Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective means of marketing for businesses these days. But to make it effective, you need to have the skill to produce valuable content and distribute it on suitable platforms.
The most important platform where your content is published is on your brand website. Therefore, it only makes sense if a business keeps focusing on creating high-value website content. To do that, the company needs to be familiar with the concept of a content silo.
What is a Content Silo?
A content silo is a method used to sort out all the content you have and put it together to categorize it into different topical areas for your company’s keyword-based website.
Building a content silo is utterly vital for your site’s search engine optimization. Content silos also enhance a website’s usability. Think of content silos as bookshelves arranged in a library. If books on all the different topics are mixed up and placed randomly on the shelves, anybody who visits the library will have difficulty finding the type of book they want to read. But when the bookshelves are categorized by subject or topic, it will be easier for the library visitors to go to the exact bookshelf where the book they need is.
Let’s have a closer look at the importance of content silos in making your website more valuable.
Why Are Content Silos Important?
A content silo gives many benefits to a website. Some of these are as follows.
1. Improve Your Domain Authority
Building a content silo for your website makes your site more organized and well-presented. That’s one of the factors Google looks for in the domains that it wants to give more authority. Thus when your website is nicely categorized into topics and menus, its domain authority is improved.
2. Enhance the Site Visitor’s Experience
When you have a content silo, it becomes easy for your site visitors to find their website’s information. For instance, if a visitor is interested in your products or services and wants to get in touch with you, they can find the ‘Contact’ page by looking for ‘Contact’ on your site’s menu. If someone wants to know more about your products, they will likely look for keywords like ‘product description’ or visit the ‘Products’ page. Suppose your organization provides a range of consultancy services, and a visitor wants to know more about your financial consultancy. In that case, they will look for a keyword or heading on that subject on your site.
On the other hand, if your website is not based on a content silo, visitors might get confused and annoyed when looking for the exact information they need. This will possibly increase your site’s bounce rate because they will feel like they are wasting their time browsing through your site.
3. Increase the Sales on Your Ecommerce Website
If you are selling products online by running an ecommerce website, a content silo will help your customers find the products they are looking for. This is because content silos are a significant part of online stores as well. In your site’s store section, you can create different product categories.
If your website is built on Strikingly, you can easily add categories to your Simple Store. If you are currently using our Free Plan, you will need to upgrade to our Pro Plan to use our simple store categorization feature. With this feature, you can group your products into separate categories and display your store categories in your store’s navigation. You can add up to 30 categories to your Strikingly store.
To add product categories, go to your Simple Store. Click on ‘Categories’. Here you can key in the category name and rename or change it anytime. You can also rearrange the categories you create at any time.
After the different categories have been created, you can start adding products to each type. Go to the product manager and group your products into the respective categories. To do this, follow these steps.
- Select a product.
- Under ‘Product Categories’, find the category that you want to put that product in.
Image taken from Strikingly
- If you cannot find the category you want to use, you can click on ‘Add New Category’ to create a new one.
- Select that category tag. You can select up to 5 tags for each product.
Image taken from Strikingly
- Click ‘Save’ to save the changes.
4. Help Search Engines Identify Your Website Category
A content silo not only helps your site visitors navigate easily but also helps search engines put your site in an appropriate category. Like human visitors, search engines also need to understand what your web content is about and how you have structured it. Content silos help your site’s structure become prominent for search engines in a way that mimics the structure of library index cards used in the olden days.
5. Make More Productive Use of Your Keywords
The main reason why a content silo is crucial for improving your website’s SEO is that search engines like and award keyword relevancy based on the following two factors.
- The content on each of your web pages
- The relevance of your entire website with your core keywords
For instance, if you want to rank your website for the term ‘pet business’’, it’s best if I create a section of content on my site and name it ‘Pet Business’. In this section, you can add any content related to a pet business, and it does not need to be confined to a single web page. You can further create different topics under the main topic of ‘Pet Business’ and create a separate page for each subject. Building topical content like this will help support your website’s overall SEO and authority and the ranking of individual pages.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
6. Determine Your Topics Strategy
Building a content silo can help you determine your topic's strategy. What does that mean? The previous section discussed how a content silo could help you use your website’s core keywords more productive. To do that, the best way, as mentioned above, is to create a section for a relevant keyword and build content on further subtopics to place under that section. When you do it, you are making a list of all your topics and subtopics that you want to have on your website. In other words, you are developing your topics strategy.
How to Create Content Silos?
Now that you know how important a content silo is for your website, let’s go through the steps to learn how to create content silos.
1. Develop a Content Strategy
The first step to get a grasp over anything in marketing is to come up with a strategy. The same goes for a content silo. Before building a content silo, develop a content strategy. Decide which topics you want to write on. Be mindful to keep all your topics relevant to your niche.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
2. Improve Your Keyword Search
This step might seem obvious but is often skipped by many. No matter how confident you are about the keywords you use on your website, it is always better to revise and update them just before including them in your content silo. This is because keywords can get outdated very quickly. Using keywords that you gathered a year ago will not help increase your website traffic. The best strategy is to keep improving your keyword research as you build your content. You need to find out the top three seed keywords and other keywords related to each of those three seed keywords. As a result, you will be listing down a whole basket of relevant keywords for your website. Then you need to correspond these keywords with your content silos.
3. Build Physical and Virtual Content Silos
A content silo can be built in two ways: physically and virtually. Virtual content silos are those that create a folder of pages, which is defined by its URL. Physical silos restructure your website’s navigation, making it easier for site visitors to access the different categories and subcategories.
We would recommend building both types of silos on your site because if you don’t, it would be a waste to create amazing content on your site without making it easy for users to access it or find it. That, in turn, will affect your website’s statistics. The content silos will serve your website in the same way that a table of contents, chapters, or footnotes serve a book.
Few Content Silo Examples
You will better understand what a content silo looks like when you see the content silo examples given below. You might see one example of a content silo that has a structure similar to another, even though they are both from different industries. But that’s how it is. Your silo structure depends on how you organize the data on your website, not exactly on the sector or area your information is about.
You must be wondering if content silos look complicated; the process of building a website would be even more complex. But that’s not the case. Web development has become quite simple now due to the availability of website builders.
If you want to build a website sign up for an account on Strikingly and select our ready-to-use templates. It won’t take you more than a day to develop a complete, good-looking website or landing page to represent your business.
