What is Website Siloing?
Website Siloing is a method of structuring a website’s content by grouping related information within distinct sections or ‘silos’. By organizing content in this way, search engines can more effectively understand the context of your content, thereby improving your SEO performance.
The Importance of Website Siloing
Website Siloing offers two primary benefits: enhanced SEO performance and improved user experience.
- SEO Benefits: Search engines can better understand and index your website by thematically organizing your content. This increased clarity can improve rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- User Experience: Siloing also benefits your users by creating a clear and intuitive site structure, making it easier for visitors to navigate and locate the information they’re seeking.
How to Implement Website Siloing
- Plan Your Silos: Begin by categorizing your website’s content into broad topics or themes, each representing a distinct silo.
- Create Your Structure: Structure your website’s architecture to reflect these silos. This usually involves creating main category pages and linking them to related subpages.
- Link Strategically: Within each silo, implement internal linking between the pages. However, minimize linking between pages in different silos to maintain the integrity of each silo’s theme.
Professional Website Siloing with Salterra
Website Siloing is a strategic task requiring understanding your website’s content and SEO best practices. With Salterra, you can ensure this process is handled professionally and accurately to yield the best results for your website’s SEO performance and user experience.
Contact Salterra today to optimize your website through the power of siloing! We look forward to helping you enhance your online presence and user navigation experience.
The biggest thing that we start when we start talking about siloing is the website’s structure. This might seem a bit basic, but it’s always a good place to start. So, why is a good silo structure so important? It directs the right traffic to the right area. Often, people will get frustrated, and bounce rates are high when people can’t get to where they want to go quickly.
Let’s say you have a plumbing website that also does HVAC. If somebody is there for HVHC, they don’t want to go through all the plumbing stuff to get to the HPAC part. Your siloing dictates where you want your traffic to go. And I’ve always told my web designers and my team on the web design side that, you know, their job is to navigate where they want the traffic to go.
So depending on the client services location, you have the public and both sides, two completely different animals. Once you get a good silo structure in place, you get a better quality, and it’s easier to micro-focus your content. Siloing will help in the following:
- Direct The Right Traffic To The Right Place
- Public and Bots
- Better Crawl Quality
- Easier to Micro Focus
- Auto Ranking (Mass Page)
- Go After More Keywords
Getting Started with Your Silo
I’m all about research before I even dig into anything. I want to know everything I can about what I’m getting ready to get myself into. So, niche research, keyword research, URL structure, metatags, and title tags, are typical of everything we do for a basic audit. We want to find out. What is the current state of the website is now.
And then again, where do we want that stage to be when we’re finished? There can be several different things: changing the navigation structure, adding pages, taking pages, and splitting them up. So there are all kinds of different ways that we look at and how we map out our silo structure.
That includes the following:
- Niche Research
- Keyword Research
- URL Structure
- Meta Tags
- Title Tags
- Body Word Content
- Internal Linking Structure
- Navigation Structure
- Footer Structure
- Sidebar Structure
So we want a good snapshot of what we’re getting ready to do.
URL Structure For Siloing
There are many ways to look at this thing, and we all run up on different URL structures. Let’s look at the different types of URL structures:
Domain Structure:
Brand Only (salterrasite)
The best URL structure you can have is just a brand only.
- Best for multiple services and locations
- Best for Growth & Expansion
- Best for Authority and Power
- Partial Match (Salterra-web-design)
- Good for specific services/multi locations
- Good for growth into new locations
- Not good for introducing new services
- Exact Match (Boston-web-design)
- Good for one service and 1 location
- Not good for service expansion/new locations
- The challenge to not over-optimize the urls
Inside URL Structure
Brand Only (salterrasite)
A brand-only domain would be a business with multiple services and locations. It is easily expandable into new services and sites, and there good for authority and power in many different markets.
- Salterrasite.com/web-design
- Salterrasite.com/arizona-web-design
- Salterrasite.com/phoenix-web-design
Partial Match (Salterra-web-design)
Partial match domains are for focusing on a brand and one service.
Like I put here sell Salterrawebdesign. So. It’s suitable for specific services and multi-location. So I can go after all kinds of locations on the web design under the web design umbrella, but it does make it a little bit harder. And even in some spaces damn near impossible to go into. Other services such as, you know, internet marketing software to have a software development might be a little bit closer. Still, you start to trap yourself, especially in a high-competition market.
- Salterrawebdesign.com/??
- Salterrawebdesign.com/massachusetts
- Salterrawebdesign.com/Boston
Exact Match (Boston-web-design)
Exact match domains are only good for one service, one location and are not suitable for any expansion, whether services or sites. The challenge is, is it’s just very hard not to over-optimize the URL structure. So, if you have Boston web design.com and you do a bunch of blogs about web design and get into the different types of web development, then you’re getting into software development slash web design.
- Bostonwebdesign.com
- Bostonwebdesign.com /massachusetts
- Bostonwebdesign.com/??
URL Structure Conclusion
You must watch how you build out your structure when blogging and siloing your inside pages. We have done The inside URL structure a couple of different ways, and we haven’t seen much difference when it comes to the inside page structure, but we always start with each service having its service page.
I believe in the state structure more than the city structure.
So, the Massachusetts web design would be the state—top of the state silo for the web design and Massachusetts. And Boston would be the city page.
Obviously, you saw through a web design.com, slash Massachusetts, and Salterra web design.com/Boston. So, we can do Massachusetts slash Boston, you know, a bunch of different structures that way. It doesn’t matter. But we like to keep a shorter URL than the longer ones.
So, exactly match the same type of thing by some web design slash Massachusetts. And then by some web design, you can’t do much more for Boston except, you know, obviously load up supporting content. Okay.
