Fortunately, there are business and marketing methodologies that exist to simplify marketing planning. And one of our favorites is the SWOT Analysis. In this post, I am going to detail how you can use the time-proven SWOT Analysis to focus your efforts and improve your SEO.
A SWOT analysis covers four key areas: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. This is a true back-to-basics approach you can use to understand where you currently are in regard to optimizing your website and improving your SEO.
This is achieved through a simple grid system that has four panels, two rows and two columns.
The top row outlines strengths and weaknesses, which are usually internal to the business. The bottom row has the opportunities and threats, which are typically from external sources.
The first column, with strengths and opportunities, details factors that should be helpful in achieving your objective. The second column has the weaknesses and threats which are harmful to achieving your objective.
In an ideal world, your SEO SWOT will build on your digital marketing strategy so you will have all your strategic ducks in a row, and SOSTAC is your friend here.
SEO SWOT Analysis
To use a SWOT analysis for SEO, we have to look at a business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats from an SEO perspective. To help you put this into play, let us consider the following fictional business: RK’s Widgets.
RK’s Widgets
RK’s Widgets has a WordPress website and is a true widget industry expert. RK’s Widgets can serve users from their local store in Mumbai, India, but the big win is targeting people looking to buy widgets online.
RK does not show up in the local results when users search with a local intent. And while RK is publishing some useful, informative content on a weekly basis, this content does not rank on the first page and receives very little traffic from search engines. Some competitor content does rank on the first page, but it is simply not in the same class as the content published by RK and his team.
RK’s Widgets currently has some SEO software that is reporting some technical issues, but currently, there is no plan in place to improve organic search results. The site is also not well-optimized beyond the home page and major service pages. There is currently no SEO plugin in place for the WordPress CMS, and the SEO software is reporting some duplicate content.
RK has identified the important commercial keywords and currently ranks around the bottom of page 2 for these terms. RK’s two main competitors rank around the top 5, with competition from Wikipedia, Amazon, and eBay filling out the remaining spaces.
There is some search content around the problems that RK’s Widgets solve, and often these searches show SERP features like featured snippets and “people also ask” results.
RK’s Widgets has been going for nearly 15 years, yet far newer companies are starting to show up on the front page of results. Comparing these businesses, we see that although newer, they have more authority metrics than RK’s Widgets. It appears they are actively engaged in improving their SEO.
The website does generate some inquiries, but RK has no idea what sources of traffic are working currently.