How To Build The Perfect Site Architecture Using Silos With Kyle Roof (2020 Edition) (Ep. 187) - 02-03-2020

Hey, Atari Hackers. Welcome to this week's episode of the Atari Hacker podcast. Mark is still on the honeymoon somewhere in Bali, sipping cocktails with no clue about how much of a havoc I'm causing into the company right now. But him leaving is not an excuse to stop the podcast. And today you're in luck because we brought Carl Roof, one of the most popular guests of 2019, to talk with me about site structure.

If you don't know him, Cal is a bit of an on page SEO genius. He's actually the only person that was ever de indexed by Google for on page optimization. And he's also the mind behind Page Optimizer Pro, which is an on page tool that a lot of people use and get good results with. And he's also a founder of IMG, which stands for Internet Marketing Gold, which is a community where he shares his single variable test results, which made him quite popular in the industry, among other things. There's other things going on.

It's a full community there. So it's going to be interesting because size structure is a topic that confuses the shit out of most people. When you read Facebook groups, when you look at the questions, etc. I felt like the same questions pop up all the time. So in today's episode, I tried to round up the most popular questions that people ask about site structure, and Kyle and I have the challenging task to try and make them clearer for you.

So let's get started.

Hey, guys. Welcome to the Atari Hacker Podcast. So today we don't have Mark, as I said in the intro, but we have Cal. Welcome back, Cal. It feels like you're like a regular now.

Well, does two times make me a regular? Yeah, I guess, like, most people never did three interviews here, so I guess it's like two times is the most anyone else other than Mark and I has ever been on the podcast. I'd like to hit like three or four, and that way I can set a record that might not be. Yeah, yeah, I think it's going to be hard to beat that one. Well, I'm sure you'll come back.

Just send Mark on a holiday a bit more often, and I'm sure I'll ping, you know? Yeah. Actually what I realized, I have not spoken with Mark on the podcast. It's only been Mark standing. Is that how this works?

It's kind of like I usually pick the more nerdy, like, SEO topics, and he picks more like the business side of things because that's actually how it works in the company. So we try to assign the topics to what we're best at, which is why that happens. And there's one thing that's weird is every time we do a podcast the day before, there's a core update with Google. So is there some kind of conspiracy here? Like, did you know anything about this?

That's actually pretty funny. No, actually, what's interesting though, is that Shameless plug for IMG, we predicted it on Saturday. Yeah, I saw it actually. Yeah, Ted Gibitis has developed a early warning system tool and it looked like a big update was rolling on Saturday and then Google confirms it on Monday. There was a core update that was actually really cool to see.

Yeah, I mean, it'd be nice to see if you guys can repeat the prediction, but that's really impressive on its own because they're really unpredictable. It's not like they have a calendar or anything like that. It's like I asked people, what do you want me to get to ask Kyle? And then everyone was like, oh, tell us of the update, et cetera. I'm like, guys, it's been 6 hours.

I don't think and I know it all. You must know what's going on right now. You know exactly what so it's like, anything to say, otherwise we can just keep an actual jump on site, et cetera. I have one small thing to say that actually team is going to share in the group is that four or five of our larger clients are in financial or law or some kind of blend of that. And what's really interesting is you can see a drop in impressions in search console about one to two days before and then all of them at the same time on the 11th ping back up.

It's an interesting little trend line where maybe as they're preparing for the update, URLs start to fall out of the SERPs or keywords start to fall out a little bit. They're reprocessing a lot. I could see some movements over the past two or three days as well. Definitely they changed the search layouts as well. So they changed the search layouts on desktop.

So it's like that could play a bit as well. Actually. They put the icon like the mobile, but they might have changed other things they don't mention since there's like a gazillion surplus these days. Anyway, this is not the topic of the podcast, even though that's what everyone wants to know about. My plan is to actually use this podcast on our site structure blog post.

So let's just do that. And I want to talk about site structure. And when I was preparing this podcast, I was trying to think who's going to be interested in this podcast? And I kind of had like two plus one kinds of people. So the first kind of people I had was people who are starting new sites.

They want to know how to structure it the best way. It's usually the best time to start thinking about it, I think, but I'll ask you about that a little bit later. Then the second type of people is people who have sites and their site is like messy as fuck. You've built your site, you have hundreds of pages, it's a freaking mess. And then you're struggling with Google and you're like, well, maybe I should work on my site structure.

And the third type of people is people who already do everything right, but they're kind of like the kind of OCD people that need everything to be absolutely perfect all the time. So they're probably listening to that podcast, so we'll probably give them a few questions for these people as well. So that is the three kind of people that I think that will be listening to this podcast. So I've kind of broken down the questions per type of people. But before we get started, we all use different ways of mapping out a site.

How do you map out your sites or how do you draw the site structure you want to build or change or anything like that? What tools do you use for that? Well, I think of really more it's a spreadsheet more than anything. I don't have a fancy tool that I use, but I like to compartmentalize my sites by target pages and then the silo that I'm going to use to support them. And so for me, I don't care too much about the overarching site structure with some caveats, especially if you're doing local and services and there's some things I think you should do.

But really I don't care too much about the overarching structure because I'm really focusing on sections of the site and if I get those right, then I know that I'm okay. So I actually use Dynalist most of the time. I don't know if you know that tool. It's just a bullet point thing that you can do unlimited bullet points for notes. It helped me actually plan site structure for new sites.

So that's personally what I use. My problem with spreadsheets is that essentially when I want to go deeper, I mean, I guess you do the vertical silos like that, but you know where you want to do sub sub sub parts or something and you want to go deep. It's a little bit annoying. I'm with you. I don't know that there's a great I would prefer a visual tool, but then I've played with some of those and they get real messy in a hurry.

Once you have a page site that's more than like 20 pages. Yeah, it's quite tricky to map site, like internal linking, et cetera, overall. And that's why I wanted to ask you, because it's like special. I wish I did, I wish I could, and here it is. No, a lot of people assume that we have some kind of magical solution for some stuff and it's like, no, we just struggle like everyone else and that's it.

The question I wanted to ask before we start on these three kind of people that I mentioned is how important do you think site structure is for a site's rankings? I'm trying to put it on a ladder, right? Like we have external links and then we have page title and then we have all. What does it fit in the ladder? How important is that?

