Is Silo Structure SEO the fastest way to outrank authority sites in 2025? If Google recognizes your website as an authority on a particular topic, you get better results.
That’s why authority sites always get more advantages and faster rankings when compared to new websites. But building an authority site takes years and here’s where Silos comes into play.
Even if you have a new website, by properly implementing a silo structure, you can establish yourself as an authority on particular topics in the eyes of Google. That’s how you can easily outrank even authority sites in your industry.
Now, if you’re wondering about what is SEO Silo and how you can implement it to improve your website’s SEO, this post is just for you! So let’s get started without further ado.
Table of Contents
What is Silo Structure in SEO?
SEO Silo involves organizing your website’s content into various categories and subcategories which helps Google crawlers to easily determine the relevance of each post on your blog based on your keywords (or topics).
In simpler terms, Silos are basically a way to separate your blog’s content into various categories.
Here’s one of the best Silo Structure examples.
These categories are further separated into “sections” where your readers can find relevant content on a particular topic (for example, Silo Page). Then your sections are finally separated into Posts where you’re providing blog posts and content for that particular topic.
Do you want to see a live Silo example? Let’s show you how we use SEO Silos at BloggersPassion (so you’ll get a good idea).
As you can see above, we’ve created multiple SEO Silos including;
- Blogging, SEO, Hosting, Coupon, Deals, About and Article.
Suppose you look closely at the categories section. In that case, you’ll notice that some of the silos have deeper posts, for instance, the SEO category has types, guides, and more as subcategories).
That means the most important categories are further divided into subcategories to create a deep Silo content structure for our website. You’ll find all the blog posts under that section when you click on any of them.
Let’s look at what the “SEO” category looks like.
As you can see above, you’ll find a ton of posts under the link-building section where you can find ONLY exclusive content that is related to link-building.
SEO Silo Examples
So far we’ve discussed how we created a Silo content structure for our site BloggersPassion.
Let’s now talk about some more real-life examples of websites that use Silos for better SEO.
Example 1: Search Engine Land
Let’s first talk about the first Silo example of the popular SEO blog Search Engine Land. Since the SEL blog is run by SEO experts, they know what they are doing and their website Silos includes a ton of SEO-related categories.
Here’s how the Silo of Search Engine Land looks like;
As you can see above, you’ll find a ton of categories (Silos) ranging from SEO to PPC to Webinars and so on. When you click on those categories, you’ll find all the relevant articles and news related to that particular category.
No wonder why their website is getting Google site links for those categories. Have a look at it.
As you can see above, most of their Silos (categories) which are displayed at their website level are also showing up in Google site links. That’s the beauty of structuring a website nicely using Silos with relevant categories.
Quick note: You can also read more about how you can get Google site links quickly.
What are the benefits of using Silos?
So why should you bother about implementing Silo architecture for your websites? Are there any benefits of using Silos in 2025? Yes, there are many which include the following.
1. Helps with better engagement and crawlability
Silos primarily helps you with 2 things, one is Information Architecture (IA), which is about organizing your content in a better way to provide a better user experience (UX) and the other is SEO, which includes organizing content the right way to provide better crawlability to search engine bots.
2. Helps you with better organic rankings
The #1 reason popular bloggers and Best SEO experts implement Silo content structures on their websites is to improve their search rankings. Does Siloing help you with higher search rankings?
Yes, it certainly does. You’re organizing your website contents in a nice way so search crawlers better understand what your site is all about so it helps them while ranking your pages.
3. Silos are evergreen
Silos haven’t come up all of a sudden, in fact, they have been around the blogosphere for a long time now. Since the introduction of Google’s latest updates and Google’s inclination towards better UX, more and more bloggers are implementing Silos to improve their site’s SEO so they are evergreen.
Silo SEO Structure Issues
While the advantages mentioned earlier make the silo structure a popular choice, it does come with its share of drawbacks.
