Organic traffic is free traffic that comes to your website from search engine results. This is different than traffic that comes to your site from social media sites, paid advertisement, or people who just typing your URL in a browser. Globally in January 2021, we observed that the average website gets about 48% of its traffic from search engines (organic traffic!) with most websites falling between 34% and 61%. One of the best ways to improve your rankings and increase your organic traffic is to develop a content silo strategy based on finding the relevant keywords for your website.
Think of content silos as internal linking structures on your website where all the content in each silo focuses around a single broad keyword. In other words, it is a hierarchy of content usually starting with a single link off your homepage and then expanding into multiple pages that all have something to do with the "silo".
For example, let’s say you operate a law office that specializes in estate planning. You could build a content silo around estate planning with pages built around services like wills, trusts, and other estate planning tools. These pages will then be linked from the main estate planning page.
If you are a toy company, you could build a content silo around plushie toys with other related pages created and linking from that page and all related to the plushie toy; how plushies are made, companies with mascot plushies, retired plushies, blogs about plushies, and of course, all the plushies in your store.
If you are a auto collision center, an example of a content silo may be created around painting automobiles with multiple pages linking from that page which are all related to painting.
This passes page authority down to these sub pages and let’s you keep the pages for hard to rank terms closer to the top. The URL in this case may look like something like this ...
sallyestateplanning.com
a link at the bottom of the main page for Estate Planning leads to ...
sallyestateplanning.com/estateplanning
then there might be four links on that page going to particular service areas like ...
sallyestateplanning.com/estateplanning/wills
sallyestateplanning.com/estateplanning/trusts
sallyestateplanning.com/estateplanning/living-wills
sallyestateplanning.com/estateplanning/estate-planning-tools
Finally, this last page on these pages may have another link going to ...
sallyestateplanning.com/estateplanning/wills/denver.
This topic is three pages deep in the silo. Remember each layer can have multiple links going off to multiple pages so the amount of content can quickly add up but keeping it all in a silo (and of course keep that content useful and well written) will help with rankings.
Creating an initial silo map of the important keywords in your industry is a good first step towards growing your organic traffic above the current number of visitors you get in a week. Once you have a content roadmap in place it is important to allocate time to write content each week and begin to fill in the silos. You may not see instant results overnight but if you are consistent you will see solid traffic growth over time.
*Note: Siloing content is not the same as blogging. We use blogs for "timely" content and messages. Siloing is a more advanced SEO activity that allows you to target the keywords you want and organize your content according to how difficult terms are to rank for. Tools like semrush.com, and spyfu.com can help you identify the keywords that people are searching for in your industry and how hard they are to rank for.
THREE TASKS TO COMPLETE
Perform keyword research to develop a sound SEO strategy
Create Web pages around your keywords to build content silos
Correctly link your silo pages together
FURTHER READING
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