Confused About Site Structure/Longtails

[smithy]

Hi everyone, I'm having an issue deciding what the best structure for a site would be. I'll use the example of golf grips and an Amazon affiliate site.

Main page/category/top of silo - Golf Grips

This page is an overview of the topic and links to all the articles written about golf grips. It may include sub-sections that contain summaries of the articles and then links to the main article. This is all good so far, I think.

Main KW/Supporting Content

This is where it gets confusing for me. Best Golf Grips would be the main kw I want to rank for. But how would I treat other kws like Best Golf Grips for Small Hands/Irons/Seniors/Wedges/Drivers, Best Tacky/Midsize/Oversize Golf Grips etc.

I see it in one of two ways: either with the brackets or without the brackets.

Title: Best Golf Grips for Every Purpose
H2: 10 Best Golf Grips
H3: Best for Wedges - Product 1
(Link to article covering the best for wedges in more detail)
H3: Best for Drivers - Product 2
(Link to article covering the best for drivers in more detail)
H3: Best for Irons - Product 3
(Link to article covering the best for irons in more detail)
H3: Best Tacky Golf Grips - Product 4
(Link to article covering the best for irons in more detail)
etc.

Writing individual articles that cover each seems like a thing of a past, and may even appear spammy. If I google these terms I can see a general Best Golf Grips article is mainly ranking for them. A few years ago I think the former was more common.

My questions are:

1. Which way is better, or perhaps even a different way that is determined by if the search volume is worthwhile? My definition of worthwhile would probably be different to someone who has a lot more experience, though - say 150 vs. 1000 search volume.

2. Individual articles would establish a lot of topical relevance. If not, it may be more difficult to flesh out the topic to establish that relevance. How else could relevance be achieved? Informational content that links back to the main kw article?

3. Physical vs. Virtual Silos: It seems like physical silos are a rare breed nowadays and don't seem to offer any advantage? Google is able to understand the relevance in other ways such as through breadcrumbs. If you have them on your site they show up in google - mysite.com > Golf > Grips. Reorganizing would also be a nightmare if physical silos are used.

4. I think what confuses me the most is how I see the SERPs dominated by sites that only cover Best X keywords. These have very little related content except maybe another article or two covering the best golf clubs and balls - nothing more specifically about grips. It's just one main article and they move onto another Best X keyword. Large sites like Wirecutter, Lifewire etc. I can understand but not the smaller ones.

The informational content seems unnecessary, and the top of the silo would just be Golf instead of as specific as Golf Grips, which would just contain a list of Best X articles related to golf and no additional content on the page.

Hoping someone can clear this up.

 

[Ryuzaki]

The informational content seems unnecessary

It can seem like this, but people regularly catch "thin content penalties" for doing pure bottom of the funnel content like those review sites you mention. Some of those survive and I guess Google has decided they are "adding value," but I'd say for every one that survives, countless get destroyed.

Writing individual articles that cover each seems like a thing of a past, and may even appear spammy.

I think it depends on how big your site is. If you have 500 info posts, then doing all of those individual reviews like "best grips for small hands" isn't spammy as long as you're offering unique information, versus falling into the "rewrite the previous article with different products" trap.

Also, you have a much, much, MUCH higher chance of ranking those terms if you have a dedicated article due to how you can do on-page optimization. This is one of the ways we can beat the giant sites funded by "old money" like Wirecutter. They're too busy going after big volume terms. You can slide in and accumulate a ton of traffic on these longer tails.

Putting all of that into one monster article helps you rank the monster term. You may get some random one-time searches related to the longer tails, especially if that article gets juicy, but you're not likely to rank highly for all of those terms. And as soon as someone does an individual "for small hands" version on a respectable site, you'll be outranked.

I think what you really want to consider here is "how fast can I get to the money?" What's going to get you flowing cash faster, when considering your domain age, size, backlink profile, etc.

I see it in one of two ways: either with the brackets or without the brackets.

This kind of outline can work. One option is to show the best product from that sub-group and then link to the individual article for the "for small hands" that then lists 5 articles or whatever (and link back to the big article). Doing this, you can use exact match anchors while de-optimizing the main article for those longer tails, like you've already shown with the H3's. Using "Best for Wedges" instead of "Best Golf Grips for Wedges" is a good move here. You won't interfere with your own ranking abilities and you're still flowing relevance and getting hyper-relevant with the exact match anchor.

Physical vs. Virtual Silos

Yeah, physical, in the sense of only linking out to other articles in the same silo isn't how the web is built any more. But you can still get as close as is reasonable by pretending the header, footer, and sidebar aren't a part of the equation, because Google definitely can figure out what's templated and what's main content. I'm positive they flow page rank and relevancy differently through them.