The main idea behind siloing SEO is to confine link equity within the silo and only link internally to pages within the same site section. However, some experts believe that, when contextually relevant, linking to other pages on your site is essential.
See this Silo structure example:
In this image, three silos are mentioned, and their posts are interconnected.
They look like perfectly structured silos where link juice is passing smoothly.
But there’s a flaw. Elephants and Lions can be found in both Forest & Savanna. However, you’ve separated them into a different silo based on Land habitats. If you want to internally link these 2 Habitats with Lions and Elephants, (which is a sensible thing to do because it’s correct information and important for users to know), it might break your silo structure.
To solve this issue, a Pyramid structure is needed!!!
John Mueller [Search Advocate, Google] is one of them. He stated in his YouTube SEO office hour video (check 52:42) that going with a top-down or Pyramid structure helps Google better understand the context of individual pages on the website.
But once you do that, you’re no longer following the silo approach.
In a Pyramid structure, You have to organize your content in a pyramid-like hierarchy, placing the most crucial content at the top, followed by the second most important, and so on.
The main issue with the silo site structure is that it limits the inclusion of relevant contextual links outside of the silo. Using a pyramid structure without such restrictions addresses this problem.
How to Implement Silos On Your WordPress Website?
Now comes to the main question: how can you implement Silos on your website for building a better website architecture?
First things first. Find out your main Silos. For example, if you’re running a blog that mostly covers digital marketing, then your main Silo would be “Digital marketing”.
Now you need to define your categories under your topic (in our case, “digital marketing”) and these categories can be generally divided into;
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Social media and so on
Once you’re done with the categories selection, you can further divide your categories into subcategories (although it’s optional and not needed for every category). By dividing into subcategories, you’re creating a deep Silo which provides stronger power and more authority to build a properly organized website.
From the above example, let’s say you want to create subcategories for the main category “SEO”, it can be further divided into the following (this is an optional step);
- Paid ads (PPC ads)
- SEO plugins (where you can only cover SEO-related plugins)
- Technical SEO (only technical aspects of SEO such as site audits, creating Silos and so on)
Are you getting it?
Once the above Silos are defined, now you can easily insert your new blog posts into appropriate categories for better Silo content structure.
Read: SEO Best Practices for 2025: Your Ultimate Guide to Dominating Google Rankings
Basically, Silo content structure of a properly organized website includes the following most important things.
- Keyword research
- Organizing your content hierarchically (based on your target keywords)
- Reinforcing your website’s structure through different ways (such as implementing categories, menus, breadcrumbs, linking to each other internal posts, URL structure and so on)
Let’s briefly talk about the above things so you can implement Silos for your website the right way in 2025 and beyond.
1. Define your keyword strategy
Why bother about keyword research while Siloing your website?
That’s a great question, to begin with. You need to know what keywords you want to target before you can create your silos around those keywords. There’s no way you can implement a SEO silo without defining your keyword strategy first.
So make sure to find out what kind of keywords you’re going to target with your blog or website in the long run. That way you can easily create and organize your whole website structure.
If you’re wondering about creating a solid keyword strategy for your website, there are few excellent tips for you.
2. Come up with a list of seed keywords
If you want to silo your website for a few topics, you first need to come up with a few seed keyword ideas. Seed keywords can be considered as primary topics or keyword phrases that define the overall “content structure” of your website.
You need to define your target audience, find out their wants and needs, and make sure to brainstorm topic ideas around them to come up with a ton of useful seed keyword ideas for your website.
Read: Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid As A Blogger In 2025
3. Target low-competitive keywords
You can’t rank for a competitive keyword like “fitness” especially if you’re building a new website that barely has authority backlinks. So there’s no point in creating a separate page or category by targeting a keyword like “fitness” as you won’t get any results.
It’s always a smart idea to focus on finding low-competitive keywords so you can create clusters or categories around them. You can also create pages with low search volume keywords like “fitness apps for women” and then start creating highly useful content around that category. That’s how you can get better results and drive targeted visitors from search engines to your site.
