use LSI keywords
Don’t only use the main keywords in the content. Search for more other LSI keywords and include them all to give you an edge over your competitors.
Include table of content
This is going to be a long post. Consider including a table of content and a comparison (table where applicable).
Internal linking
Remember interlinking is important here. So link from the silo page to the children pages (posts in the silo). You can also link out to other silos from there too.
Final note
Having a good silo structure on your website will not only improve the usability of the site but will also boost SEO. It will make it easier for both human visitors and search engines to better understand your site and what your content is all about. So give your site the extra push it needs by creating content silos on it. Your increased traffic and conversion will thank you for that.