SILO For Ecommerce. Is this the right way to do it?

I've been talking to @BassTrackerBoats about SEO and ended up doing quit a bit of reading on my own after my conversation with him.

I have a few question about creating a SILO structure for an commerce website. Now I have read quite a few articles about the SILO concept and understand the Narrowly focused SILO and the cross linking concept.

For this example, say we have a site about music instruments. So the most obvious SILO structure could be:-



Clearly, the structure is based on the type of product. Or in the case of a Woocommerce site- based on particular product categories.

1) When using something like Woo Commerce, is it better to build a SILO using product categories or is it better to use Wordspress Pages ? For e.g. A Wordpress page called Domain.com/Acoustic-guitars that showcases all the products listed under the product category Acoustic Guitars.



2) How do you factor in Brands? Do you structure brands as a sub category? For e.g. Music Shop>Guitars>Acoustic Guitars> Yamaha Guitars. Or do you just create another product category under the main SILO page e.g. Music Shop>Guitars> Yamaha

In the latter case a product could belong to two diffrent Sub categories. For e.g. a Yamaha acoustic guitar would belong to Music Shop>Guitars>Acoustic Guitar as well as Music Shop>Guitars>Yamaha - would that be okay?



3) Assuming we are following all the basic rules of the SILO concept, Is it okay for an commerce site to have product categories, as well as other types of pages in the same SILO- for e.g. a blog post that is directly related to that particular Silo? Or a Wordpress Page that showcases special offers?



4) What do you do for products that might belong to two diffrent SILOS. For example guitar strings could belong to a category named GUITAR as well as another category named ACCESSORIES.

OR What if we have a Special Xmas Sale Sub category under one SILO where we have special offers on Guitars. In such a case, certain products would belong to both the guitars as well as the XMAS sale Sub categories. Is that okay?

Thanks for all your replies.

Did you ever figure it out? I see I’m a little late to this party but since no one replied I’ll tell you what I do.

I use pages for my silos with good, informative, long form content, after keyword research. I try to rank my pages as landing pages and funnel traffic to relevant products by displaying the WooCommerce products (using wp bakery shortcodes) on the page usually surrounded by text that is aiming to help the searcher find what they are looking for and usually try to upsell them on something better than what they were looking for.

My product pages are not really part of my silo structure, but mostly try to rank for very low comp searches with those.