4. Use the right SEO tools
To perform an in-depth keyword analysis, you must need to get access to the right SEO tools. Although there are a ton of tools out there following provide you exceptional keyword data.
Semrush: Semrush is the #1 SEO tool in the world which is used by over 10 million people worldwide and it’s also the same tool we’ve been using at BloggersPassion since 2015. It gives you exceptional data around keyword analysis no matter whatever niche you are in.
Not only does it help you with keyword research but you can also use it for competitor analysis, backlink audits, site audits, on-page optimization, and so on. If you’re looking for a free trial of the Semrush tool, use the following link.
2. Organise your content hierarchically
In the above step, we’ve talked about keyword strategy, let’s now talk about organizing your content around those keywords. You need to map out a high-level information architecture based on your target keywords.
What if you already have existing content? What if you already have a website with a ton of blog posts and you want to implement Silos?
If you have existing content, you need to simply review all of your content and decide;
- What blog posts to keep
- What blog posts or pages to update
- What blog posts to remove or use 301 redirects
The key here is to remove and use 301 redirect for every blog post or page which has thin content or which is not relevant to your target market anymore.
Make sure to shrink your blog content size so you can organize your content much easier. For instance, at BloggersPassion, we had around 1000 blog posts which are already going live but now, we’re only indexing 500 pages on Google search.
Do you know why? We decided the remaining blog posts or pages are not helping us with anything including traffic, sales or conversions. So we either updated them or removed (and redirected) to other existing pages that are performing well.
That’s how we cleaned up a ton of blog content at BloggersPassion and we didn’t notice any traffic drop whatsoever.
With new content (the blog posts or topics you want to cover in the future), just make sure to create specific categories that are relevant to your content. And make sure to create in-depth content so it ranks well in the search engines.
Come up with a target keyword for every blog post or page you create on your blog. It’s better to target low search volume long tail keywords if you really want to get better results from search engines.
3. Reinforce your website’s structure
Reinforcing your website’s structure through different ways which include the following;
- Implementing categories
- Menus
- Breadcrumbs
- Linking to each other internal posts
- URL structure and so on
Here’s how you can get started.
1. Use pages for creating Silos
Use pages instead of blog posts to structure your site in a hierarchical way. That way, you can easily define a parent page for each section it gives you the ability to create your website’s structure hierarchically.
Just make sure NOT to create too many pages for Siloing otherwise it becomes very difficult for you to manage those things. There are themes like Genesis themes which provide you with easy options to manage your pages and navigation, otherwise, keep it simple by creating only essential pages.
2. Use breadcrumbs:
A breadcrumb can be considered a secondary navigation system that shows the user’s location on a website.
- One is, people, can easily navigate to the relevant category or section to find (in the above example, SEO tools section) similar blog posts
- Another is, that search crawlers easily understand what the page is all about
To put it simply, breadcrumbs help your website visitors track their path from the page they are currently viewing to the homepage of your site.
If you’re using WordPress and want to implement breadcrumbs on your site for better navigation, you can install and activate this plugin.
3. Optimizing your URL structure:
Your URL structure plays a key role in optimizing your content and improving your site’s overall SEO. So make sure to keep it simple.
WordPress provides you with an option for URL structure which looks like this;
/%category%/%postname%/
To be able to make such changes, just go to the WordPress dashboard, click on Settings > Permalinks, select Custom Structure, enter /%category%/%postname%/, and Save. You’re done.
You can also avoid using category names if you want an even shorter version of the URL structure for your site. In that case, only your blog post title will be shown up beside your domain name.
4. Use menus:
Almost every professional WordPress user uses menus to show up their main pages such as about us, contact, email landing pages, portfolios, and so on. Whether you know it or not, Menus are extremely important, as they are the primary navigational links to your top-level silos.
It’s extremely easy to create menus in WordPress (assuming your WordPress theme supports the Menu feature). Simply go to WordPress dashboard > Appearance > Menus and set up the menu to include the top-level silos on your website.