Well, the URL itself is very important for a ranking factor. I put the URL in the top four places to put a target keyword with the meta title, h one in the body in paragraph text, and then in the URL, those are probably the four, and they've remained for quite some time the four most important places. So in the URL is an important thing. How you have actually physically structured your site. I don't know that that's necessarily a ranking factor until you get to points where you're harming yourself, where you have folders that are 404 or you've decided that this page that you want to rank and it's in a very important page for you and it's like six folders deep into your site because you did like a year month day category subcategory subcategory target page.

I don't know that Google is ever going to find that page. And if it does, how much budget is left for Google, even? How much could it crawl? So I think more than anything with site structure, you can harm yourself more than helping yourself, I think is how it usually goes. I don't think it ultimately matters until you get to the point of harm.

I see. So basically what you're saying is there's kind of like this difference between hard silos, which is built in the URL, your site structure is built in the URL and you have these subsilos which are essentially built only with internal linking. That's right. What you're saying is essentially it doesn't really matter what you have. The problem is with hard silos.

Let's say you built a small site of 20 pages, and you built hard silos, and then you want to go, like, three levels deeper as you build a hub, that becomes quite complicated, and it actually hurts you because these pages are so deep. Whereas if you had a subsilo, that would not happen. That's exactly right. I think there's a certain point where you should decide we're not going to go any deeper than this. And then your structure should then should make accommodations for it.

After that, try not to go farther. I really hate having a page that I'm trying to rank that's really more than threedeep.com whatever the page I'm trying to rank, if it's something that's important to me, I try not to go any deeper than that. So do you ever build subfolders on your site anymore? Is this something you recommend at all at this point? No, they exist because we have a lot of sites that are WordPress, so that's kind of by default usually is how things you can do.

The URL structure, like the permalink, you can just start postname and then it's like you don't have any. Personally, when I build sites these days, there's no subfolders except for things like landing page, for example. So I'll have LP, whatever, and I'll just no index all my landing pages. So if I do PPC or whatever, then all this stuff doesn't get I'm with you. That's how I agree to do it.

One of the things that people don't often or there's something that they don't realize is that a lot of CMS tie the URL structure to how the NAV menu is going to look. And that's a fiction. You don't have to have categories and then also a NAV, but you can create that for the user's experience and for humans to navigate a site. It does make a lot of sense for them to have a structure where they see a category and then they see its sub pages. But just because it lives that way in the navigation doesn't mean that's how the URL structure actually has to be.

Yeah, I agree. It's like, basically you can do whatever you want. And I mean, one thing that has really changed the game for me as well, in terms of how I built my sites is actually Elementor Pro. I don't know if you've played with that, not too much, but they allow you to take over your WordPress category pages as a normal page. So you don't have to break WordPress, you don't have to do like, dodgy redirects of your category pages, whatever, because you have it in your slugs or something of your post.

You can literally take that one category page and build a proper hot page there. And then it's changed the way we build sites a lot. It's removed a lot of glitchy or shitty stuff that we were using behind the scenes, like these redirects, like all of these, et cetera, that allowed us to build a cleaner site structure that was bypassing the default WordPress, which is really not that nice. I mean, a category page on WordPress by default has like, temp posts and has the pagination and all of that. It's kind of shit, to be honest.

Yeah. No, I'm with you. I like that a lot. It's an internal linking clusterfuck. That's why I called it to the staff.

I think that might be the big hack of the whole show right there. I think that should be a technical term. I think we should add it to like, some SEO wiki or something, make back at the show.

One thing I wanted to know as well is for people who are starting sites, should they worry about not internal linking site structure right from the beginning, or is it something that you can take care of later, in your opinion? I think if you have the opportunity to get it clean to start with, that's what you should do. Usually what happens is people start and they have a site that really doesn't matter. There's only 20 pages on the site, and then once they get to 100 pages, they're like, oh my God, I don't even know how to handle this anymore. But if you could make some decisions earlier on on how you're going to approach it.

But probably the biggest issue is that people are building a website is like writing a book, and sometimes you just don't know what direction that book is going to go until you start doing it. And so you actually might have to build out some of the site and then realize this is a mistake and if you can kind of maybe then course correct on how that site is going. But I think that's kind of part of the problem. It's one thing to be able to plan it, it's another to really know what the site is going to end up being. In most cases, I don't think people do.

The thing is, you start a site and some parts of it are going to be successful and some are not, right? So I start a site and let's say I start five hubs and there's like one that's usually going to take off and do really well, and the four others are just going to kind of either be average or kind of shit.

Then you gain relevancy for this sub silo in the eyes of Google, basically, Google is like, let's say you're talking about, I don't know, like green socks, blue socks or whatever, and a green socks takes off and then it's like in the eyes of Google, you become an authority for green socks. So it makes sense to write more about green socks because every time you write about it, you just end up ranking really fast. You don't have to do a lot of work. There's a lot of incoming links to your pages about green socks. And we had that for health ambition.

At some point we were ranking for anything. Apple cider vinegar we would write about because we wrote about the skincare routine of Scalia Johansson that was using that and it got so many links. And then we would write anything about apple cider vinegar. It would just rank. It was just kind of funny.

It was really good. And that's the problem with hard silos, in my opinion, is that if you go in that direction of these kind of like, lengthy URLs, essentially, and then you realize that that one subsilo well, you know what? It makes more sense, business wise to build 100 pages on that one subsilo and kind of ignore the rest of the site for a while. Then that's when you end up with these four, five folders deep kind of, kind of things, because it was like one blog post that did well, and you're like, well, I need to create all these sub pages and sport content and all of that and becomes a massive mess in my opinion. So I guess that's why say structure is good, but it's also why playing say structure is good, but it's also why it's good to not do physical silos, in my opinion.

Yeah, I like to avoid them I don't know that it's a necessary ranking component. Is the guy being like, oh my God, I've got physical silos, I need to change? Absolutely. Don't don't you're like basically flipping a coin every time you change the URL, right? Oh, that's exactly right.

You don't know if Google is going to love it as much as it used.

Know that's often what comes up when you're at that point, okay, we've gone this far. Now do we need to change everything or should we keep it as is and deal with it? And the decision I think you have to make is, what do you stand to lose? If you have pages that are on page one and they're ranking well and they're bringing you ROI, there's really no point in changing that URL. I think you stand more to lose than to gain.

