Successful SEO in 2022 relies on many elements, some small, some big, to get your SEO moving upwards or staying on top if you are already there. One of the more overlooked aspects is your site structure. With everything dependent on Google’s crawlers which crawl through your site and rank your pages, Silo structure in SEO can be a game-changer.
An SEO agency understands that every site needs to be optimised. A site must deliver a successful SEO strategy that uses regularly researched keywords for current trends and links to high authority domains (DA). Still, these are two cogs in a complex wheel.
SEO Silo Structure is one of those components to make your business TICK.
I look at SEO like a Rolex watch. It’s a perfect working piece of machinery. Still, if you took it apart, you would be astounded by the technicality and the number of cogs and metals and intricacies that go into making that perfect machine.
However, that perfect machine keeps ticking every day, which SEO is; just like a Rolex watch, it can never stop; it has to keep working.
Your site’s architecture plays a pivotal role in how the search engines perceive your site and understand how to rank it accordingly.
If your structure is broken, so is your SEO campaign, regardless of how much money, time, and effort are.
Silo structure in SEO will fix these issues. This article is designed to give you an insight into how they work, what they are and how you use SEO silo structure. The intention is to help push you forward and reap the benefit of more intense internet usage in 2022.
Silo Structure what is it?
I am being presumptuous, but your website will contain services and products. A silo structure groups each page on your suite into sections categorised by topic and then segregates groups of information.
This formula differentiates itself from most sites’ standard ‘flat’ structure. This structure is where pages are positioned directly in the root folder.
That lack of structure hinders the crawlers from being able to determine precisely what your site is trying to achieve. Once a crawler is confused, you are running into a brick wall. Your content ends up mixed and in one place.
If you group pages that are related together and get them organised in subfolders, you are helping Google’s crawlers to identify your site’s main topics and understand your use to their users who are searching.
You subsequently show relevance to search terms, which is the key in 2022.
Also, don’t forget the user once they arrive on your page. You make it simple and easy to get the information they want and turn them into a lead.
Creating silos for SEO
Creating a silo structure in SEO does require time and effort, but what part of any organic SEO doesn’t? But in life, if you work hard enough at something, you will succeed.
Here are three basic requirements:
- Identify your website’s core focus
So, stage one is looking at your core topics. If you offer
The first step to creating a silo structure is determining the core topics of your site. There is a logical starting point if you offer unique services or products.
Let’s take an HVAC business as an example. You have a plethora of options to create silos, such as:
- Plumbing
- Air conditioning
- Heating
- Plus other services and so on
You separate the topics on your existing pages into appropriate groups.
There may be some pages that don’t directly correlate with your established silos, but that’s not the end of the world. For example, ‘About Us’ or your ‘Contact page’ can stay in your root folder.
If you have leftover pages, then you can look at finding common themes between them. This could well lead you to additional silos opportunities for the site.
- Core topics need navigational organisation
Once the core topics are selected, organise the site content using separate subfolders for every one of them.
If we stick with the HVAC model as shown above,
Sticking with the HVAC example above, your folders would look something like this:
- www.mytestcompany.com/heating/
- www.mytestcompany.com/cooling/
- www.mytestcompany.com/plumbing/
Therefore place each page into the relevant folder.
For example, the page would be located if you had an electric heating page at www.mytestcompany.com/elecric-heat.html. So then, place your pages accordingly in the relevant folder.
The same applies to electric heating www.mytestcompany.com/heating/electric-heat.html.
- Your Internal linking structure needs to be strong
An SEO agency would focus on earning and gathering links for external sites. That adds authority to your site that Google wants to see.
But never forget the importance of internal linking either. This allows the crawlers to seamlessly move through your site and index each page.
Adding links in each silo individually, if they are relevant, will help you progress.
In doing so, you show the SERPs that all these pages are relevant to each other and related to specific topics on which your site is informational. This will also help users stay on your site longer, another ranking factor for Google.
SUMMARY
Don’t mistake stopping to add relevant, engaging content to each silo. Organic SEO is continual. This is the marketing tool for the foreseeable future, so you must always be proactive in your efforts.
Building an effective silo structure still has to be maintained after you have re-organised everything on the site; this is a starting point. If your site makes sense to both users and crawlers, you are onto a winner, and again, it’s a part of the machine that has to keep turning, and in 2022 so do you. Keep working at it, or if you have an SEO agency, make sure they are too, and you’ll have every chance of a better year than 2020 and 2021; good luck and I hope this article helped.