What is a content silo?

A content silo is a system of organizing your pages on your website so that it is easier for both users and search engines to understand the depth and type of information that you have available on your website.

A content silo is typically organized on three main levels, although some topics may have more. At the top level is a general concept that defines the silo, such as alternative energy. On the second level, that topic is broken down a little further. In this example, secondary topics might be wind energy or solar power. Finally, on the third level, these topics are broken down even more to provide an in-depth exploration for those who want to explore more insight. You might have content related to affording solar panels or a piece exploring the costs and benefits of installing wind turbines for those who have a large piece of property, for example.

The goal of the silo is to take a topic and break it down further at each stage of the hierarchy. Since the pieces are organized and grouped together, Google is able to connect the information from your different pieces and can see your expertise in the subject matter far clearer than if you just had your pieces scattered around your website.

What is a silo structure in SEO?

A silo structure has two main benefits to SEO:

• It will improve the user experience
• It will help search engines better understand your content

Customers understand your website by moving around through your internal links and using your navigation panels on your page. When you have your information organized in a content silo it is easier for people to find their way to related information that can further help them answer their question. By making content easier to find and consume, you make it easier to start building a relationship with these prospects.

Content silos also will help search engines understand the layout of your content. When Google understands the depth of knowledge you have on a particular subject, this can improve your domain authority. Domain authority is one of the factors that Google considers when ranking of all your pages within your site. Using content silos can help improve your domain authority, which can have a positive impact on how your site is ranked.

Since you will be improving your user experience as well, you will also encounter better engagement rates and lower bounce rates-- this will further help you improve your placement on the SERP.

How does a silo structure help with the buyer’s journey?

Silo structures can also be helpful because they align well with your ideal customers’ buyer journeys. Your content should be organized to encourage people to move from one stage of the silo to the next.

Generally the upper level content will match up with the needs of users higher in the sales funnel. As they become more familiar with your brand and begin to research topics more in-depth related to your industry, your content should carefully guide them further down the funnel to lower levels of content.

Your internal links and your calls-to-action will be critical to helping prospects navigate through relevant materials. As you align your ideal customer personas with their buyer journeys, you will be able to clearly see the topics and styles that interest them the most at each level of the buyer’s journey, helping you to create an effective content silo that will have the most success.

How does a webinar work?

When you create and host a webinar, you are looking to boost your brand reach and reputation by providing people with unique insights on a given topic. By interacting with customers personally while addressing their questions and concerns, you are able to cast your brand as an authority in the space and build relationships with those who attend. A webinar is more than just webinar length, it's the entire presentation.

How do you conduct a webinar effectively?

Before you begin your actual webinar, you'll want to be sure you have everything in place to make it successful. Do your research, know your topic and know it well, know your audience, choose a webinar length that works for your topic and audience, and practice before you get going. In order to be seen as the expert during your presentation, you'll need to be fully prepared and that means a mock webinar presentation.

As you begin planning, your webinar length won't be the only thing you need to worry about. Your webinar should have at least three main parts.

• Introductions
• Core presentation
• Questions and answers

1. Introductions. You will need to introduce your presenters and explain their expertise and connection to the webinar topic.
2. Core presentation. This is the longest part of the webinar and should frame your opinions and data as a story. Structure your presentation as an engaging tale that helps listeners understand how you arrived at your opinions and how they are impacted by the information you are sharing. Most importantly, you need to show your audience how your insights will help them.
3. Question and answer session. It is important to leave time for questions at the end to boost engagement and help you learn more about the interests of your prospects. The questions will help you focus on areas where concerns or uncertainty exists but that you might have missed. They will also help build a greater sense of connection between you and your prospects.

Create Effective Webinars Today!

What is the optimal webinar length?

The exact webinar length will depend upon your topic. The majority of webinars are around 60 minutes. This will generally provide you with ample time for the three sections of the session:

• 5-7 minutes for welcomes and introductions
• 38-45 minutes for the actual presentation
• 10-15 minutes for questions at the end

Occasionally, brands that have very high customer engagement rates or that are covering a particularly lengthy topic may go closer to 90 minutes of webinar length. This hour and a half mark should be the maximum as longer webinars run the risk of seeing audience drop-off.

While you want to inform your audience with plenty of industry knowledge that's trending, you want to avoid boring them. If your webinar goes over the suggested time, your audience will not only drop off but they also may not return in the future. Creating a webinar can not only help you engage your audience on a more personal level, but it will also answer their questions and offer you the opportunity to be seen as an expert and a thought leader in your field.

Although your blog post length may vary depending on your topic and audience, it is often best to aim for about 1,500 to 2,000 words for articles or posts. Longer pieces seem to do better when it comes to ranking on SERPs. One study found that the average post length of content ranked in the top 10 positions tends to be more than 2,000 words.

However, do not attempt to produce lengthy content for search engines at the expense of your readers. Many types of content simply do not need this many words to provide value for users. For example, a recipe site will generally not need more than a few hundred words to provide users with the information they need.

It is also important to note that the increasing popularity of Google Quick Answers may also impact the desired blog post length. On average, most pages that are selected for a Quick Answer result have less than 2,000 words.

How do you write a good blog post?

Remember that Google wants to provide value for its users. It does not want to return a SERP that contains multiple pages that largely detail the same information. If your piece does not provide enough depth or if it only gives a cursory treatment of the topic at hand, it may not be deemed high-quality content. You will want to dive deeper and provide more information as well as have an optimal blog post length.

Use keyword research with the BrightEdge Data Cube to learn more about related popular topics that visitors might want to see covered. Use the Recommendations engine to uncover more about the top ranking pages for your keyword so you can see the types of material that are ranking highly in the SERPs.

However, do not let content averages prevent you from covering topics at the length and depth that you are most comfortable. These guidelines are only averages, which means that they are calculated from content that is both shorter and longer. If you are confident that your blog post length is optimal and the post adequately explores the topic and provides customers with the information they are seeking, do not be afraid to hit ‘publish.’

How do I measure the success of my blog?

Your metrics will be the best indicator of whether or not your piece met the needs of your readers, including if it was long enough. You want to see:

• How many people click on your page
• How high your bounce rate is
• What people do after they read your content
• How your content correlates with business success, such as conversions and revenue

StoryBuilder provides you with an excellent platform for understanding these analytics so that you can better understand if people find value in your content.

What is the purpose of creating a content style guide?

Writer's style guides are important for the structure, design, and style of your content to create an optimal and similar user experience across your website. You'll want to create balance by using the same standards for punctuation, capitalization, and company voice.

Developing a strong company voice is an important part of establishing a brand. Like your content style guide, your company voice should be consistent across the many ways that you communicate with your prospective customers, both on and offline.

What is the value of a company voice in a style guide?

Your company voice will play an important role in how your brand is perceived and the type of reputation you are able to cultivate. Your voice will help you build relationships with customers and impact their expectations. It can even influence which candidates apply for open positions at your brand.

Communication with prospective customers today is a personal endeavor. People want to know about the humans behind the computer screen that work at the business. They want to know that these individuals are invested in their individual needs. Creating a consistent company voice will help make the entire brand more unified and personal, and it will help to strengthen your relationships with customers.

To develop a company voice, consider the tone and format you want to use when speaking with customers. Some brands might want to take a more formal tone and cast themselves as the trustworthy professionals who are able to help customers. Others might have a more informal voice and want to be viewed as a buddy providing a friend with valuable information. Once you have decided upon a company voice, it should lead your writer's style guide.

Why is it important to follow a brand style guide for your business?

A brand style guide will help you create and maintain a consistent voice across your organization. As brands digitally mature, they generally have more than one person doing the various roles in digital communications, including drafting emails, writing on social media, and creating online content. Creating a writer's style guide will help you lay the groundwork for the tone and style that you would like the brand to take. This will include your brand’s opinion on various grammar questions - such as whether or not to capitalize ‘Internet’, use the Oxford comma, or to be mindful of prepositions at the end of sentences. These details of your writer's style guide will create a common voice that is consistent for customers regardless of the representative who reaches out to them.

How do you create a style guide?

A writer's style guide should not only include the finer points of grammar, but it should also touch upon the voice and tone that your content creators should be using as they develop material for your organization. Follow these tips when creating a style guide:

• Work with your marketing managers and main content creators to establish the ground rules for grammar and styling.
• Speak with those leading the organization’s branding efforts to identify the voice that would be most effective for enforcing the intended reputation.
• Communicate the desired voice with those throughout the organization. Some might find it useful to compile an outline of expectations that can easily be emailed to content creators. It can also be helpful to include examples of the types of voice so that writers have a better understanding of how the brand wants to sound.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the art of using online content to encourage people to enter your sales funnel and then progress through to conversion. Content is the material that you produce to market your business and connect with customers. It can include the text found on your website, the messages on various social media platforms, and your brand’s images, videos, or webinars.

The goal of your content is to educate and engage the audience. By positioning your brand as the trusted leader, you increase the likelihood that audience will select your product and services, and convert on your page. An estimated 67 percent of the buyer journey now takes place online. This means that brands need to be equipped to engage with these online customers.

Content marketing differs from traditional marketing in one fundamental way. In traditional marketing, also known as outbound marketing, you go out and show prospects what you have to offer. For example, you may buy advertising to communicate your brand or products and the interested customers will call or visit your site to learn more.

For content marketing, also called inbound marketing, you bring the customers to you. By providing content that interests your target audience, you encourage people to visit your site. You can then engage them, demonstrate your expertise, and encourage them to convert. Content allows you to build a digitally-focused marketing strategy that focuses on building important relationships with consumers.