But if you're not ranking whatsoever or you're stuck on page seven, you're losing nothing. So that would be a good opportunity then to switch things up. But otherwise the those windows, you've built out the site a bit and you decide, well, we probably need to change that, then you have to decide, what will you lose? Would you change part of a site but not the rest of the site? Let's say a part of the site is doing well, so you're like, I don't want to change it, and this other part is not doing well, and you're like, Should I change that?

Should I start introducing discrepancy within my site in terms of URL structure? I would do that. I would actually try sometimes it's a real coin flip on if we should or should not change. Can you change a few of them? Can you change what?

Can you just change a few pages on the site and see how they perform? A lot of people think of things as light or dark. We're going to do all or nothing. And it's like, well, you don't have to do that with a website. It might take a little bit of dev work.

It might not be WordPress out of the box, but you can probably set up where you could have different structures for different things and then do small changes, small adjustments, and see if it horribly impacts your pages. And then you're like, well, now I know, yeah, fair enough. I've never tried it, but one of my considerations was actually to duplicate your site, change the stuff and equal your original site to the duplicate site, see what happens, and then just remove the rock and the nickels if it doesn't work. But I haven't tried, so I'm not going to recommend people do that. It's a little bit risky, but it's a bit softer than the straight one with direct passing.

It's not a bad way to do it. Actually, now that I think about it, I think it would probably work pretty well. But that's one of the things, like we talk about on shows. If it's something you care about, don't do it. Yeah, that's what I said.

I don't recommend it. It's just like something that on paper does make sense. But it is a big gamble if you have a site that makes money, so be careful with this.

One thing I want to say as well is a lot of newbies will listen to this podcast and be like, oh, I need to work on my site structure. And my problem is that it's kind of like the same problem I have with Page Feed is that people literally haven't figured out how to generate content or how to get links to their site and start working on site structure. I'm like, Guys, what the fuck? What are things that you think people should sort out before they worry about site structure? You have to have your target pages mapped.

This is the page that I want to show up in Google. That has to be a concept that you've come to terms with and saying, okay, this is going to be my primary keyword for this phrase. Whether it's an easy one or a difficult one, I don't think that matters too much because if you properly optimize for a particular phrase, you start to win secondary terms for it. Even if you never win that primary, you'll still win a lot of secondary. So choose those target primary keywords and their home.

I think once you do that, that'll give you a good idea of your structure because, okay, these are the pages that we actually want to rank. So these are the ones we need to focus on. You can probably start to build out from there. The next thing I'm going to do is then my supporting content for those target pages and I'm going to determine what that is. And this is kind of how the site continues to build is by based on a target page, that primary keyword, and then it's supporting content, content that's specifically chosen to support that target page.

And then you can build out, I think, from there. But I think to your point, at some point you have to get content up. A beautifully structured site with nothing on it isn't going to do anything. I'm sure you've had that before, right? People come to you and they're like, oh, I need to work on my site speed, et cetera.

And you go on the site, there's like three pages and you're like, no, that gets into the I've done everything and nothing's working, and you go to the site.

I think this is my problem with online marketing content. It's like people need to throw some shiny object at people so that they keep engaging with people's content. But these are things that you take care of after you've figured out your basics, basically. And I think it's important to repeat to people because I see that mistake a lot. So you kind of like explain essentially you reverse silo concept.

I actually was watching SEO Fight Club before that podcast this morning so that I can catch up on all your theories on site structure and everything. And yeah, you explained that quite a bit. I linked the video. I can't remember which episode 19 I think I've seen. Yeah, episode 19.

I know that just because everyone's like, hey, tell me about that. I was like, Just watch episode 19. Yeah, okay. But you explained essentially this reverse silo that you briefly explained right now, which is essentially that most people kind of build this like a pyramid, but you focus first on the page that you want to rank, and then based on that, you brainstorm support content. Can you define what support content is and what is not?

Support content? Support content. These are terms around your topic, questions that people would ask that they have. So if you're selling a particular product, this would be questions like, does this come in black, blue, or green? Or Can I use this in the winter?

Or do you guys ship to I mean, they can be very mundane questions like that, things that people would ask about a certain thing. The example that I give in workshops is like, if I'm trying to sell ski packages in New Zealand, a great question is like, which are the best ones for families?

Do you look for search volume when you write about these? Or how do you essentially pick the questions? I find them from people also ask. And if you put a People Also Ask into Keyword Planner, it's going to come back with zero as search volume, which I find really amazing because somebody has actually already asked it. There's no way for it.

They don't count, right? I'm going to guess more than one person has asked this, and that's how it pinged to be relevant enough. So I'm answering those questions. People have those questions if they show up there. Or you can usually tap into like a niche forum for whatever you're selling or your product or your service or whatever.

If somebody's taken the time to write in a forum that question, that means they've searched it and that's how they searched it. So if you can answer that question and you can find the ones that are most engaging, like people like, I have that same question, too, or I did too, and then I found this. That means people are searching for those things. I love those for supporting content, because you'll probably win it with the long tail phrase that's just getting it in your Meta title and your H one, and then just answer the question. And then at that point, you're probably going to start getting traffic into your silo, which is probably one of the best things you can do because a silo is being engaged that it's getting traffic.

And then people are linking to it organically. Now with your internal linking structure you set up through your silo, you're getting juice flowing up to where you need to go. And one of the overriding principles is if you're selling something on that target page, nobody's going to link to it. Not organically unless your product has really good reviews, and eventually, if you get instruction. I guess this saved my life, but other than that, those things aren't getting but if you answered a great question about it, people do link to that.

I was going to ask, do you get a lot of links to these kind of like tiny questions type posts? Well, they're easier to get people to link to. So whatever type of outreach you do, if you say like, hey, I noticed that this is important to your people, I answered these questions over here and then however you're negotiating your links from there. But you can often get those types of links going into those things. They make for much better organic link possibilities and it makes people a lot more amenable to getting into a situation where they might link to your site because you're not asking them to link to a page where you're selling something, you're linking to something that actually might be beneficial to their audience.

Fair enough. I mean, the thing is we've done kind of similar stuff with shotgun skyscraper that's what we did is that you're aiming for essentially low volume, low competition queries that answer questions. Whereas kind of like the method to find shotgun skyscraper topics for us is to actually use keyword difficulty in ahrefs, because it's only based on external links to pages that rank on top. So it's the only thing they look at. They didn't really think a lot about the keyword difficulty but it's quite nice to find these topics because then it gives us a lot of link opportunities.

