How to define a good silo strategy in SEO?

The position of a site in the search results is essential. It is greatly dependent on the relevance of the site given to a subject or a topic sought. Therefore, by opting for an SEO silo strategy, you can tackle the main subject as well as all the subjects revolving around a theme. Follow the guide to see how to do a siloing job on your site. And thus perfectly treat one, or more, targeted thematic (s)!

The basics of an SEO silo strategy

The first principle to be mastered is that of silo mesh. Indeed, if we start again from Google’s primary mission – to organize global information and make it accessible and useful to all -, it is easy to understand why a site must address very specific subjects, linked to targeted themes, and easily indexable by the search engine. An SEO silo strategy, therefore, makes it possible to identify how to group related information in different sections of the same site, and how to link them together.

Concretely, siloing is an efficient internal networking method but also a perfect structuring of a site. The idea behind all this is simple: create relevant links between pages that cover the same topic. Thus, the semantic universe concerned will gain in power and in trust in the eyes of Google.

The Bottom-Up Approach

For a long time, in marketing and commerce, the Top-Down approach was predominant with a top-down structure, from companies to customers. It was the advent of Push Marketing with two main axes: to impose your brand because it is “essential” and to have a process of conquering the market by proving that your company is worthy of trust. Now, the Bottom-Up largely prevails in our age of sharing.

Indeed, thanks to the Internet, information has become universal, customers have understood that they have more “power”. This has forced brands to get to know their customers. But also to personalize their messages and adopt pull marketing strategies. In addition to the classic paid, earned, and owned media has come “shared”, thanks in particular to social networks. Thus, the strategy that now dominates is a mix of social media and brand content, to share information, ideas, encourage people to follow a company, a brand, and, ultimately, to consume or buy!

The semantic cocoon

Let’s start by defining this rather obscure notion for the uninitiated … A semantic cocoon is an internal linking system of the pages constituting a site, a sort of SEO architecture of a site.
Concretely, this technique will aim to “push” a given page from lower-level pages, with contextualized and logical links for the Internet user and for Google. The pages are therefore close from a semantic point of view and are linked to each other in a relevant way, to promote navigation by Internet users (and bots of search engines).
From then on, you will understand, a semantic cocoon is used to give juice to a given page, thanks to the quality and relevant internal links. The themed links between two pages that are close from a semantic point of view have a great SEO power and can even give more results than a backlink.

To set up a semantic cocoon, you have to have a lot of thought beforehand.

Indeed, unlike the SEO silo technique, which requires you to first define the keywords, as we will see below, in the case of the semantic cocoon, you will have to start by defining the personae to be reached, by defining their expectations, their questions. Then, it will be a question of “visualizing” the cocoon, and, for this, the mind mapping tools will be essential and very practical. Only then will we be able to tackle the keywords and the optimization of each page of the semantic cocoon according to this work. Think about the main page first, for the main keyword, and the ancillary keywords for the long-tail pages.

Of course, it will then be necessary to write the corresponding pages to properly address the entire cocoon. Once the pages are integrated on the site, they will need to be linked together in the most logical and relevant way. Finally, it will be necessary to ensure that the links lead ultimately to the main page.

How to set up a good silo SEO strategy?

Now you can put together a good silo SEO strategy. To do this, audit and define the important keywords for your site and its theme. Then visualize the different semantic levels of your silo in the form of a flowchart that can have up to 3 levels.

Level 1 corresponding to the main subjects. Level 2 will go deeper into the important topics of Level 1, and so on. Then concretely design the silo by linking the pages together. Link articles on the same theme to each other, and prohibit links between different themes!

Thanks to this internal network, the navigation of your Internet users will be more fluid. Again, use a mind mapping tool like MindMeister to easily visualize your silo. Finally, you can tackle the writing of missing content to address all the themes of your SEO silos.

Some useful tools for a good SEO siloing

To finish this chapter, let’s talk about some tools that can help you, starting with Cocon.se, which will allow you to put in images the structure of your site and its internal mesh. Perfect to see if the juice is balanced or if it is sent to the right landing pages. An essential tool for mastering the semantic cocoon. More “general” tools like Yoda Insight and Mr. Expert are also very useful, in particular for analyzing a site, its competitors, its keywords, and even for discovering the major players in a given theme.

In conclusion, if your goal is to optimize the visibility of your site in search engine results, a siloing strategy is a must and recommended by our SEO agency in Avignon. So, if you want to support or an audit, or even the creation of a complete semantic cocoon to seek good positions in the SERPs.