Utilized correctly, content silos can massively improve the way both human visitors and search engine crawlers find information in your blog. Not only will taking advantage of this simple technique help your blog’s page rank, but you can also take advantage of the silo model to make generating content easier in the future. But what is a content silo? Let’s take a look at everything you need to know about this content structure to make your blog successful.
What is a Content Silo?
Just like a grain silo stores a large amount of similar grain, a content silo is a subdivision of blog posts or website content that’s clustered around a single topic. A blog on fishing might have a content silo on fishing rods, involving a pillar content page that serves as a general overview on fishing rods that links to a number of posts on specific types of rods, techniques to use with fishing rods, and other related content. By linking all of these specific articles to the general pillar, both viewers and crawlers will be able to find the content that they want quickly.
Silo Structure for Blogs
So how should you set up content silos for your blog? Here’s a rundown on the steps you’ll want to take to build your first silo.
Chose the First Silo
Your blog is probably centered around a number of topics or subtopics. You’ll want to start with a silo that sees a good amount of search engine traffic with plenty of room for content creation. As you create your silo, you’ll start to break up that topic into smaller and smaller sections for individual blogs.
Write the Pillar Content Page
Your pillar content page is the heart of your silo. These pages tend to be long, detailed explanations of the entire topic with plenty of detail. If your topic is especially complicated, don’t worry about explaining everything. You can always add more information in the various sub-pages. If your topic is simple, however, don’t worry about putting everything into your pillar page. It’s okay to have ideas duplicated across various blog articles as long as the content itself is unique.
Write Supporting Content
Once you’ve got your pillar page written, it’s time to dive into your supporting content. For each topic addressed in your pillar page, create a blog that goes into more depth on that topic. These supporting blogs don’t need to be as long, but they should serve as comprehensive guides for anyone looking for information on that subtopic. The amount of supporting content you add will vary based on the complexity of your topic and the research you’ve done. You don’t need to be totally comprehensive with your content now. You can always come back and add more later.
Publish and Interlink Them
Once you’ve written the content needed for your silo, it’s time to publish your blogs! Make sure your homepage links to your pillar content page and that the pillar content page and all of your supporting content pages are linked together.
This organizational structure will help readers naturally find blogs on topics that they want to know more about. Generally speaking, content in your silo should always link to and from the pillar topic.
If topics covered in other silos are mentioned in your blogs, you might want to include the occasional link to a different silo, but you usually keep internal links centered around the topic in question.