Using a Content Silo for SEO

 

Often times we find ourselves explaining to clients the concept of using a content silo for SEO. You have probably heard the expression “content is king” by now when people are speaking about digital marketing. Well, while there is some debate on how true this is, I can assure you for the purpose of SEO the importance of content can't be overstated. Without quality SEO focused content your SEO efforts are dead in the water.

So this begs the question, what is a content silo? Well, at its most basic, the content that you are writing, for the purposes of SEO is intended to send signals to Google to explain what your website is about. While this is done in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes, a content silo working in tandem with a quality content marketing strategy can be one of the most effective tools in your SEO kit.

What is Silo Content?

Now that we have established that silo content or a content silo is important, let’s talk about what it actually is. A content silo is one piece of content that supports your main keyword that is then supported by many other articles to achieve interlinking on your website. For example, if you have a website for a plumbing company in San Diego your focus keyword may be just that “plumbing company in San Diego”. So the first step to the silo is creating a page that talks about you being a plumbing company and that you are located in San Diego.

Once you have the main page written or what we sometimes refer to as the “money page”, then you want to start chipping away at some of your silo content. The goal is to write the money page in a way that then you can write supporting content that the money page can link to via anchor text and ideally that the supporting content or silo content can also link back to the “money page”. While this may sound complicated, with a good strategy in place it can be slowly chipped away at over time.

Why do you need a content silo?

At its most basic concept with SEO campaigns, we are trying to send Google signals about what your business does and if it is a local business, where it is located. In order to achieve this, sometimes the content silo is needed to further support and send more signals via supporting content and anchor text than a standalone page can by itself. When dealing with search terms and keywords that are highly competitive this content silo can help to further optimize for the keywords that you are approaching with the linked content.

How to come up with a plan for creating silo content.

Coming up with a plan for your silo content is obviously crucial to make it worth the time. You may have noticed that a lot of SEO companies include blog writing as part of their deliverables for a managed SEO campaign. Generally, they are doing this to accomplish the task of creating a content silo. Creating more and more content that supports your main topics will only help to get more content indexed and if done correctly push up key rankings that you are going after and potentially long-tailed variations as well.

To plan for a content silo it is best to pick your main topic first and then pick subtopics that are related to your main topic. Once you have chosen your topics and subtopics start writing! Generally, we like to publish most, if not all of the support articles and then link from the main topic page back to the support articles and then from the support articles back to the main page, where possible.

Wrapping it Up

As it stands, content is still king when it comes to SEO. Using a quality content silo can really help push up rankings and take your SEO efforts to the next level. However, like everything else, it takes a well-executed plan to really make it work. Hope this helps…now get to writing