The Silo: The Best Way To Organize The Structure Of Your Website

When you think about what a visitor to your website needs, then you realize how important the structure is. For example, if your visitor comes to your site because they searched for baseball gloves, then they probably don’t need information about hockey goalie gloves.

The structure of the site is essential so the person who searches for baseball gloves can get all the other information on your site that is relevant to that topic. All too often, when people create a website, they are only focused on the SEO of one particular post. All of the focus is put on getting the person onto that post or page and then they feel the work is done.

There is a way to maximize the user experience and that is by creating silos on your site. This is a way to structure your site that benefits the visitor and improves your SEO at the same time.

In this article, we will go over what this means and how you can achieve this on your site.

What is a silo?

Think about what an actual silo system is on a farm and you get the idea of how it works on a website. One silo has all of the corn, another has the wheat and so on. You wouldn’t want a silo that had all the different kinds of grains mixed together as it would create a lot of confusion.

A website needs to be organized in such a way that each topic has its own area that is more or less separated from the other topics or subtopics.

Many content marketers already do this on a smaller scale on a post or page. The perfect post is one in which you have the main topic, or target keyword in the H1 heading at the top of the page. Then, the supporting keywords are in the H2 headings to follow. This helps the reader find the relevant information and for Google to understand what the post is about more easily. 

The same concept works for the entire website on a bigger scale. Let’s stick with the baseball glove example. If your site is about baseball equipment then one category would be for baseball gloves and another for baseball bats, etc. You should then have all of the content related to baseball gloves grouped together so a visitor can get all of the information about that one topic. 

Importance of interlinking

An integral factor to creating a silo is interlinking. It’s a tool that often gets overlooked by content creators. By not interlinking, you are leaving a lot of SEO juice on the table as well as not creating the best UX that you can. Again, think about what the visitor to your site is looking for and you can see how important this task is. 

If somebody lands on your page about all the different types of baseball gloves there are, then they are likely to want a deeper understanding. You should also link to an article about how to keep your baseball glove conditioned. But, at the same time, you shouldn’t link to an article about how to store your baseball bats. You should have a sort of repeating loop of interlinked articles that focus on just the main topic or target keyword. 

Now a visitor will easily find more information, spend more time on your site and these metrics will signal to Google that the information is relevant to their query and the content is good. Then your target keyword will rank higher. And, since a rising tide lifts all the boats, your interlinked articles will also start to rank better as a result. 

How to structure the silo

There are two categories for your topics that will determine how the silo will look. These are top tier landing pages and lower tier landing pages. 

Think of the top tier landing pages as the subtopics within the target keyword. For instance, your top tier landing pages would be first baseman glove, catcher’s mitt, outfielder’s glove, etc. All of the posts in those categories will link to each other and then the lower tier landing pages. 

Examples of the lower tier would be how to find the right size catcher’s mitt and other informational articles that help people understand more about the topic. These lower tier landing pages should have links pointing to the higher tier landing pages on the same topic to create the loop or silo.

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