Most business websites have a blog section that helps them improve their search rankings and share their knowledge and expertise with their audience.
But many marketers don’t know that it is important for your blog section to have a structure too.
Having a proper structure can help your audience find information in a logical manner and with more ease.
Besides, it is also helpful for your SEO.
When your content is well-organized, it becomes easier for search engines to find relevant content and rank your blog higher in search results.
After knowing of so many advantages of a well-structured blog section, you must be wondering how to create this structure. Well, that’s where content silos come in. So what are content silos?
What are Content Silos?
Content silos are a way of organizing content on a website into topics or categories to make it easier for visitors to find relevant information.
Ideally, they are organized around topics to make it easier for users to find the information more quickly and easily.
The best thing about creating content silos is that it helps you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) by allowing search engine crawlers to discover and index related content more easily.
Now the question is how do you create a content silo that works well for your blog. In the following section, we’ll talk about 4 important steps that can help you create a powerful content silo for your blog.
So let’s check them out.
1. Conduct a Survey to Discover Your Audience’s Pain Points
Conduct thorough research about the pain point of your target audience. The fastest and most qualitative way to do so is by creating a survey with the right questions. So take your time to think about what you want to know: What problems does your audience encounter? How do they currently deal with them? What is the cost of these challenges?
This way, you get qualitative information that will help you write the content your audience wants to read. In your articles, you can offer suitable solutions to their pain points in your blog, promoting your product or service. For example, you can create content silo’s according to each pain point category, or per solution category.
Share the survey on your website, via mail, and on your social media channels to get as many responses as possible. To give your audience an incentive to complete the survey, offer them a score and feedback at the end of the survey. Personal recommendations will motivate your audience because of the added value you offer for free.
The greatest advantage is that you can keep the survey running for as long as you want. You can update your content according to the responses that flow in because you are constantly collecting data. As such, you can update existing articles and keep them evergreen.
Once you’ve determined the main topics, it’s important to conduct keyword research in order to optimize your blog articles for search engines.
2. Start with Keyword Research
Before you can create content silos, you need to identify the topics that you’ll be focusing on in your blog. This will help you determine which topics are related and which ones are more general for your silo.
Once you know that, start with keyword research. This will help you identify which topics to include in your silo. It also helps you identify the most relevant search terms and phrases related to a particular topic.
Knowing these phrases and topics is important because you can then use them to come up with sub-topics and related content for your silos. In the process, don’t forget to create a spreadsheet where you add your keywords.
3. Create Pages for the Content Silos
Once your keywords are ready, it’s time for you to identify the subtopics and create the pages for your silos. Review the keywords and choose the ones you want to add to your initial silos.
Now there are two different ways of picking your silo. In the first one, you want to opt for the core topics that are essential for your business.
This approach helps offer value to your audience from the early stage of your website. The downside of this approach is that it isn’t very helpful for your SEO.
In the second approach, you want to opt for the keywords with the lowest difficulty. Now create content by targeting long-tail keywords for those keywords. This has great benefits in improving your overall search rankings.
However, it’s to be noted that you can’t expect your website to generate a massive amount of traffic right from the start since long-tail keywords don’t do that immediately.
Now that you know your subtopics, it’s time to map out your content. Try to choose at least 5 subtopics under each topic.
4. Create a Page Structure
After you have grouped the related topics together, it’s important to create an overall structure for your blog.
This will help visitors quickly find the information they’re looking for and make it easier for them to navigate your blog.
So how do you create this structure? Let’s take an example in which you’re creating a content silo around Web Design. Now the topic on your main page says ‘How to.’ Let your supporting pages be about ‘WordPress’.
Now on your main page, which is ‘Web Design,’ you have to create an H2 or H3 heading about WordPress and add an internal link to it.
You’ll do the same on your subpage as well. For example, you’ll create an H2 or H3 heading on your WordPress page and add an internal link to your main page, which is ‘Web Design.’
Basically, you create a structure in which your audience can easily browse through your contentto find the information they are looking for.
5. Publish and Link Your Content
The next step is to create and publish content on your pages. Take your time and start with research. If you’re not sure how long your content should be, make a quick Google search on the same topic as yours.
Now pick the first three posts and calculate their average length. The trick in making your content stronger than theirs is to add 10% more content to yours.
But simply writing a long post isn’t enough. They should be able to add value to your audience. Make it engaging by using a lot of infographics, images, and videos.
Also, focus on improving their readability by using headings, subheadings, and bullet points. Keep your paragraphs small and distribute your keywords strategically to make them appear more natural.
Once your posts are ready, go ahead and link them together.
And that’s it. Your content silos are ready. But don’t forget to keep your content silos updated.
This will help you improve your search rankings and will keep you ahead of your competitors too.
