For websites driven by creating content to increase authority and visibility on various topics, internal links help push the content more effectively to search engines and thus to users.
By strengthening key topics and grouping related content around primary pages, you can enhance the authority of all pages on a topic and thus achieve better rankings.
You can use tools like OnCrawl or Botify to segment your website based on your topics.
This helps you visualize the link structure between thematic groups of content. It also allows you to track KPIs for each content area, such as organic visits, rankings, and page views.
Content Groups
- Consist of multiple pages with closely related topics or keywords.
- Are structured around a primary page – an authoritative page on your website covering a topic you want to be seen as an expert in. This page then links internally to other pages in the content group on your website.
- Use internal links between the pages to strengthen the relationship between them. These links should, where it makes sense, use the primary keyword or variations thereof in the anchor text.
- Typically, your primary page will rank well. The internal link structure from this page to the pages in the content group will distribute the authority gained to all related pages it links to.
Using internal links to build thematic content groups can also increase UA (URL Authority) and improve the click-through rate for your website.
The more the pages in a thematic content group link to each other, the better the group can rank in SERPs.
Why Use Content Groups (Silos)?
Content silos – also called content groups – enhance your website’s information architecture and user experience. You will likely also find that by organizing your content into silos, you get a better overview, and it becomes easier for you to build new content in a balanced way.
Each silo encourages the user to delve deeper into your pages logically – this can mean that users find more complex information, understand the intentions of the page they are on, or find products just as they are ready to buy.
At the same time, users have many opportunities to delve deeper into a topic they are reading about. They can follow internal links within the silo, choosing what to read without being overwhelmed with options.
It is, therefore, easy to dive deep and become more knowledgeable about a topic without having to deal with a sea of choices.
The Different Types of Silos
There are fundamentally a number of different methods for working with silo structures. One is called organizational silo structure and is the most common form.
Organizational Silo Structure
Organizational silo structure involves placing content into categories that make it obvious to search engines what the content is about.
Organizational silos allow you to rank on many different subtopics on a single website. Related pages, connected with internal links, make it significantly easier for both users and search engine bots to navigate your website.
Physical Silo
The use of physical silos is illustrated through the URL structure. An example of this could involve a new battery for an Audi A4.
https://www.example.com/cars/audi/a4/batteries/120v-battery/
Previously, this was an essential part of silo structure, but in recent years, Google has become so sophisticated that you can build silos without it being explicit in the URL structure.
One specific reason why segmentation through URL addresses has been phased out is that on many webshops, a single product can be available in multiple categories. This means that you achieve duplicated pages on your website unless you address them, for example, through the use of canonical tags. The challenge with this is that it is not easy to manage in practice.
Decisions must be made each time a new product is uploaded that can belong to multiple categories. This is why it has become more common and practical to have products, for example, always named /products/product-name
After that, you can easily display the product in many different categories, as it will always be the same URL.
Virtual Silos
Virtual silos, on the other hand, are the form used today. This method is more relevant to how search engines index content.
An internal link structure connects groups of related pages but does not separate related pages.
This structure encourages linking pages for specific keywords, increasing the chance that the page in question achieves rankings on the specific keywords and phrases it is optimized for.
Moreover, this way of organizing the website is easy and simple for users to understand, as the pages are where users expect them to be.
This text is the first part of the chapter on Silo Structure. In the next chapters, you will learn how to work with silo structure concretely and practically. Read the rest of the chapter in the full edition of The Book on Internal Links, click here to buy your version now.
