Silos vs Categories

Contrary to what you might have already heard about site architecture, the word “silo” and the word “category” are not synonyms.

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a category is "a division within a classification system." So, in this sense, items within a category should have particular shared characteristics that are familiar to the target audience.

On the other hand, on a website, a silo is a repository of content that is only accessible under one specific category. The siloed content is isolated, or mostly isolated, from other content within a website.

Most site visitors expect a website to be categorized in some way but sometimes overcategorization or an unorganized set up can make the site much more difficult to navigate. Problems arise when categories are:

Not organized in ways that match user expectations
Not labeled well
Formatted to limit accessibility to desired content

This is why using silos becomes important. It is even more important that if we are utilizing silos for SEO that we do it right because when done wrong it can lead to:

Impeded location and discovery
Lost leads
Wasted user time

The video below shows how we can manually build out our silos for a website. Near the middle of the video, we also find a case of content cannibalization. That occurs when two or more pages are competing for the same keywords. The result is neither page performing well.

Interlinking

It opens up paths to previously less accessible web pages for search engine spiders.
Helps organize web pages categorically from the keyword used in the URL of the link and the anchor text.
Improve user navigation by providing additional ways to interact with your site.
Use anchor text keywords to support the intent of the user.
Passes "link juice" between pages (a suspected ranking factor).
Organizes the site architecture and communicates your most important web pages to search engines.
Supports advertising campaigns by visibly highlighting or displaying links on a home page or following the content.

Of course, there are cases of links that search engines cannot parse. It is important to mention them so that you do not use them incorrectly:

Links in web pages that are disallowed in your robots.txt file

Links in search bars or submission fields
Links in embedded plugins like Java or Flash
Links on websites with more than 150 links

The video below shows how we use our clusters or silos to our advantage through internal links.

Creating a List of "Money" or High-converting Pages

When we first take a look at a site, it's extremely important that we identify which pages are working and which aren't (Note: In order to do this, you ideally have Call Tracking or at least Button Click Tracking setup on the site. If not, the best you can do is analyze traffic to the pages).

By identifying which pages already convert, we know what other related pieces of content would be beneficial for us to create. We can also identify gaps where pages need work or additional content needs to be built out in the content silo to help rank existing pages or optimize the user experience on the page to drive more of a desired behavior.

Restructuring an Existing Site

The site needs to be structured in a way that content flows in tiers or silos. This is important both from a user experience perspective as well as a Google ranking perspective. Think of it like an essay with a main topic, sub topic, then paragraphs under each. Sites need similar structure to rank.

For example, a piece of cornerstone content as one of your main pages on the site could be your “Substance Use Treatment” page. Linked under that could be all of the different drugs you help people recover from. However, the main page that you’re looking to rank and generate conversions on can be the “Substance Use Treatment” page, so that’s where the keyword optimized content and main backlinks go.

Once cornerstone pages are identified or written, you want to do some conversion optimization by split testing different versions of the page to see if you can increase the conversion rate. You also want to work to start ranking those pages higher in Google search (through on-page optimization and backlink outreach), driving bottom-of-funnel traffic to them with paid ad campaigns, and building out 2^nd and 3^rd tier articles on the site itself. Part of this will be identifying pages and articles with similar content and simply redirecting them to the money page.

Note in the image below that each piece of cornerstone content should be as close to the Homepage as possible. This can't always happens if it turns out that a high-converting or money page is lower down in the content tiers, but, generally, the closer it is to the Homepage, the more likely it is to rank. This is because the Google Bot's crawl time is limited and it only explores so far on each site when passing through. Just like a human, it doesn't have time to follow every link, so being closer to the Homepage means the Google Bot is more likely to crawl that page, index, and rank it.

Also note that the arrows represent interlinking between the pages. The image is just an example; any interlinking structure will work as long as there is at least one inbound and one outbound link for the silo. When the map is completed, it should be possible for a visitor to find their way from every page within the silo to another page in that silo. Interlinking should be done through money or high-relevance anchors to the appropriate page. No money or high-relevance term should be linked to any content outside the silo and especially not off site to some other organization's website (which would then pass the link juice to them rather than keep on our site).

This training goes into how to audit and restructure an existing site.

Below is a visual of how we recommend structuring a site so that Google can understand it.

Interlinking Summary

It opens up paths to previously less accessible web pages for search engine spiders.
Helps organize web pages categorically from the keyword used in the URL of the link and the anchor text.
Improve user navigation by providing additional ways to interact with your site.
Use anchor text keywords to support the intent of the user.
Passes "link juice" between pages (a suspected ranking factor).
Organizes the site architecture and communicates your most important web pages to search engines.
Supports advertising campaigns by visibly highlighting or displaying links on a home page or following the content.

Of course, there are cases of links that search engines cannot parse. It is important to mention them so that you do not use them incorrectly:

Links in web pages that are disallowed in your robots.txt file

Links in search bars or submission fields
Links in embedded plugins like Java or Flash
Links on websites with more than 150 links

Siloes, Hierarchies, & Interlinking