Silo Structure in SEO

Silo structure in SEO is the best approach to organizing content on a specific topic. Having a silo structure in place will guide users and search engines throughout your website in a clear, understandable manner. This will help search engines crawl, index, and rank your website better.

Search engines award top keyword rankings to the site that proves it’s the most relevant fit for the theme and intent of the user’s query. As a result, the primary goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve the website so that the site is about more than targeted keyword phrases — it is about the themes matching those keywords.

More often than not, a website is a disjointed array of unrelated information with no clear central theme. Such a site suffers in search engine rankings for sought-after keywords.

Siloing a website serves to clarify its subject relevance and lays the groundwork for high keyword rankings. It is a core building block for SEO and is normally an advanced topic.

The term siloing originated as a way to identify the concept of grouping related information into distinct sections within a website. Much like a chapter in a book, a silo represents a group of themed or subject-specific content on your site.

The reason this grouping has such a high SEO priority is that search engines award keyword relevancy within their index based on the page and then the rest of the site with the most supporting relevant content. This contributes in particular to Google’s evaluation of a site’s expertise, part of the E-A-T quality factors (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).

Virtual siloing involves using the internal link structure of a site (i.e., how pages link to other pages) to:

Connect groups of related pages together.

Separate unrelated pages.

Strengthen the primary landing pages of each silo.

While physical siloing requires theme-related pages to be located within the same directory of a site, a virtual silo is formed by links between theme-related pages.

Connecting related pages virtually through text links can be effective even in the absence of physical silos. That’s because search engine spiders crawl a site’s contents by following its links. Virtual siloing is powerful.

By linking between pages that are tightly related in topic and theme, you are consolidating that theme's relevance to a section of your site. A site hierarchy, with top-level landing pages and support pages for each SEO silo, emerges based on linking patterns alone.

For example, rather than interlinking between all of the pages haphazardly, our example power tools website could use virtual siloing to show that it has three distinct, keyword-relevant content themes for cordless, electric, and gas-powered tools

What Subject Themes Does Your Website Currently Rank For?

The best place to start identifying the relevant themes for a site is to examine the historical traffic data of the website. First, examine the data from the following sources:

Google Search Console

PPC Programs

Tracked Keyword Phrases

Keyword Research

Each of these sources of information will provide information about who visits the website and why. It won’t directly explain why the site isn’t ranked for desired keywords, but it will help evaluate which themes of the site the search engines recognize.

Google Search Console

Organic queries are shown in Google Search Console’s Performance report by Queries. You can see what queries caused your pages to show up in search results (impressions) as well as which ones actually brought Google searchers to your site (clicks) in the past three months.

Note: If you have not done so already, be sure to set up Google’s tools for webmasters, Google Search Console and Google Analytics. You may also set up Bing Webmaster Tools for additional data. These free tools provide the invaluable analytics you need.

PPC Programs

If you use Google Ads or Bing Ads to do pay-per-click advertising, you’ll have even greater insight into exactly which keyword phrases work to bring searchers to your website. You can also use PPC as a testing environment, bidding on phrases you would like to be relevant for within the organic search arena but for one reason or another have not yet ranked for organically.

Tracked Keyword Phrases

The last and most accessible method of discovering your website’s most important subject themes is to ask people within your company which keywords are most important. By interviewing the president, marketing team and sales managers, you can often get an idea of what the company is trying to rank for in organic search results. The phrases they use generally match the content, so it would be useful to validate the expectations against the reality of the site.

Keyword Research

After creating a list of 10 to 100 non-brand keyword terms that appear to be most relevant to your company’s product and/or services, it is time to begin keyword research.

During this research, the first goal is to grow the keyword list as large as possible. Cover as many relevant subjects as possible, even those only somewhat connected to the website’s subject themes. Use keyword discovery tools to identify every possible synonym even remotely related to the site’s subject matter.

For SEOToolSet® users, after you have created as large a list as possible, enter all of your keywords and keyword phrases into Manage Keywords and specify a name for this keyword list. (You can set up multiple keyword lists.) Next, run a Ranking Monitor for your selected keyword list(s). You can click the Activity column to see the words sorted from the highest query activity to the least-searched terms. You can use this information to identify the words that have a too low activity (usually anything less than 100 searches per month unless it’s a very targeted and relevant term) and possibly remove them from your list. You can look at the Pages column of your ranking report data to see the keywords you currently rank for across the search engines.

After answering the question of where the site currently ranks, you will have identified two major factors: 

1) you will know what you are ranked for and 

2) you will know what you are not ranked for in the search engines. The next challenge will be to understand what subjects your site is legitimately relevant for and how to understand why you have your current rankings.

What Subject Themes are Legitimately Relevant for Your Website?

There may be a wide margin between a site’s potential and its current status, and this can affect your business. Wisdom lies in knowing how to determine what a site is truly about after stripping away all the visual components. The skill lies in identifying subject themes a site does not currently rank for that have the potential for better rankings and recognition of relevance by search engines.