But I'm quite curious of how many link opportunities you find for these tiny keywords. It I couldn't give you numbers but we have a full time link builder and I don't really handle that part of it. Okay, yeah, but that's what we do. That's the whole strategy is that often what we'll do. So we've got our target page and let's say we're going to focus on getting three initial supporting things out to them.

One is going to be something that we think we can get links to, whatever that might be. That could be a shotgun skyscraper type thing, it could be an infographic, it could be a video embed, it doesn't matter whatever going to be used actually for our link outreach. The other two things are probably going to be those longer tail questions with the idea that they probably rank within a few days. Then we've got something that's supporting our silo that's on page one, page two in a matter of moments because it's a long tail phrase that's being answered. So then when people search for it, we actually might start getting.

Traffic into the silo. It's kind of like that passive link building side of things, which is quite powerful. We've had a lot of info keywords rank, and it's not a lot of links, but a small post like that can collect like three to five links a year, but they're really not a lot of work to do. You can have hundreds of these on your site and if you have a site that has a lot of these, it adds up mattering quite a lot, actually. It's a lot of inboundings and you do not have to spend courses on getting links.

Once these are ranking, they just happen, basically. So yeah, I can see that, definitely.

I'm doing a little case study from Doug Shows live the golden ratio, Kgri keyword golden ratio.

I found seven that match it or whatever, and then I launched them with Lauren Ipsum and I did this three days ago. I've got three that are already ranking in the top 100. Wow. In three days. So that's a fun little case study.

What's that? Are you getting traffic to these pages? Not yet. They're like on page five, page six, somewhere in there. But I'm watching it as like just a little fun little case study.

I think it's interesting, a lot of people talk about it. I'm much more on the harder data side of things, so that's why KGR feels a little bit light from my taste of picking keywords. I like to look at click through rates and things like that, but I've seen people get results with it. So it's like, hands up, let's see what happens. I'm quicker.

Yeah, well, that's right, man. I just want to see what happens, see how it goes. Because it could be when you think about the things you're going to throw into your silo, what if you did two people also ask one keyword golden ratio and then one thing that's meant for links and I think you've got an SEO campaign. That was actually my next question. How do you decide how many of these you do and maybe looking at the main keyword you're trying to rank, et cetera, I'm sure you're kind of like judging how much resources you're going to have to put into this.

How do you decide about that? It's really more from a practical sense on what you can manage in a month. And so three is usually what we do. Just it's an easy number to manage because you've got a lot of moving parts to these things because you have to manage content writers, you have to manage if you're producing something that's going to be used for links, you have to then work on the outreach. So usually three is a number that we can handle.

We'll do a set of three. If we have more resources or more budget, we might take that to five. But then you also have to think about client approval because we're all client side on things. There's a lot of moving parts and so three to five is probably what you can reasonably manage. And then we'll do them in those sets.

So we'll launch it, we'll see how that goes. We'll see if they rank, if they're getting traffic, if it's the effect that we have, and then do another set of three and just kind of keep going. So far sites, I tend to do bigger silos now. I tend to do like 20 pages or so same. I would say 20 is like usually what I do is I throw a silo of 20 articles.

Maybe you have like five skyscrapers or something, something that's really meant to bring injustice into that and it's kind of like being thought out so that the other pieces are contextually linked from these pieces. And I throw it and I'll just wait six months and then see what happens after the outreach is done and go back to this and be like, am I making money? And if I am, then usually I expand that silo from 20 to 100 pages or something, although I'll forex it or something. Well, something you can do if you have the existing site that has pages already, you can find the ones in Ahrefs or any tool that you like that have accidentally gotten links that accidentally have traffic and then use those to jumpstart your silo. Because then you can put that's exactly what we're doing on a toy hacker right now.

Actually, literally like last round of content updates, I went from pages by links and then we did brainstorming topics from these pages. And then you have these contextual links. You can put exact anchor text as well on your page and it's like often you do okay on medium keywords from these. You're niche editing your own site. Internally we call them repurposed pages, but if they have links coming in, we call them Power pages.

And one of the first things I want to do is find power pages that are not being utilized correctly and I don't worry about the other links that are going on in it. I don't sweat that too much. But what I try to do is the first link that's going to be on the page I want going to that target page. So when I'm repurposing things, I don't want to mess up too much of whatever is going on in there. I want to make sure that first link is going to my target page and then I want to make sure I'm getting links going to my other style of pages.

So do you think the order of links on the page matters? Like if the link is low on the page it matters? I do. And so for that reason, I want to make sure that my first link on the page for something that I'm specifically doing for a site. You can have a lot of different pages on your site for a lot of different purposes, but something that I'm consciously dedicating to one target page.

I want to make sure that my first link is going to that target page. Okay, and how many intel links would you put on a page before you say it's too much? Let's say I'll take an example on toy hacker, right? So we have that page that I don't know how it's doing with this update. So I don't want to say where it's ranking right now.

Let's look it up right now. Oh my God. Why did we do this on a live show somewhere we've been for a long time? Someone page one for like affiliate programs, for example. And I can jumpstart a lot of pages from that page strictly because as a lot of links how many is too much?

I don't know that that's a number you're talking about though. So I think these are slightly different things. You're talking about a page that you're using. Would you call it a Hub page? How do you define that?

Yeah, it's something that hasn't necessarily been a Hub page initially, but has slowly become one. Become a hub page. There then you know what, I don't worry about how many links that has because the Hub page is a Hub page. It's just there to pass. It's a blog post.

Right? This is a blog post. But it's like it's just starting to link out to more and more things as we produce content. Right. I don't think there's a number that just whatever is reasonable and practical, that's how I would treat that.

Something that I'm really consciously saying, I'm creating this piece of content. It's going to answer this question and it's going to support that target page. I really want to limit that. I want one link to my target page. I want one to two links into the silo depending on where it's sitting.

And I really want to limit from there so that you don't dive into because if people don't know the original formula of page rank is essentially like water and vases, right. The more holes there is to other pages, the more it divides between the pages. That's right. And for a long time, people were doing what's called page run sculpting, which is essentially no following internal links so that you would follow the page rank to the pages you want. But now Google actually makes page rank disappears through no follow links.

