Content strategy and SEO go hand in hand. That’s what I learned in my Writing, Editing and Curating course in my second semester of Content Strategy Master study. Teodora Petkova talked about how the text changed when the web came in and what that meant for our marketing communication practices.
Writing for the web should be thought through – structuring the text in a way it’s engaging for the user and readable by machines. It should include hyperlinks and strong keywords and at the end, enjoyable content so the reader is drawn in.
Since I work in a company where web writing is a fundamental activity there are a lot of ways we create the text. Sometimes we get content ideas from our customers or readers and sometimes we just come up with them ourselves in written content and SEO teams.
With SEO there’s a lot of experimenting that’s why our current project in motion is creating new content and structuring it in a SILO. If you’ve never heard of a SILO structure, it “is a type of website architecture where you group, isolate, and interlink content about a specific topic. This creates clean, distinct sections of related content on your website.” (Ahrefs)
How we’re structuring SILO
Our SILO structure consists of 5 articles. The core article will be titled Planets in the solar system. This article will link to a second one down the hierarchy titled Which planet in our solar system has the most moons? In this article there will be one link pointing to the next article, which will also link back. This is also the only article in the second level that will link back to the core article. When we reach the last, 5th article titled How old is the solar system? we have one outgoing link to the 4th article and two links coming in – from the 4th article and from the core article. Wow, that was a stretch.
Writing the articles
It’s very important for the content of the articles to be actually good. It has to be written in a way people will like to read it. Headings should reflect important topics to create a natural flow of a reader. With thorough analysis we prepared a structure for each of those articles with specific headings (H2s, H3s) for our written content department to follow when writing. Keywords and ideas came from a simple Google search of the title, looking at SERP, picking out the keyword variations and Related search section at the bottom.
Research for the titles of articles included using SEO tool Ahrefs and People also ask section in SERP which is very useful for coming up with ideas, either for related articles or headings.
What could break a SILO
Essentially you will have multiple SILOs in your structure and the most important thing is to not link between them. Lower level pages or articles should not link to other silo pages or articles. Even though it may make sense due to content being relatable to link to other articles in other silos, it will break up the structure of a SILO.
After all we get new content
This is an experiment and we’ve read through (almost) every article on the web – also the one telling you to not bother with SILOs – but we are excited to see the results in the next few months. It may work or it might not. The fundamental goal is to create good and valuable content to attract new readers in any way you structure it.
Useful links: