I just got this great question in today from one of our members who is trying to figure out the best approach for creating a silo structure for his local client.
The client has a business in Adelaide, Australia – a city with which I am only vaguely familiar. And while it’s easy enough to look up how big the city is in terms of population and geo location, I can’t really tell how Google is serving up SERPS pages quickly – so I’m considering the results for Mesa AZ while I’m answering this email. Mesa has about 500K people, and while there are a lot of suburbs to Mesa, they don’t show different results from each other. If you are in different cities in the greater Phoenix area then you will get different results.
Here’s the question:
Hey Sue, when doing a local search do you build silos like this?
Example #1
SILO – Adelaide Wedding Photography
Cat – Suburb Wedding Photography
Cat – Suburb Wedding Photography
Cat – Suburb Wedding Photography
Cat – Suburb Wedding Photography
Cat – Suburb Wedding Photography
Cat – Suburb Wedding Photography
Cat – Suburb Wedding Photography
Or 
Example #2
SILO – Adelaide Wedding Photography
Cat – Adelaide Wedding photos
Cat – Adelaide bridal photography
Cat – Adelaide Wedding something
Cat – something Adelaide Wedding
or
Example #3
SILO – wedding photos South Australia
Cat – Adelaide Wedding photos
SA – suburb Wedding photos
SA – suburb Wedding photos
SA – suburb Wedding photos
SA – suburb Wedding photos
Cat – Adelaide bridal photography
SA – suburb bridal photography
SA – suburb bridal photography
SA – suburb bridal photography
My response:
What are the keywords that you REALLY want to rank for… you have to know that first – those become your silo terms
So if “wedding photos south Australia” is a keyword you really want then the last one, #3, makes a lot of sense.
If that keyword doesn’t seem like something that people would type in or something that Google would show to people in the southern part of Australia (it certainly doesn’t work like that in the US) then forget that term – and forget that structure and go with #1 or #2
#2 is going to get you ranked for most nearly anything to do with wedding photography in Adelaide – which is probably what you are really after. By using a lot of synonymic diversity in your keywords in that structure, Google will understand that you are talking about all things to do with “wedding photography” and potentially rank you for many similar ideas that you are not even targeting. That will be a very rewarding website for you and your client.
#1 is going to get you ranked for fewer terms but you are guaranteed to show up for all of the suburbs – which is great if you are finding that in different parts of Adelaide they are being shown different results
If I were doing this for a city like Sydney, that is most CERTAINLY how I would approach it; by targeting the keywords with the highest search volume and covering more of a geographical area, you will bring your client more business.
However if Adelaide is too small for the suburbs to be showing different results, as is Mesa, then #2 is the best way to go.
If I took a little bit more time with this, I would do some searches for his primary term “Wedding Photography” while switching my location on the Google search settings to different suburbs in Adelaide to see if the results were different – this would help me decide if #1 or #2 is a better approach, at least for how google is approaching the SERPS today.
For more information about silo structures for local websites, silo structures in general and how to optimize your site for local search, check out my Local Search Empire course inside the Network Empire Member’s Area
About SueSue Bell is the CEO, founder and mastermind behind Theme Zoom's 'Krakken' Search Engine Marketing Tool, The Last Keyword Tool and Domain Web Studio (DWS). Her expertise with system design and databases allowed her to back engineer popular search engines and discover methods for Search Market Analysis and Competitive Analysis that turn SEO and search engine rankings into a science. This resulted in the creation of tools which make the life of an SEO/SEM easier by automating both the difficult and mundane aspects of Market Research, Keyword Research, Website Site Structural Design and Implementation. Sue retired from her career supporting the Military in her thirties and recently came out of retirement to mastermind the programing behind our powerful and proprietary market analysis tools. She currently enjoys living in the arid Arizona desert, spends her spare time dominating online markets, and is available on a limited bases for online marketing consultation and training.