So I haven't tried it, but it does seem like page rank sculpting doesn't really work anymore, I don't think, in terms of you're trying to no follow things internally. Yeah, but if your internal links, obviously it works. I guess if you don't link and you just internal links, basically. Yeah. So, I mean, you can self sculpt in a way that I think page sculpting is something that's a naughty term that's pretty old school as well.

Wherever you're trying to follow or strategically no follow within your site with the idea of blocking juice, but making a decision. I'm only going to link to two things. You can consider that basically, but that's not naughty. Every big company does that. Every Fortune 500 companies that does a CEO has active thinking about their internal linking, for sure.

What do you think about navigation links? Do you think they count as much? Do you think they count at all? What's your sense on that? I would imagine they count for something, but I've stopped stressing about them.

Just let them happen. Let them be so that people can get through your sites. As I focus on the virtual silo rather than a physical silo, I'm really just worried about the links that I have in my body content and then just however the site is going to happen, I think just let it happen. Now. I say that and then somebody's going to show me some sidebar that's got 8000 links in it for some reason.

I said you could do whatever. You said I could do whatever. That's absurd. Don't be absurd. But just a site should happen organically in a sense of like, this makes sense.

We've got these navigation things for these reasons so that people can find this content. I'm worried about that for humans. After that, the stuff that I'm worried about for Google and for rank purposes are the only stuff putting in the body. So I don't stress my NAV bar, my sidebar, my footer. Yeah, I was going to ask something like related posts, for example.

It's not really in your footer, it's not really in the navigation. Where does that stand? If it's in the body, I think it counts for the body. That's where silo posts, you can make them look like related posts, but it's just you've personally curated it. You can see that on Autoria.

Hacker. If you pick a category, you will actually see only posts from that category and you will see the post that we're trying to that's exactly how you should do it. That's why using a plugin, unless you can really customize it can be problematic because what they'll do is they'll start sending links out to other categories and I really want to keep all my focus on that one silo, that one category, if you like to think of it that way. And then often those links will start to start linking all across the site and I don't want that to happen. Eventually it becomes like you don't control your you might as well not do your internal linking because you get like a leak of ten links at the bottom of the exactly.

And you have no control over it, I guess. But yeah, we do that as well. So same we use elementor post templates. So you can literally just redesign your site with elementor. You build a whole page template and it just takes over your team for that.

And it just takes your body content from WordPress and just throws it in a content area. And yeah, I took something that looks like Related posts and then we just manually curate it per category usually. And that works pretty well, actually.

Yeah. Okay, so I had a question. So now we're going to jump into people starting new sites, et cetera. There's kind of like two ways of starting a new site, right? There's one way which is trying to find as many low competition keywords as you can and essentially be like, well, it's going to be easier to rank with the lower authority sites and kind of make sense.

And then the other school, which is essentially building relevant silos. And sometimes when you build relevant silos, it also means that you kind of need that parent topic that is a keyword that you have very little chances of ranking for as a low authority site. But you might still decide to do that for the sake of building that coherent structure of your site. What's your take on each? And if you had to start an affiliate site today, which one would you pick?

I didn't see that one in the pre question. Was that on the it is first slightly elaborated. Okay. For people starting new site, first sub points, if you check that, this might sound like a lame answer, but on the first one I'm doing both. I'm building that page that I might not win.

I'm building that page out because I know I'm going to win. Secondary keywords. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, look in Search Console, do it by page view. And then look at a page and you'll see it's ranking for hundreds of keywords, many of which don't exist on the page. That's because Google is identifying, this is what this page is about.

These are the keywords that rank for. So when you choose your primary keyword, your target keyword, you can win all those secondary. So even if you don't perform well on that one, you can get a page that is very successful, that has a lot of page one terms, a lot of great impressions and traffic and clicks and ROI because pages rank for a lot of keywords. So I do that. And then though, I do like the idea of finding those longer tail quick wins and that's what turns into my silo content so that I can do that and get those quick wins, get that initial ranking, but then they all funnel up to the page that I'm ultimately trying to sell something on.

It's kind of the approach that I like to take on that I think that works. Go ahead. What niche do I want to get into though? Is that the next part? No, we're just talking theory here.

Usually the way we do this actually is we kind of find the keywords that will bring us to break even. Usually we start a new site, we maybe hire like a full time writer, maybe like a part time link builder. And our editor is going to spend like 6 hours a week editing content. Let's say that's the amount of resources we're throwing to this, let's say we're like $2,500 down per month from all expenses, including tools and everything. And so the number one goal we have for affiliate sites is actually breakeven.

So we're like, well if we can keep this running and it doesn't cost us anything, then we're happy to play for the long run in that niche. Maybe that should change with how volatile Google has been lately. But whatever, that's been the way we've been seeing so far. And so I usually try to find these really easy affiliate keywords that I think will make me my money back. And usually these days these are Vs keywords that will be like comparing two products, et cetera.

You can find 700 to 1000 search per month Vs keywords in many niches on high paying products. And the thing is, I would not just write about my Vsql and link to it to my homepage. I would rather take these keywords that I know will make me money and kind of reverse engineer the whole silo all the way back to the main topic of my site. And so that means that in the process I will most likely build four or five I don't want to call it parent pages because that gives you the notion of hard silo, but pages that are above that will link to these so that I can create these 20, 30, 40 vs pages that I think will make me my money back. And I'll try when I do my big keywords, to angle them in a way that I can skyscraper them basically.

That's usually the way I do that actually. But I like to ask people because I think everyone does this slightly differently, like the start at least in the end everyone ends up with the same site. But like at the beginning, not everyone has the same site. If you're making an informed decision on things getting to that break even point, what's a click through rate going to be for a whole site? It's going to be one and a half to two and a half percent, probably.

Yeah, somewhere around there, maybe 1%, maybe 3% or pages. You can get 20% click through rate on an essay offer for these kind of queues. Sure. For that one page, I'm thinking in total across everything on those pages that work, the pages that don't, you could probably assume a 2% click through rate for rough numbers and then you can get some volume ideas. So we've got this primary, these are the secondaries that we could win.

These are some longer tail ones that we could win. Combine all of that search volume, do 2%, that's how many clicks you're going to get. What's a good conversion rate or what's a normal conversion rate for an affiliate site? It really depends on the niche. Some niches are going to be like 40%, some niches are going to be 5%.

Sure. So go on the lower end and call it a 10% conversion rate and look at your cost and then you can see how much traffic you need to get in order to that's how we do that. When we pick even point, that's exactly what we do when we pick a niche and we actually call all the affiliate managers and stuff and collect stats from them and do all that. Now, usually when we get into a niche, that's the amount of work that gets into it. That's why people are like, oh, you're not starting a new site every two weeks or something.

I'm like, it's actually quite a bit of work to do properly, but yeah, that's exactly how we do that. And so you do that based on the site structure you've planned, basically. So that's kind of it gives us an idea of where we'll be. And usually we kind of do what I mentioned for the silos. We throw something for six months and then well, if we have full time staff, we'll keep them writing, but we kind of start new silos to sit them and see which ones are taking off and which ones are not taking off, and then just bring them back to the ones that have worked.

Once we have proven the market, basically. But yeah, I think for example, I think my diggity does something completely different, which is why I wanted to ask you, actually, when you start a new site, will you still go with your four pages rule, which is essentially your money page and three supporting articles? Yeah, I think of it in those terms. That's how I can roll it out. If you're starting a brand new site, you probably want to get as many of those target pages up as you can to begin with.

So you might focus a little bit more on that and then come back through on the supporting content in the following month, perhaps. Because at some point you have to get those pages on that can make you money. If you're just starting out, maybe instead of doing like one target and three supporting, I might do four targets and then come back and hit my supporting yeah, see where they land. And then kind of after a few weeks and then after that be like, okay, this has a chance if I add exactly. And then you can spend money where you actually might make money on, hey, this target page is taken off.

Let's support it now because we might get it to page R1 quick, and then that's going to fund this whole site. And I think that's something that if people listen to, I want them to pick up on this properly, is that we essentially throw as little resources as possible to something to see where we land and to actually then get an idea of how well we can do. If I start throwing a silo and every page is like number 50 on Google, like 50 or less, then I'm done. For example, if I started a hosting silo, like a hosting review silo on a toy hacker, most likely it would not do well, and most likely I would abandon it and I would just focus on something that's maybe making less money, but I have higher chances of actually getting, rather than going for the big play, essentially spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and two years of my life to get some hosting keywords. And I think that's something that because a lot of people are looking for hard rules.

I'm sure when people ask you questions they are looking for hard rules. They're like, oh, how do I do this, how do I do this, et cetera. And I like that everything you tell me is like, oh, I do a little bit of this, then I see how it goes. And then based on this, I do that. And I think that's what beginners need to pick up on because I think that's the way most people, people that are more advanced do things.

But it's something that you gain with experience, this ability to deal with uncertainty. And I think when you're starting in this industry, it's extremely frustrating because it's not an exact science. Basically. It's like there's an exact algorithm that you will never figure out and then you just have to do your games rocks. You have to figure the successful people are probably 80% successful or 70% successful.

And in that what they start off with. And what they're trying to do actually ends up working, which is there's 20% to 30% that's not going to do anything. Yeah, even more than that. Maybe more, maybe more.

But people take the feedback of failures as well and actually improve from that. And I think that's how people grow in this industry as well. And I think it's something to that people have embraced failure that have done this for a long time. I'm sure you had plenty of failures in SEO and we've had many and many people. I can't stop failing.

Yeah, I don't mind anymore. It's kind of like you get to a point where your ego just doesn't mind anymore because it's happened so many times. It's funny. One thing I wanted to ask you for new sites is category pages, because we mentioned it earlier, but you didn't really tell me how you do things. So how do you handle categories?

Let's say hub pages on your site. So the category page you're just talking about, that generates from WordPress based on I've done these posts and I've categorized them and now I've got that page. I don't worry about that page too much. If I'm feeling like it's causing problems and maybe tag pages sometimes can cause problems with WordPress sites. I'll no index them, I'll no index and follow and I think that that will probably take care of any of those things if I really don't want that page to show.

But ultimately I don't sweat it too much. I've not run into any problems with category pages personally. Like outranking something that I wanted it to rank. I have seen tag pages do that and that's kind of annoying because they really don't convert I think at all. They look weird in the serfs.

I can't believe that WordPress is so old and it still looks like that and the search is still complete crap. And categories I don't know, so I don't really worry about those too much. Now a hub page, something that I'm creating where I've got particular topic and then I've got links going into my site. That's kind of what a hub page concept is, right? Or as you define it, the Hub page is like a page that's like covering a topic and then linking out to all pages.

Basically. There are some nice ways you can do those so that people would actually link to it. Where you've got a whole might look like a resources page where you can come here and you can get this is the place where you can come and get to all forms of resources. People do link to those pages, you can get actual links to those and then so instead of like you've got your silo where we're building links and it's going to a target page, you got this hub page and it's linking out to all the others. So you are getting that form of link juice flowing through that particular page because people do link to them.

So I like to think of those as a separate thing outside of any kind of silo structure. They're on their own and they're navigational that they get through my site but then they're also educational or some form of resource that people would actually link to is how I like to play with those. Yeah, I like to actually make them blog posts these days. Actually it's funny, literally this morning I published a blog post on the Toy hacker that's exactly that it's like list of affiliate niches. It's basically like we've done a bunch of research on a bunch of niches and then there's a giant list and just like essentially it's a hub page that's here to navigate people and get links and pass interest.

So that's all I use it for. I don't really worry about sitting in a silo structure, I don't really care where it sits on the site. Do you ever link build these pages? Would you do a guest posting campaign to a page like this? Yeah, a list of how do I cancel my cable company?

So you could list the top cable companies how you actually cancel and then you've got links going to your different services that are better than their services, that sort of thing. Yeah. Okay. And then you would just guess post them and then you try to put them for a keyword, usually like some kind of semi relevant keyword. I haven't done it too much where I'm actually trying to rank the hub page for anything.

Not intentionally. Usually what I'm trying to do is maybe something else would rank something that I'm linking to. But I am just trying to get it as a place that's just a resource for people to put link or for me to put links to things that give good answers to questions. And then the juice drives in that I can spread throughout my site. So the reason I try to rank them actually is because that's why I make them articles now, because it's easier to rank.

