How many pages does a content silo need?

Most businesses overthink this. A content silo needs enough pages to cover the topic completely, without repeating itself. For the majority of business niches, that means 5 to 10 pages per silo. If you want the short answer, there it is. If you want to understand why, and how to work out the right number for your specific topic, keep reading.

Before we get into page counts, it helps to be clear on what a silo actually is. Our complete guide to content silos covers the full structure, but the short version is this: a silo is a tightly grouped cluster of pages, all covering different facets of the same broad topic, linked together so Google can read the topical relationship between them.

The minimum viable silo: 5 pages

The smallest silo worth building is one pillar page plus four supporting pages. That gives you five pages total, and it is the threshold at which Google starts to recognise genuine topical depth rather than a loosely related handful of posts.

Understanding what a pillar page is matters here. The pillar covers the broad topic at a high level. The four supporters each go deep on one specific subtopic. Together they signal that your site owns this subject area, not just touches it.

In a local or mid-competition niche, five pages is often all you need. A plumber targeting “hot water systems” could build a tight silo with one pillar and four supporters covering gas, electric, solar, and heat pump systems. That is comprehensive without being bloated.

The danger of too few pages

A two or three page cluster is not really a silo. It is just a handful of related posts, and Google does not read topical authority from it. You might have a pillar and two supporters, but there is not enough signal to tell the algorithm that you have genuinely covered this topic area.

This is where a lot of DIY content strategies fall apart. Business owners write a few blog posts on the same general topic and wonder why none of them rank. The pages are not wrong, there are just not enough of them to establish depth. Four pages under 4 is the number where silos start losing their structural benefit.

How to calculate the right page count for your topic

The right number is not arbitrary. It follows directly from your topic research. Count the distinct subtopics that people actually search for within your broad subject. Each subtopic with its own real search volume deserves its own page.

If you find eight genuinely distinct subtopics, build eight supporter pages plus a pillar. If you find four, build four. The keyword research drives the architecture, not the other way around. Our guide on how to plan a content silo walks through the full planning process, including how to identify subtopics worth targeting.

The test for whether a subtopic needs its own page is simple: does it have search volume that is meaningfully distinct from the pillar keyword? If yes, it gets its own page. If searchers looking for that subtopic would be perfectly satisfied landing on the pillar, skip the separate page.

The danger of too many pages

Going beyond 15 pages in a single silo starts creating problems. The first is keyword cannibalisation. When you have too many pages targeting closely related terms, Google gets confused about which one to rank for any given query. Your pages end up competing against each other rather than reinforcing each other.

The second problem is thin content. To fill 15 or 20 pages on a topic, you inevitably start repeating yourself or padding pages with information that does not actually serve the reader. Thin pages drag the silo’s overall quality signal down.

The third is maintenance. Every page you publish needs to be kept current. A bloated silo becomes a content liability faster than a lean one. If you find yourself writing two pages that target essentially the same keyword, either merge them into one stronger page or cut the weaker one entirely.

How internal linking changes with silo size

Page count affects your linking structure directly. In a five page silo, every supporter links to the pillar, and the pillar links back to every supporter. That is clean and manageable. Getting how to interlink a content silo right becomes more important as the silo grows, because a poorly linked ten page silo is actually worse than a well-linked five page one.

As page count grows, you also start grouping supporters into sub-clusters under the pillar. This adds a layer of hierarchy but keeps the topical signal clean. For most businesses, this level of complexity kicks in around eight or more pages.

How SEO Sandwich packages map to silo size

The Classic Sandwich delivers 10,000 words, which maps cleanly to one silo: a pillar page of around 1,500 to 2,000 words plus five or six supporter pages at 1,000 to 1,500 words each. That puts you squarely in the 6 to 7 page range, which is the sweet spot for most competitive niches.

The Full Stack Sandwich gives you 20,000 words, enough for up to two complete silos, or one larger silo with 12 to 14 well-developed pages if you are targeting a broader topic that genuinely needs the depth. We plan the architecture with you before a word is written, so you are not guessing at page counts.

The word count per package is not a constraint, it is a forcing function for the right structure. Most niches do not benefit from more pages; they benefit from better pages. That is the logic we build to.