SEO Silo is a term few search engine marketers have heard of – therefore even fewer website owners know about them. For those that have heard of them, understanding the right way to implement them is an art in itself.

Before we delve into that, let’s talk about what exactly they are.

What is an SEO Silo?

An SEO Silo is a way of ring fencing content on your site, so certain key topics remain seperate from one another. This means when Google crawls your site, it will get a clearer picture of the order of importance of certain pages and have an easy job doing it.

This is what farmers do with their grains, crops etc. They keep them all entirely seperate as some can damage the others, through pests, bugs etc. For you, if you run a building company that specialises in a number of trades, you may want to keep each topic and related posts partitioned.

Famous SEO expert Bruce Clay explains this in jelly bean format.

If you start talking about electrical work in the loft conversion section, and your loft conversion page happens to be decent, cannibalisation can occur. This means you end up with a less relevant article, appearing in the search results. Essentially you are not putting your best foot forward.

You want someone when finding you page for electricals, to see your main electricals page. If that isn’t happening it’s because of three things:

1. Your page is not indexed – Ie: Google can’t see it
2. You have keyword cannabilised it
3. You are just not using the right terms on your page. Users search ‘electricians’ you have used ‘Electrical Installation Engineers’. Or something of the sort

Generally Google is pretty good at picking up alternative versions, so it’s usually 1 or 2.

SEO Silo strategy helps avoid this, by ensuring only related content about certain topics appears in a section. Only posts discussing electricals appear in your electrical services cluster and so on. If another silo has to mention electricals, it would link from that cluster to your top electricals page with that word.

Therefore telling Google: “That page over there is the one we mean.”

This is the basis of an SEO Silo.

How do you make an SEO Silo?

Depending on when you start making an SEO silo determines how you go about it. It also depends on what kind of CMS you are using. Is it Shopify, WordPress, Wix etc?

If you are using Shopify, it’s not completely possible.

If you are using Wix, please get in touch with our web developer immediately to build you an affordable and more functional website on WordPress today. I beg you.

Magento and WordPress are the website platforms we suggest for making this.

Just as a side note, this is why you shouldn’t just build a website without being SEO ready. It’s what practically everyone does, then they remake it all over again, with all that wasted time.

Start as you mean to go on.

If you’re building a site to win traffic – make an SEO ready website.

Back to our SEO Siloing Definition

As you can see, this approach create a trickle down style of ‘URL Hierarchy’. It is clean and the posts only link within their silo. If they ever need to mention a topic from another silo, they would link straight to the top of that category, thus continuing the process of telling Google, what is what.

This system also means URL structures are tidy and you’re never more than 3 clicks away from all content. Something else that is prized.

Ask yourself this:

Have you got blog posts that even you can’t find on your site?

I’m sure the answer is yes. In fact many website owners have effectively orphaned off some blog posts as there is no way to get to them.

This means the work you did was a waste and money spent, pointless.

That’s the basics of it and one of the tools we use to help our own website projects. Whether it’s an e-commerce business or a local one. We all use Google to find things, and businesses are made on there.

Next you need to define your keywords or topics.

What is a Keyword

We go into more depth on this in our ‘what are my keywords’ guide, but briefly speaking, this is what they are.

Keywords are your top targeted words. They are the ones you would like to appear high in the results for. If you are a wedding photographer, then it would be ‘Wedding Photographer’.

Where seo silo keyword research comes in, is that what we learn when we search for Wedding Photographer, you see it is a crowded space. Hard to rank for.

Plenty of search volume, which in reality you aren’t going to get. But keyword research helps us find the longer worded versions of this term (Long-tail keywords) and finds us the ones we could rank for.

So instead we type in ‘Wedding Photographer Southend’ as that’s where you’re based.

What we see is a much easier phrase to target and one more relevant to your area of operation. In truth, no one from The Hebrides wants to see a wedding photographer from Dover turn up on the rankings page. This is the essence of effective keyword research.

Now we know your target keyword and an seo silo strategy would be built around that.

What is an SEO Silo Strategy?

An SEO Silo strategy can become a little complicated but it works to improve your ranking by strong internal linking.

High ranking web pages tend to have lots of links from other sites pointing that page about that term. This tells Google: “Hey, these folks are good.”

A vote of confidence in essence. Certain keywords require more backlinks than others to rank well. This is known as keyword difficulty. Not an exact measure but a decent one. SEO silo strategy devises a way to use your own content to create similar signals.

By linking from one post to another within a silo and then back up to your top of the silo page, it shows Google how important that page is to your topic and how much depth of content you have around it. It shows organisation and good navigational signals. Things Google likes.

 Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.

Google Webmaster Guide

This is not an exact science, but it has been shown to work time and time again.

If nothing else, if you are offering Google what is known as a flat structure, it is often messy and difficult for crawlers to understand.

When you pay an SEO company to help you build backlinks, through off-page optimisation, your money will go further if the backlink spreads influence across all related pages.

This way, you see companies end up ranking for the full spectrum of related keywords.

Do you have a website that sucks?

If this SEO siloing definition was news to you and you don’t have an seo silo strategy, the reality is, your site currently sucks for ranking as well as it can.

That doesn’t mean you can’t rank, but it does mean, the moment a better-organised site comes along, you are probably going to be pushed to the side.

Think about it, if a competitor has gone to the effort of doing this, and you haven’t, then they are planning ahead to beat you.

What are you going to do about it?