Since I started talking about virtual silos and using other signals to indicate relevancy in this fashion, HubPages put out a widely popular idea called Topic Clusters. It's nothing groundbreaking, they just have the reach to have turned it into a "thing." You've already described it above, but reading that might help you think about it more clearly.

Which way is better, or perhaps even a different way that is determined by if the search volume is worthwhile?

I'd be thinking about the value of the conversion versus the search volume, in addition to the competition in the SERPs for that keyword in relation to my site's own ranking power. "What can I actually rank for and start making money now" versus pie-in-the-sky rankings you won't get ahold of for years to come. Get to the money now, then you'll have cash flow to outsource and scale and cover all the bases.

 

[Poplanu]

It can seem like this, but people regularly catch "thin content penalties" for doing pure bottom of the funnel content like those review sites you mention. Some of those survive and I guess Google has decided they are "adding value," but I'd say for every one that survives, countless get destroyed.

How do you tell it's a thin content penalty? Does the site never take off? Or does it take off and then gets manually penalized?

I just see plenty of sites doing bottom of the funnel content exclusively, and none of the ones I'm following have gotten penalized for it. SERPS are full of sites that do "best X" and "X review" articles exclusively. Maybe it's a manual review to see if you're spamming out cheap content just to rank?

One penalized site that comes to mind with horrid content quality (the last I checked) is www.thesmartconsumer.com. Then again it's hard to tell whether it's links or content, or everything put together. I know the owner was going for the cheapest content and nearly spamming out the articles (which admittedly did work for a while for him).

 

[Ryuzaki]

How do you tell it's a thin content penalty? Does the site never take off? Or does it take off and then gets manually penalized?

Exactly. You'll get some traction, enough to get looked at, and then you get a manual penalty notice that explicitly states it's a thin content penalty.

The main thing is to "add value." If you end up ranking for some decent volume, valuable terms with a tiny site mostly comprised of reviews that don't add value, then you'll eventually get hit. It's basically a way to clean up the SERPs of SEOs doing slick stuff to rank better than they should.

Not adding value is basically like regurgitating facts about the products that anyone can find anywhere. You should be adding opinions and other information. Of course that's not all there is to it, and nothing can really defend you from it, because that's not the point. The point is to stop SEOs that are only working the bottom of the funnel from flooding the SERPs.

 

[smithy]

Thanks, Ryuzaki. I understand better now.

I see that it is more about intent and conversion points. The longtails are suitably different to warrant having their own article while building lots of relevance, being easier to rank, helping out the user, and providing a more targeted conversion point. The informational content turns the site into more than just your run-of-the-mill affiliate site.

Speaking as a user too, I hate it when I'm looking for recommendations and I come across a general article that just lists 10 different products without differentiating between them. It doesn't help me a whole lot in my decision making process, which is why I like the idea of recommending the best product for a more specific purpose. But I didn't know whether to expand on this with their own individual articles.

Speaking of exact match kws and anchor text, when does it become too much? If I wasn't to link to the longtail kw articles would you then use the exact match in the header tags. So "Best Golf Grips for Wedges" and "Best Golf Grips for Irons"? One thing that always confuses me is that I usually include a table of contents that I think probably counts towards the usage of these terms, so it then becomes a balancing act.

How about on the main silo page and other articles - a mix of exact and partial matches maybe?

 

[bernard]

I personally just consider if a keyword deserves its own dedicated topic or if it is just a variation.

A variation would be stuff to do with size, color and other attributes. I don't want to do individual posts for those since that is very spammy imo. Like "best 22 inch monitor", "best 20 inch monitor", "best 28 inch monitor" or "best 10 feet fishing rods", "best 9 feet fishing rods" etc. I do not think that warrants a unique topic, I think those are best served as price comparison table or search or something like that.

Instead, lets say "best monitor for gaming" is a broad keyword, but you could niche down and say "best monitor for fps gaming", "best monitor for driving games", "best monitor for rts games" and I would feel perfectly safe with that since they're legit topics with legit concerns. I would then have my "best monitors for gaming" as a hub and link to each subtopic, which would also link back. I might then add a "coupons and offers for gaming monitors" along with a "best gaming monitors on sale (feed search)" page as well. In addition, if the niche was deep enough, you could do individual product reviews for each of those subniche products.

 

[Poplanu]

A variation would be stuff to do with size, color and other attributes. I don't want to do individual posts for those since that is very spammy imo. Like "best 22 inch monitor", "best 20 inch monitor", "best 28 inch monitor" or "best 10 feet fishing rods", "best 9 feet fishing rods" etc. I do not think that warrants a unique topic, I think those are best served as price comparison table or search or something like that.

The monitors actually do deserve their own dedicated topics, e.g. "best 24 inch monitor" has 1300 searches per month on Google. Just caught my eye because I was shopping for one a month ago and I was searching based on size specifically