Sure. But the reason I try to rank them is for the same reason you're trying to get your support pages. I'm trying to just get passive link building coming to this page as well. Yeah. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but it's something that I want to give six more months before I'm highly recommending or something.

But that's kind of what we're trying, right? Basically. Anything else? I didn't ask you about site structure for new sites. No, my only last point would be you got to start so many people, should I start with this niche or that niche?

Should I do this or that? Just do one. Yeah, I agree. Just go and do it. What's?

That you can fix site structure later anyway. Yeah. I would also mention if you're just starting out and you're going to build an affiliate site, I wouldn't do my heart's passion on my first one. I would do something that I wouldn't mind if I just burned it now completely. I would do something that I'm interested in because obviously you're probably going to do your content writing to start or a lot of it.

I would at least make it interesting enough that you don't mind writing about it. But I might try something that I don't care so much about so that I learn so much on that over the course of a year, so that when I start my second one, I feel I'm in a good position to do that, need all that knowledge. And then your second one, which you really do care about, I think will be much more successful. And then you've got the passion with the knowledge that you gained on that other one. I agree.

It's like your first, you can do okay with it, but you always have regrets and it's something that people that haven't done this for many years don't realize. But when your sites age, there's a lot of regrets that are difficult to fix on things that you've done on branding again, like URL decisions and things like that, that you just. Can't go back to and it's too much of a gamble to go and change, but at the same time, if you had to do it over again, you would do completely differently. So you may as well make these mistakes on the site you care a little bit less about than that. I like to give that example of that affiliate site called Pickmytolet.com that has 100,000 visits per month or something.

I didn't check recently, maybe they got hit or something because Google but yeah, it's like I'm like you can pick a use as stupid as toilets and still make basically a full time income. So you can start with something like that and eventually do something that you care a bit more about for sure. Actually, it'd be kind of fun to actually get some passive income out of that sort of a concept where your education is paying for itself. Yeah, it's fun as well. I like actually getting in the niches that we get into as well, like learning something new and yeah, I think it's the best way to live that lifestyle.

Basically you can get into high paying niches and doing that, you get into personal finance and start YouTube and do that kind of stuff and make really good money with affiliate, but it's a fun way to build sites as well. So I would say I agree with you. Start with something, make it happen, and then you'll learn a lot. You'll fail a lot, but you'll learn a lot and then you can do something a little bit bigger next time. Let's go over people that have existing sites and it's a mess and they need some help.

So there's nothing better than putting ourselves in the shoes of these people. So let's say we have a WordPress site that's essentially the 2020 WordPress team and 200 blog posts. And all I've done is I've looked for low competition keywords and I've just been ranking for that and I bought articles on fiver and I have 200 of these on that site. It gets 25,000 visits per month, but it's a fucking mess and I should be getting four or five times that. What should I do?

Wow. It would be great to have a month mess on traffic because you're just outside where you can do like advertisement, right? What do you need? About thirty k? I mean twenty five k you can get a media buying, actually, and 10,000 as well.

So that's a really decent mistake.

What I would start to do is and this is just my own, so as I discussed how I set up sites, I've got target pages. That's the thing that I'm trying to rank for. So what you probably need to do is identify what is a target page and it could be one of those 200 blog posts. Just because it's a blog post doesn't mean it can't be the top of its own silo. Again, with the virtual silo concept pages and posts don't matter.

So you can probably identify like, hey, these are the ones that are bringing me the most traffic. So what I'm going to do is I'm start to virtually restructure them by taking some of these other posts and then kind of shifting them as my supporting post for that target page. So you don't need to change any of the actual physical structure. It could be a complete mess. And that's okay.

I'm going to start to reposition the site virtually by changing my links in my body content. And so I'm going to start internal linking work exactly right. So I'm going to start to break those 200 up, and I'm going to say, these are the ten target pages that are bringing me the most traffic. And now these guys, they aren't bringing me as much or little at all, but they're relevant to that. Now I'm going to start interlinking them into my virtual silo and support my target pages.

And then what I might do at that point is then maybe filter in some links into those supporting pages and then see if you start to get a real benefit out of it, because I bet you will. I bet you'll see those main ones all start to move up. I think your keyword base will grow, which is the more important thing. The number of queries that your site is ranking for will expand, and that's the sign that you've done it correctly. If you've been stagnant or you're only got this many keywords that you're ranking for, and you can see this in search console, you should see those numbers grow, and then you know you've done it right, and that's how I would approach this type of situation.

So let's say you've brainstormed these silos and you've essentially done some internal linking work. There's going to be a number of pages that essentially fall out of these silos, and you feel like they're kind of like on their own, the orphans, and you don't really have plans for them. Maybe you don't make money from them. What do you do with these pages? Do you get rid of them?

Do you just leave them alone? Do you rewrite them? Right now, I leave them alone. I think Pruning a page is the last thing I want to do.

Maybe it's a drastic measure. If you realize, like, hey, I've got this other page and I can see a little bit of cannibalization with this guy, then I might prune him. But otherwise there's going to be some point where you can use them. And I'm not a fan of Pruning sites for the sake of Pruning. I know I've seen some examples where, like, Maz says they did it and Brian Dean says he did it, but I'm going to guess that you're not getting 300,000 plus visits to your site a month where maybe that could actually be beneficial.

I think those were very edge cases where they were able to do that.

I'm not a big fan of that concept to go into your affiliate site and do it. Okay, I'd leave them as is for now. The thing as well is all content ranks for really tiny keywords, at least even if they're like they get almost zero search volume. And the thing is because you do appear for these tiny keywords, there's kind of like that off chance of this passive link building thing that we talked about where you might actually just randomly get a link to your site. And I think if you have a lot of pages, like in this case, then it actually can be a decent amount of link growth over the year or something.

If the content is not hurting, I think that's not a problem. I think the one case where I would recommend that is maybe if two pages are very close in topic then merge them basically. I agree. How about homepage linking?

Is links from homepage important? And what would you recommend people do in terms of internal linking from the homepage on their sites? Usually if you're just getting started, the homepage is the one that's getting all the links because you can build like citations to it. Or maybe you built around of Web Two, like branded Web 2.0 that kind of get your nap going and pointing in. So that's the one that's probably going to get the most juice initially just by default.

