SEO is more important than ever. Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day. Organic search traffic should be the biggest traffic generator to your website. And no matter how good your numbers are, you can make them better.
Putting together your SEO SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis will give you insights into how well you are doing and where to direct your efforts to see the best improvements for your business.
SWOT Analysis Questions You Need to Address
Let’s explore the questions you need to address:
Strengths
- Start by cataloging search referral results. Go back at least one year. How much search referral traffic are you receiving? How many conversions is that traffic generating? Calculate the value of that traffic. If you cannot calculate that value, go to accounting. You may be surprised how helpful they will be. This is the foundation for justifying your search engine optimization efforts.
- What keywords does your website rank well for? Is it #1 for your branded phrases? Which other phrases have 1st page rankings?
- Which web pages rank best? What are your top entry pages? Why are they generating the best numbers? Is it from organic rankings? What keywords are attracting the traffic?
- How well do your videos appear in search? What keywords do they rank for?
- What is your competitive advantage? What keywords describe that advantage? How well does the website rank for them?
- What is your strongest content? How visible is it on search?
- What are the best-referring websites? Why are they driving the most traffic?
As you can see, exploring your SEO strengths will also help you uncover some of your weaknesses.
Weaknesses
- What keywords are you not ranking for? Did they ever? What was the content that drove those search positions? Could you update that content? If important keywords never ranked, what content could you develop to create search visibility?
- If you are not #1 for your branded phrases, what steps do you need to take to change that?
- What do your competitors do that is better than you? How well do they communicate those advantages? What content could you develop to neutralize those advantages?
- What keywords are your competitors beating you? Why are they beating you? Why is their content attracting more audience interest? Google’s algorithms rank content that best attracts searcher interest. Is the competitive content better search optimized? Is it more valuable to your audience? Or both? What content could you develop that would be stronger?
- What strong content does not rank well or delivers little traffic? Why? How strong is the SEO? How well is it linked? What have you done to promote it?
- What SEO tactics have you tried that did not deliver results?
- Are adequate people resources and budget dedicated to SEO?
- How strong are your in-house SEO skills?
If you are not sure how to fix these weaknesses, contact E/Power Marketing and we can discuss your situation and how to remedy it.
Opportunities
Identify the SEO opportunities and you will have a guide to focus your SEO efforts.
- What is the value of increasing search referral traffic 10% to 30%? You may find that SEO is the most cost-effective marketing tool you have.
- What content could you develop that would interest your target audience? What are the hot topics in your industry? What content topics are generating traffic for you that you can expand upon or develop content around related keywords? What content would describe the benefits of your competitive advantages?
- Where can you develop beneficial links? Are you listed on industry and web directories? How strong is your LinkedIn profile? Your Google My Business profile? Your Bing Places for Business profile?
- What areas of your website could you strengthen? Does your website provide useful information for your audience? Does it have content that provides solutions for the problems that your customers commonly face?
- What can you learn from your competitors? How can you take that up a notch and beat them?
Threats
- Which competitors are beating you? How are they doing it? What can you learn from them? Is the gap between you and them growing?
- Which competitors are pursuing more organic search visibility by improving their SEO? What are they doing? What do you need to keep pace with or surpass them?
- Has your search visibility been improving or deteriorating? If it’s deteriorating, why? Are you not doing enough? Or are you pursuing outdated techniques?
- Have evolving Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) pushed your search positions down? For example, search engines are using more real estate for ads, video search results and content generated by search engines. What can you do to counter that? What type of content are you seeing on SERPs that you could be creating? Yes, search engines keep changing how they do what they do. You need to keep up by adjusting along with them.
Your SEO SWOT Analysis will give you the input you need for planning to lift your website and be more competitive than ever. The time will prove well worthwhile.