Project Example of Siloing
We are going to build a structure around the following:
4 Services
Project Locations
- National
- 3 states
- 5 Biggest Cities/per state Min.
Basic Site Structure
All Service base websites use the basic type or website structure:
Standard Pages
- Home
- Contact
- About
- Services x 4
- Terms of Service
- Privacy Policy
Below is the new content we will need to build out the local areas:
New Content Site Structure
New Pages Needed Minimum
- 3 State Pages
- 5 City Pages
- 4 Service Pages/City Info
- 28 Total Pages
New Supporting Content Needed
- 12 Blog Pages
- 12 External Pages for Properties
- 24 Total supporting Pages Month 1
52 Pages of New Content in the 1st Month
Home Page – Title, Description, H-Tags
The home page structure should follow the basics formats:
Keyword = Brand Services
- Home Page
- Brand Keyword in Title
- Brand Keyword in Description
- Brand Keyword in h1 (1-h1 top of page)
- Keyword Variable in h2 (Web Designers)
- Keyword Variable in h3 (business Web Design)
- Keyword in Body of Text
Examples
Title – Salterra Web Services provides Web Design, SEO, Internet Marketing, and Software Development.
Description – Salterra specializes in helping businesses with all things digital. Web Design, SEO, Internet Marketing, and Software Development. Contact Salterra today
H1 – Web Design – SEO – Digital Marketing – Hosting
H2 – Web Design
H2 – SEO
H2 – Internet Marketing
H3 – Salterra Web Design Services
Salterra’s Perfect Silo
Salterra Homepage
So one of the biggest things we see people making a mistake is people trying to rank their homepage for everything. So we want at the minimum, to rank for your state, you don’t want to rank any city on your homepage. So you can cause keyword cannibalization, you can cause all kinds of problems by focusing. All your efforts are on the homepage and not on your insight pages.
I tell people all the time your homepage is just to get somebody off of, whether it be phone, call, email, or get off into an inside page and get into a silo structure. So one of the things we try to ensure is that it’s all set up from a brand. On the homepage. So the brand keyword in the title and the description and the H1 keyword variables and H2 keyword variables and H3 and then keyword and the body of the text that’s normal.
So we also will take an H4 and put it at the bottom of the inside pages. So it’s Salterra web services, providing web design, SEO, internet marketing, and software development. So this is a nationwide site, so I’m not mentioning Arizona. We do all these services.
I’m not trying to rank the homepage for any of these services except Salterra. The description. Salterra specializes in helping businesses with digital web design, SEO, internet marketing, and software development. Contact us today. The H1, web design, SEO, digital marketing, and hosting.
That’s it. That’s the homepage. That’s what we do on the entire website about that. So, again, I want them to get off of this page as quickly as possible.
Home Page Silo
Web Design Silo
This is a web design silo. Somebody comes in here, and they click web design, the link they’re going to pop into the web design silo. So this silo is all about web design.
My main nav structure changes. Most people do not do this. I started doing this about a year ago and saw incredible results with ranking for multiple keywords. It’s not that I went from page 2 to page 1 for a keyword. I just went from ranking for 300 keywords to ranking 600 keywords.
So web design, business websites, church websites, you can see the. The results from Google in six months ago, five months ago, um, e-commerce websites and WordPress website hosting has its silo. So target markets for our web design silo. Again, national, we do send National links there.
We’ll send state links, to Arizona, Texas, Nevada, and Colorado. Those were the four that we were focusing on when we started. And then the internal link plan, the same type of deal, web design, variations, naked variations, and brand topic.
Silo Web Design
SEO Silo
Here’s our SEO silo, same thing, local SEO, national SEO.
E-commerce SEO gets a free quote, blah, blah, blah—so same type of thing. We know the results and the numbers we go after the same target markets, and our internal and external link plans are always the same. So it was going through these internet marketing silos, same way software development, silo, the same way.
Search Engine Optimization Silo
Internet Marketing Silo
Silo – Internet Marketing
Software Development Silo
Software Development Silo
Local Web Design Page
So city pages is where the money’s at. Some people call them city service pages, the same thing. So, we build ours very precisely, just through all of our markets. And so I show mine here. You can go check this out, and you can look and see what I’ve done here. I don’t have a problem with that. So basically, the Phoenix web design page. Phoenix in general, is one of the top five hardest markets in the U S so just going after web design is pretty freaking tricky.
Target words for web design, honestly, Phoenix, web design and Phoenix web design variations, the page structure. I have web design content I have about Arizona content in the sidebar. I have about Phoenix content and accordions and the bottom. I have links to the Phoenix area. I have links to the GMB and driving directions to my office in Tempe.
And if you want to see this page, Check out the schema. The target market is Phoenix and Phoenix only. The link plan is internal and external. I do some exact matches here, but they’re typically through a tier-one buffer site. I’m a big believer in buffers, but you can see the same thing, but the money page is the money page.
Local Page Silo
Keep Track Of Your Silo
It’s very important to keep track of how your site and how your crawl map is looking. And once you do this, you’d find out what a successful prey page structure looks like. Um, and you can go check these. I don’t care if you prevent these rankings, but the whole thing I show this for is that the inside pages rank, not the home page.
Results Of A Perfect Website Silo
So out of all of these search volumes, The inside page is taking all the traffic. They’re not even going to the homepage. So this is why it’s crucial to have a solid silo structure because you will get the right pages ranking for the correct terms. And that’s what you want. That’s the way you don’t have any keyword cannibalization.
Conclusion
That’s how you can clean up your structure and improve it for the boss and the consumer.
