What Are Content Silos?

Organizing your content is an often overlooked, but important, aspect of your SEO strategy. You can write all the quality content in the world, but if the pages are in a jumbled mess on the main nav, or they’re hidden multiple layers deep with seemingly no relation to each other, you’re hurting yourself in two ways–the user can’t find it, and Google bots have to figure out for themselves how to interpret the content on your website.

If you’re a business that offers services which span multiple categories or areas of an industry, especially eCommerce, content silos are a form of technical SEO that can be a useful strategy to employ in order to organize your content for both users and search engines.

How Do Content Silos Work?

Let’s say you are a pet store that sells food, toys, and collars for both dogs and cats. That’s a lot of content for a lot of different topics, and unless it’s organized properly, it could be a nightmare to navigate both for users and Google. Try visualizing your website’s content as a flow chart, looking something like this:

Everything is separated into its own categories, with a clear path from the parent category above it–dog products links to collars, which links to chain collars and harnesses, which can then link to specific brands. As long as you have content to write about each of your products or services, your content can be set up this way as well.

It’s important to consider not only the content, but the URL structure of your site, as well. If you want to properly set up a content silo, the structure of your URLs must reflect the categories that the pages are in.

For example, the URL for dog chain collars should look something like this:

www.yourpetstore.com/dogs/collars/chain-collars

Each “folder” in the URL lets Google know which category the product or service belongs in, and it’s an easy to read URL that tells the user exactly where they are on the site.

Remember, content silos are for users first and search engines second. If you organize your content in order of what you know your usual customer journey looks like, then you can target increasingly specific keywords as you go further down the flow chart. As you begin to rank for those specific keywords, your domain authority increases and your chance of ranking for the higher-volume head terms increases.

If you’re just getting started on your content, do it the right way and silo it off. However, it’s never too late to organize it–and our SEO writing team can help you do it!