So if you're in a position where you're just starting out or even if you're then kind of trying to clean up a mess, if there's a page that's really important to you that's internal, I would get a link to it on the home page. And let's say you have on that 200 page example, let's say you've identified, these are my ten targets, these are the ones I'm going to go after. Why not have a little blurb about each of those on the home page? You can do that in ways that look nice, you don't have to make it gross. But these are the main things on our site and this is what we're trying to do.

You can have a little blurb and you link in and then you do get a home page link going to your target page. Yeah, we do that quite a bit as well. Even when you do guest posting, right, like guest posting very often, at least in the byline, there's going to be a link to your home page. Sure. And so if you've been running guest posting for a while or your site has been around for a while, this page has the most links of all your site apart if you had like one or two blog posts that really took off or something and it happens.

But I like to link these hub pages from the home page as well.

You have your home page and it links to that Hub page that links to, like 20 or 30 pages below, and I find it's like a nice flow of that direct links that goes to the home page, basically. Okay, cool. Would you implement all changes at once, or would you do gradually? I think you kind of answered the question, but let's see low and slow. You want to see how it works.

I've seen situations where someone had all those they had the 200 posts, and then they changed them all and things just went and then they're like, now do I change back? What do I do? And it's like, oh, my God, you're in for six months. When you do a big, drastic change and it didn't go well, you kind of have that forgetory period where even though you fix it, your site never really completely recovers. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. It's funny how Google doesn't kind of restore things faster for a site that has untrust in the past. I find it weird, to be frank, for a new site. Know you were ranking this page here. Okay.

It was off for two weeks, but it goes back to where it was, and it still takes six months to go back to where it was or something. I'm very curious on why they do that. They probably have a good reason that's all my questions for site structure, anything we didn't talk about that I should have asked, and I didn't do my homework correctly. No, I think that was pretty exhaustive.

A whole other thing you can get into is, like, how to do services or local pages or stuff like that, but that might be a whole other talk. Yeah, I think that's a little bit of a different it's more like local SEO, et cetera, which kind of like, follows its own rules on top of classic SEO rules, I would say. I had a question, actually, from Mark Jenner from Atoy Hacker Pro. It's not related to site structure, but I think it's quite interesting. Basically, you are known for doing single variable testing, which is essentially picking an imaginary keyword, building ten pages on ten different sites that target this keyword and changing them a little bit and using that lower Mipsum just to see what factors seem to be coming on top with as little external factors as possible so that you can isolate them.

Which is why it's called single variable testing. And Mark Jenner essentially said he likes this a lot. He finds it interesting, and essentially it's the best we've got. But I think Ted, when we asked him to do the predictions for 2020, he mentioned that there is this kind of, like, cofactor thing where essentially for a factor to take effect, you need another one to also be validated or something. So what's your take on that and how do you think that can be tested?

Well, we can test that. So there has to be a point where things and using like Ted's types of tools, you can see which factors seem to pair. And so that's where a correlational test that he runs, we can see that. We can start to identify. These two are linked.

They always ping together. And so what we can do is then isolate those. We can start with one and then add the other. So in that test environment, they all get factor A, and then say, the number five result or whatever gets factor B as well. And then we see if we get the movement up.

And that's how you can then play with cofactors within a single variable model, because how you eliminate the situation is that all of the test pages have that first variable. And then maybe you need to go the other way. So you can run it the other way and see if okay, you need to run another test. Basically, that confirms it. Exactly.

Yeah. So even though that may or may not be true, I mean, that's something that we're playing with. And that's a pretty exciting idea and would explain a lot of things within SEO about like, hey, I did all these things and it didn't work. And maybe that you were missing that one trigger, if you will, for that particular niche. So that's actually something that we can play with.

The problem with single variable testing is that it's a long term play. It's a lot of work, it takes a lot of resources. It's not easy and fast to do, which is probably better for all of us. Why are you the only one doing it? Exactly.

It's better for me.

All those things can be overcome for anything. Did you guys start testing with these cofactors? Is there one interesting thing that you can let us know about this? Because obviously you guys been playing with the idea, et cetera. What gave you the idea?

What made you notice it? And maybe I can't take credit for that at all. There's a guy named Lee Witcher. He is killing it in testing right now. He's our lead tester now in IMG.

So he's overseeing and doing all the peer reviewing of the test, but he found the number one factor. Do you know the number one factor in SEO? Probably like search intent. No, it's the existence of a factor, but it's better to have something in a signal area than nothing. So the concept is you can look at the top ranking pages for something and let's say they all average.

They have placed something in approximately 150 factor areas. It's the ones that you are missing are the ones that are affecting your rank. And so the people that have the most things in you can think of, it in the negative. It's the nonexistence of a factor. As a ranking factor, you need to check the tick boxes.

Basically. It's better to get a partial check in there than to have nothing. I see. So you need to compete on all 150 factors. That's right.

So what you need to do is look and see or have a method to count how many factors are being hit in my niche, how many factors are the sites that are winning? What are they actually doing across the board? So not just some of those big ones, but even getting into some of those smaller ones. And then you can then start to optimize according to all right, we need to get these things in to match the number of factor areas or signal areas that they're optimizing. Yeah, fair enough.

And I can imagine for different niches, it's quite different, to be honest, especially the eat stuff, et cetera. That's when it would probably start kicking in, actually. My favorites.

I thought you were going to say that was the number one factor. No, I'm warming up to the idea that they might have a very primitive way of checking this out, but yeah, I don't know. I see a lot of sites that have a lot of credibility just going up and down like everyone else. Okay, well, I think we're done with this podcast. Thanks for all your info.

Thanks for sharing. Thanks for being super open, et cetera. It's been great. You are over at Page Optimizer Pro, which is our page optimizing tool that people can use. You can put your URL, your competitors URL, essentially see these factors that you should be optimizing for.

And you are also a founding member of IMG, which stands for Internet Marketing Goals. So you guys can go and sign up there. It's a free community. And you guys have a paid member with a paid membership with the tests, et cetera. So, yeah, thanks for joining in.

Next time Mark goes on a holiday, I guess I'll call, you know. Perfect. Anything else that I forgot to say before we close it up? I think that's it people ask, how can they get a hold of me? And it's in IMG.

You can post I'm there, so so, yeah, we can have a chat there. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining and for the listeners. See you next week. Bye bye.

All right.