5. Learn how to interlink like a pro
Interlinking is extremely important as it helps you with better rankings. If you’re wondering what interlinking is all about it is the process where your blog post or a page has links to other relevant articles on your site.
When someone clicks on it, they’ll be redirected to another similar article on your site. Not only helps you with better user engagement and dwell time on your site but also helps you with deep crawling on your site from search crawlers.
Pro tip: If you don’t know how to smartly interlink to your posts (it’s harder to do interlinking especially when you’ve too much content on your site), start using Rank Math SEO plugin as it recommends highly relevant internal links while creating a blog post. You can read our Rank Math SEO review to know more details about it.
4. Implement a Pyramid Structure Concept Whenever Needed
I previously mentioned issues with the silo structure. If you encounter a scenario where you need to create internal links between subcategories of two silos, go ahead. It won’t harm SEO; in fact, it’ll assist users in accessing relevant information, ultimately enhancing user experience and potentially improving Google rankings.
Important Things to Remember While Creating Silos for SEO
Here are a few important things you need to remember while siloing your website content to improve your overall SEO.
1. Don’t create posts that don’t match with your Silos
The #1 big mistake most people make after creating a Silo for their site they publish new topics or blog post ideas that are completely irrelevant to the categories (or silos) they created on their site.
If you really have to create new blog posts or new topics on new silos, make sure to create a new category and publish them under that category.
2. Review your published posts
You might already have published a lot of posts under various categories. If you’re using more than 1 category for a post, just deselect them and map it to only 1 category that is relevant to the topic of your blog post.
Focus on content quality and relevancy: SEO is changing almost every single year but there are two things that are growing more in popularity and they are “content quality” and “relevancy”.
It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, if you want better rankings, you need to create high-quality content that’s relevant to your website topics. Here’s where siloing comes into play. Make proper use of them and you’ll see a boost in your search rankings.
3. Link to posts, not categories
Interlinking is so important and you must include links to your internal posts wherever necessary. But just don’t make the mistake of linking to your categories as there’s no actual use. Link to relevant posts so your website audience can actually go through one post at a time. It also passes link juice to one particular page instead of a category full of posts.
Final Thoughts On Silo Structure
As we often say “SEO is a huge ocean” which is constantly changing. You need to adapt to the latest changes to get better rankings.
Although siloing is nothing new and it has been practiced by many SEOs for a long time now and it is still essential if you want to get higher organic rankings.
We tried to uncover almost every important thing that you need to know about creating a Silo content structure to improve your site’s SEO. If you still have any questions, do let us know in the comments.
FAQs On Silo Structure SEO
Here’s a list of few important questions you should know about Siloing your website for better SEO in 2025 and beyond.
Silos in SEO is all about dividing your website’s content into various categories and subcategories and these groupings are known as Silos.
Figure out what topics you want to include on your website so you can perform in-depth keyword research. That way you can easily divide your website’s content into multiple categories to create powerful silos.
There’s no limit. It’s simply like there’s no limit on how many number of categories or pages you want to create on your website. You can create as many silos as you want.
Yes, absolutely. In fact, it’s better to start building backlinks to your Silo pages that you think are really important instead of building links only to your home page.
Yes, you can create sub silos by including subcategories which you can implement by dividing your blog’s primary categories.
Anil,
How are you. Thanks for this post, it’s very helpful.
I created my site using categories and subcategories, and wrote up the content specific to each one. Some posts were indexed into 1 or 2 categories.
After taking some advice from another marketer to create pages with the same names as categories and create 301 links from the categories to the pages, also changing the menu to include pages and not categories any longer… my site lost domain authority by more than half.
I linked to the home page from posts and to the pages that I newly created for the categories, but I’m now noticing my page authority increasing and the domain authority decreasing. Also, my site is decreasing in Alexa ranking.
