June 4, 2026 · SEO Strategy
How to Plan a Content Silo from Scratch
Most content silos fail before a single word is written. The planning is either skipped entirely, or done so loosely that the silo ends up too broad, poorly linked, and competing against itself. If you want to understand the full picture first, our complete guide to content silos covers the strategy behind why they work. This post is about the practical process of building one from scratch.
Done properly, silo planning takes a few hours before you write anything. That time is not optional. It is the difference between a silo that ranks and a group of posts that go nowhere.
The Step-by-Step Planning Process
Follow these seven steps to plan a content silo that is focused, well-linked, and ready to rank.
- Pick your topic, and make it narrow
Your silo should cover one service, one problem, or one industry segment. Not an entire industry. A physiotherapy clinic in Brisbane should not build a silo around “physiotherapy”, that’s too broad. A silo around “sports injury treatment” is specific enough to own. The narrower the topic, the faster you build authority and the easier it is to cover every relevant angle without running out of things to say.
- Do keyword research for the topic and its subtopics
Once you have a topic, find out what people are actually searching for within it. Use a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or even Google’s autocomplete and People Also Ask results. You’re looking for the main keyword (what the pillar page will target) plus the subtopics that branch off it (what each supporter page will target). Write every relevant keyword down. You’ll sort them in the next step.
- Map the searcher intent for each keyword cluster
Not every keyword belongs in the same silo or deserves the same type of page. Separate your keywords by intent: informational (how-to, what-is, explainer), commercial (best, review, comparison), and navigational (brand or product-specific). Most silos are built around informational and commercial intent. Mixing them carelessly is how you end up with pages that confuse both users and Google about what they’re supposed to do.
- Build the page list: one pillar plus 4-8 supporters
With your keyword clusters mapped, you can now decide which pages to create. You need one pillar page, the broad, authoritative overview of the whole topic, and between four and eight supporter pages, each covering a specific subtopic. If you’re not sure how many pages your silo needs, read our guide on how many pages a silo needs before you finalise the list. Aim for completeness, not volume.
- Assign one primary keyword to each page
Each page gets one primary keyword focus. Only one. This is not negotiable. When two pages share a primary keyword, they compete against each other in search results, a problem called keyword cannibalisation. Go through your page list and assign one keyword per page, then check that no two pages are targeting the same term or a near-identical variation.
- Plan the internal link architecture
Internal linking is what makes a silo work as a structure, not just as a collection of posts. The pillar page links to every supporter page. Each supporter page links back to the pillar and to two or three sibling supporter pages that are topically related. Read our breakdown of how to interlink a content silo for the exact linking rules. Map this out on paper or in a spreadsheet before you write anything, it will save you significant editing time later.
- Write in the right order: pillar first, then supporters
Start with the pillar page. It sets the scope and tone for the whole silo, and it gives you anchor text targets to link back to from every supporter you write. If you write the supporters first, you’ll spend time rewriting internal links. The pillar also helps you identify gaps: if you can’t write the broad overview clearly, your topic might still be too vague and needs narrowing before the rest of the silo gets written.
The Mistakes That Kill Silos Before They Start
The most common planning mistake is choosing a topic that is too broad. “Digital marketing” is not a silo topic. “Google Ads for e-commerce” is. Broad topics mean broad keywords, which means you’re competing against major publications with domain ratings ten times yours. Narrow topics let you become the most thorough resource on a specific thing, which is how you actually rank.
The second mistake is trying to cover everything in the pillar page. The pillar is not supposed to be exhaustive. It is supposed to be comprehensive at a high level, with the detail living in the supporter pages. If you try to say everything in the pillar, you either write something bloated and unfocused, or you cannibalise your own supporter pages. Understand what a pillar page is supposed to do before you brief the content.
The third mistake is skipping the keyword research and writing what feels logical. What feels logical to you and what people are actually searching for are often different things. Keyword research is how you close that gap. Skipping it means you might write six perfectly good supporter pages that no one is searching for, and miss the three pages that would have driven real traffic.
How Long Does Silo Planning Actually Take?
Done properly, planning a silo takes two to four hours before any writing starts. That includes keyword research, intent mapping, building the page list, assigning keywords, and sketching the link structure. If you try to rush it into thirty minutes, you will spend that time again, and more, fixing problems once the content is written.
Once the plan is solid, the briefing stage is straightforward. Read our guide on how to brief a content writer to make sure each page brief gives a writer exactly what they need to hit the keyword target without guessing at your intent.
If you’d rather have this done properly from the start, the Classic Sandwich includes a full content silo built and delivered as polished Google Docs, ready to publish.
Most silos work best with one pillar page and between four and eight supporter pages. Fewer than four supporters and the silo lacks depth; more than eight and you risk diluting the topic or running out of genuinely distinct keyword targets. The right number depends on how many distinct subtopics your keyword research surfaces.
Yes, and this is often the best approach. If you already have a service page targeting a competitive keyword, turn that page into the pillar and build supporter posts around it. You’re not starting from scratch, you’re adding structure to something that already exists, which can lift the existing page’s rankings as it earns more internal links.
No, but publish the pillar page first and try to get the core supporter pages live within a few weeks. Google needs to crawl the internal link structure to understand the silo as a coherent topic cluster. Publishing one page every six months does not give the algorithm enough signal. A staged rollout over four to six weeks is fine; a drip over a year is not.