How can a content silo build your expertise on a topic?
Even if you have been producing content for a long time you might not know about content silos and how to use them. A content silo is a way of structuring and grouping together related content on your blog. You do this for a few reasons.
- It helps you show your expertise and authority about a specific set of keyword phrases that your business is about
- It helps the users easily find related content about a specific topic.
Sometimes you will see SEO or blogging experts talk about “website silo architecture” but that’s a fancy way of saying the same thing. The meat of the concept is that you can use content silos as a way to plan out and structure your content so that users come to know your expertise in a specific topic and so that any one piece of your content supports the other pieces that are related. It’s a win for you and for your users.
An example of a content silo
Let’s say that your business is all about eye creams. Over the past 2 months you have published 8 blog posts or articles about various aspects of eye creams. And you have created social media posts for every single article, and maybe you have also created some YouTube videos about eye creams, too. You are all about eye creams both on your blog and on social media. While content silos are mostly talked about for bloggers you can also create a content silo for your social media and that will help you keep on topic there, too. Sort of another way of building a content calendar. Your content silos will look like this.
To get the most visibility and reach you want to interlink your content. You already know that your social media posts link back to your blog posts, right? But here are additional ways to get more use out of all your content.
- Link your blog posts to each other – find 2 of your blog posts that relate to each of your other blog posts and create a backlink to them in your post.
- Link your YouTube videos in the same way – suggest a “next” video that relates to the video someone just watched.
- Link some of your social media posts to each other to keep them in your feed longer (make a newsfeed post a story, for example, and link several stories one right after the other).
An example of links within a content silo
When you have linked a few blog posts together (creating a backlink from one to the other) and done the same for your YouTube videos and social media posts your content silos look a lot stronger.
You can see that your silos are stronger and more stable, and each piece of content helps support other pieces of content in this illustration.
Linking one content silo to others – an example
Finally, find a few places to link your silos together.
- Link a blog post to one of your YouTube videos.
- Link a YouTube video to two related blog posts.
Now your content map looks even stronger, something like this illustration.
The benefits of interlinking content silos together
Interlinking gives you backlinks, extents the usefulness and visibility of every piece of content you create, and reaches more people. And even better it saves you a lot of time because you are spending less time creating and getting more use out of one piece of content.
Here is a rule of thumb to work with.
- Each new blog post or article should link to 2 others you have published before.
- Each new YouTube video (or whatever else you do) should link to one or two others you have done before.
- Each new social media post should support a few other social media posts you have already created.
- A few times a month link across the silos to another type of content.
More help to improve SEO in addition to building content silos
If you want to find out more about improving your SEO I highly recommend Debbie Gartner’s “Easy Backlinks for SEO” (that’s my affiliate link). I have this and use it myself, and the content is actionable and useful.
Click on the image to check it out.
Related Post: What is SEO and What Does It Do?
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