A themematic customer asked me today how to silo a website using Google’s Keyword Tool.
If you’ve never used Google’s Keyword Tool (free) for your keyword research, you should, because it has been improved to show search volume and search trends and gives your the SEPS (search engine proven synonyms) as well as other diverse keywords to use on your site.
The question as stated:
When I look at my main keyword in Google Adwords which is “{main keyword}”, the first set of words (keywords related to term) that are shown would be the “silos” of my website?nbsp; Then the second set of keywords (addtl words to consider) can you make some of these into silos too? (especially if there are higher ranking ones than is shown in the relevant terms?
My Answer:
The way I determine which keywords are Silos is a combination of traffic volume, theme relevance, and competition.
1) Traffic Volume - since each Silo is going to have Sub-Silos or Articles underneath it (in a tree structure), these keywords under the Silos that make up the Articles or Sub-Silos by definition are more ‘long tail’ and have less traffic and competition. Your Silos are the ones that have more traffic, more competition, and are ’short tail’.
So, look for keywords close related to your Parent Theme that are ’short-tail’, high traffic, and have more competition. If the ‘Additional Words to Consider’ section has some of these (it will show you traffic volume and competition but not theme relevance), you need to determine if the keyword has ‘theme relevance’ to your Parent Theme.
2) Theme Relevance - Keywords can be related a number of ways.nbsp; Russell at ThemeZoom breaks it down by:
- Purely Diverse SEP
- Partially Diverse SEPS
- Statistically Improbably Phrases
- Purely Diverse
- Partially Diverse
- Technical Long-tails
What do those terms mean?
An example:
Parent Theme = Tattoo Design
- Purely Diverse SEPS = Celtic Tattooing (both words are different, but one is just a different form of one of the Parent Theme keyword, and one is completely different, but they are SEPS according to Google)
- Partially Diverse SEPS = Tattoo Designs (one word is just a different form of the Parent Theme, but SEPS according to Google)
- Statistically Improbably Phrases = Henna Art (both words are completely different)
- Technical Long-tails = Celtic Tattoo Design (just adding a word before or after the Parent Theme phrase makes it a long tail)
The other 2 I didn’t give examples of are the same as the SEPS versions, except the words aren’t SEPS.
Also, the above example is off the top of my head, not what Google actually considers SEPS for ‘Tattoo Design’
SO, based on the above, you would have to determine how closely related the high-traffic short-tails are to your main Parent Theme to decide if it should be a Silo.
3) Competition - check google using ‘allintitle:{keyword phrase in quotes}’ and ‘allinurl:{keyword phrase in quotes}’ to see how many other pages are SEO optimized. Needless to say, the less competition, the easier to rank for it, so why make a long-tail, low-competition keyword a Silo when you can rank for it as an Article Title instead?
You want your Silos to be your market keywords that have lots of other stuff ‘under’ them in the keyword tree structure.
Bottom line is: You have to use your head and not get bogged down with these decisions - if you work more on bank-links to your Article and Silo pages of your site and use ThemeMatic to build your site, you will rank for the more competitive terms use chose for your Silos over time in any case. These should be the ‘highly coveted’ keywords that are going to make you money and have lots of traffic.
Who cares if you are #1 in Google for ‘cheap celtic tattoo design patterns from Ireland’ if you are only going to get 1 visitor per year for that phrase?nbsp; I’m sure you could get to #1 in Google for a long-tail like that with your eyes closed, so the question is:
“What happens if I’m #1 in Google for ‘celtic tattoos’ or ‘tattoo art’ or something like that?