Also, I’ve created the pages and even the pages for the sub-categories to go straight to the home page, ex: “domain-name-here.com/page”.
I’m thinking I screwed up big time.
Any words of advice from your experience? Thanks in advance.
Gone are the days when categories used to rank on Google search. Now we need to create pages for all potential keywords. From categories, you can add canonical tags to their respective pages. You don’t need to create too many links for the home page as it’s going to rank for brand queries only most of the time. Focus more on promoting your internal pages.
Thanks for your feedback. Though I was doing really well using my categories to rank and writing posts , no pages.
As far as linking. I meant something like this: my-domain.com/category/post >> now becomes >> my-domain.com/page-with-category-name-and-301-redirect-from-category/post
also:
my-domain.com/category/sub-category/post >> now becomes >> my-domain.com/page-with-sub-category-name-and-301-redirect-from-sub-category/post (here I don’t even add the category page for before the subcategory page).
Does this make sense?
Wisam, I don’t understand the use of category for a post URL. Post URL should be free from the category or sub-category name if you are asking me for the optimized URL option. Wisam, I would suggest you share an email to me at [email protected] with complete details. That way I can help you in a better way.
Till date, I was thinking that website categories is only important for the reader but today it came to know that it is also useful for search engine if we want to get a good rank…. Anil sir you always share amazing post.. thanks
No, you have to categorize your topics first. Then, use your menus to structure. Please read the whole post along with the examples and you can do it yourself easily. Please let me know if you’ve any questions.
Hello Anil,
Silo structures is quite popular in these days and many bloggers have implemented these techniques to outrank them in search engines. Creating silo structure for your blog needs a lot of time, patience, and dedication. This cannot be achieved in few days. It is a constructive process which tech years to build a pillar of quality content. Thanks for sharing these great and helpful tips with us.
Regards,
Vishwajeet Kumar
That’s so true. Silos are not only helpful for search engines but they also help your readers to easily find your contents even if you’ve a lot of blog posts. So true about taking time to create your Silos and yea it sometimes even takes weeks especially if you’ve already published a lot of blog posts in various categories.
Can i just use only categories as silos and not create any page dedicated as silo content?
You can do that too! But if you’re created a solo dedicated page for Silos, make sure it’s detailed and highly informative and also build backlinks to that page for better organic rankings.
Hi,
i followed this post from the Facebook group. I must admit that I have learnt alot.
i have a question for you sir.
SEO wise, is it advisable to uses pages as menu on a header or use categories.
those pages if well optimized, do the rank?
Thanks as i anticipate your answer
One quick tip is don’t use too many pages. Publish absolutely needed pages which you can later use as categories (which you can easily show them up as silos using your menus) as we’re currently showing at Bloggers Passion.
Hello Anil,
Thanks for this post!
Do you like the idea of linking to one of your posts (typical info post like how to type) from the category and do you think it will be considered as silo?
For instance, in one of my sites, here’s how I structured my menu bar!
– Toys (broad category)
– Remote Control Toys (sub category)
– Top 10 best remote control car (my money article)
Do you think it’s a good practice?
I can email you my site URL too just in case if you wanna know what I am talking about!
Looking forward to hearing back from you!
Cheers,
Shakir
You can always link to other posts in the same category. In fact, it’s a great way to create a deep silo structure for improving your SEO. So yes, it’s a great way, go ahead. Also make sure to build links to your main blog posts so it ranks well.
Hi Anil,
This is great guide for beginners and intermediate SEOs. Recently, I started a new blog and I was looking for perfect silo structure guide and I came across this guide.
It’s good practice to have to create main pages from the beginning and then supportive pages interlink to main pages. This way we can pass good link juice to around one topic. What do you say?
Regards,
Aakash
Hi Aakash, what you said is absolutely right “It’s always a good practice to create main pages from the beginning and then supportive pages which you can interlink to main pages. It can easily pass lots of good link juice to around one topic”. Make sure also to build links from other sites for better SEO.