In marketing terms, content silos are groups of related content, which enable Google searches to find the right search engine optimization (SEO) terms and improve your search rankings.
Quality content can increase Google ranking
The message is clear and precise; ‘Write quality content and you will be rewarded with high-rankings from Google‘. This is mostly true. However, a lot of companies miss out on this opportunity by failing to structure their website content in a way that makes it easier for Google to find the posts that most contribute to the company being an authority on the topic.
Despite efforts to maintain quality, engaging content, marketers are finding that the content is not providing the required SEO benefit. Often, this is because the site structure makes it hard for Google to grasp the connection between the better quality posts and the other pages, which are the focus of the SEO rankings. The way to achieve this is by using a proper ‘Silo’ structure. This will help Google find what it needs, all in one place.
Web silos can improve Google searches
Website silos are not a new concept. The credit for this has been given to Bruce Clay, the founder and CEO of his own Digital Marketing Optimization company, who developed the silo idea. Mr Clay wrote an article about his idea, which makes for very interesting reading. In effect, the main idea is to make sure that all the related content for each Google search word is in the same general “area” on your website. Then, when Google scans the content on your site for a certain term, it is forced to recognise the connection between the term and the content. And this is how it improves the rankings in the Google search engine.
Progressing with optimization and content
No matter what your site is for, be it ecommerce or a blog, there are pages you want Google to find. These are known as “organic landing pages” and if optimized correctly, contain the keyword for Google searches. So when a potential visitor looks for that keyword, your page will be displayed in the search results. Hopefully, on the first page. Once you have completed the optimization, the next step is to write great content related to that keyword. Then you prioritize it all and add a few tags, and away you go. Now you go off and watch your keyword tracker excitedly awaiting the desired result.
Make landing pages your parent pages
And nothing happens. No search results for your keywords, no tracked clicks, no visitors to your site. All that effort, gone to waste. Why? In a normal structure, the organic landing pages are not linked closely to your content pages. So when Google crawls through your site, it sees no connection between the two, and moves ponderously on. In an ideal structure, the organic landing pages are the direct parent pages for your content, so when Google crawls back, it can see the content directly below your keyword pages and can link them together, placing you in its list of relevant sites.
Improve ranking without changing keywords
In a case study, with a website using the normal structure, it showed a minimal SEO ranking, and very poor click-through rate. When the silo structure was implemented, and the organic landing pages correctly linked to the content, the rankings changed.
Prior to the study, the site only ranked on 3 of its hundreds of keywords. And the highest ranking was on page 5 of the results (42nd). After a week of re-integration of the organic landing pages, and a lot of reshuffling of content, the site was relisted. No improvement was made to the SEO work that had been previously done. Within a few days, there began to show an impact of the work. After 3 weeks, the site ranked for 18 keywords, and two keywords, which had previously been unranked, showed on page 1 of the Google search.
Changes show promising results
In the ever-changing world of Google ranking, a few weeks is not really enough to show whether this is the best formula. However, the speed at which the results began to show was promising, considering there was no further SEO work done. And while the site continues to grow in the rankings, it is possible that some changes to improve the SEO work could put it on page one permanently, whenever one of their keywords is used.
As an ongoing case study, this is still something to confirm, and see if the silo structure can improve the site’s overall ranking as drastically in the future as it did in just a few weeks.
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