How do you do content marketing?

To get started in content marketing, follow these steps:

• Make sure you know exactly who will be targeted with a specific piece of content. You should have your customer personas outlined and mapped to the buyer’s journey so you know exactly what they see at each step of the way.
• Produce content for your users that is high-quality and informative. Use a variety of media, such as images and videos, to fully engage as much of your audience as you can.
• Promote your content across your web properties, including social media and email. This will help attract attention to the material, boosting traffic and engagement to help improve the performance of your material on the SERP.
• Monitor your progress. No content marketing strategy would be complete without monitoring your site metrics. Watch for basic metrics, such as traffic and engagement, but also watch how different pieces of content impact the bottom line, including conversions and revenue.

Why is a content map relevant?

When you create a content map for your website, you line it up with your ideal customer personas and their buyer’s journeys. In other words, you imagine each of your personas as a real person, slowly moving from their discovery of a problem until they determine a solution and officially convert into a customer.

By deeply understanding the pain points experienced by customers, and therefore the types of information they are seeking, you can align your content at each stage.

How do I plan my website's content map?

By creating a map for your content, you are able to clearly see how your content aligns with the buyer’s journey that you are targeting. Any gaps in your content production process will become apparent. You will also be able to plan your editorial calendar and future content strategies based on your identified weaknesses.

To begin, you'll need to know your audience. Create content that engages readers and keeps them discovering more throughout the rest of your site. You'll also want to storytell and evaluate whether or not your current copy is for your market or if it should be rewritten. Part of writing content and creating a map for it is to write for people and not search engines. This will not only give your target audience a better user experience and keep them coming to your site, but it will also help your SEO efforts. Google is evolving and the search engine giant is now able to read natural language.

How do I create a successful content map?

Content mapping can help brands understand how well their efforts are satisfying the needs of their prospects and where gaps exist. Use these steps to assess the effectiveness of your content while you create a map:

1. Develop strong and thorough buyer personas. You want to make sure that you understand the pain points and motivations of your customer targets.
2. Take your buyer personas and plot their buyer’s journeys. Start with their initial realization that they have a problem, through their research stages, and to the conclusion when they make the decision to become a customer. Using your personas, along with a careful examination of traffic patterns on your own site, determine the topics and types of content that people are most likely to be interested in at each stage.
3. Lay out your existing content to these journeys for the different buyer personas.
4. Analyze the distribution of your different types of content. Look for gaps in your content creation and make sure that you focus most of your creation efforts on the beginning of the buyer’s journey. Your content should mimic the journey of your customers, with the highest numbers at the beginning and tapering off at each stage.
5. Use keyword research and the BrightEdge Data Cube to start finding ideas to fill in the rest of the buyer’s journeys.

What does targeting mean in marketing?

A writer’s biggest challenge is not writing—it’s figuring out what to write about. This conundrum is exponentially more complicated for a content marketing writer. Not only must a piece be interesting and useful to its intended readers, but must also encompass a diverse set of criteria to match readers’ search intent to maximize its search rankings.

The discipline of SEO copywriting originally focused on how to create content that served both readers and search engines, but while the how is now well understood, many are still searching for the what. At best, SEOs instructed writers on how to do keyword research for content marketing that would unearth potential terms or phrases that might help drive organic traffic, but with warnings such as, “Avoid targeting terms dominated by top brands,” and, “Purchase Google AdWords to test traffic.” Basically, the advice amounts to, “Try it after you buy it.”

BrightEdge Content has always helped you identify both the what and the how of content marketing, but it just got expansively better.

The BrightEdge Content keyword tool applies analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the most opportune topics, prioritized and categorized by their impact (likely Quick Answer, capitalize on local demand, weak competition, etc.). The algorithm accounts for competitors’ profiles through an SEO analysis, spanning their keywords, backlinks, and social strategies, to give you recommendations that are part of a strategy encompassing your entire online presence. This has always been part of our core functionality.

But now there’s target marketing. Targeted marketing marries your creative insights with several terabytes of SEO data, resulting in customized content marketing campaigns.

Targeted marketing returns content topics related to the term or terms you enter. You can adjust your analyses to include specific competitors, to exclude parts of your sites (the career section, e.g.), and to limit or expand the number of words in search terms, search volume, and amount of recommendations returned.

In short, you can now guide the BrightEdge Content platform toward the topics you care most about.

What is the purpose of target marketing?

• Seed your own keywords to return multiple actionable content ideas
• Target your competition to find the keyword strategies you can use to beat them
• Discover additional topics with maximum effectiveness
• Execute on campaign suggestions
• Tune analysis parameters
• Manage result sets and control whether you get a targeted set of related terms or a wider swath of possibilities

All reinforced by algorithm enhancements to ensure recommendations are right for your business.