Commonly, organizations use SWOT Analysis to assess their current position before they decide on any new strategy. Nowadays, as businesses are shifting to the online market, marketers are now using SWOT Analysis to come up with their Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
And with good reason. With SWOT Analysis, you find out what’s working well with your business and what’s not good. You try to set goals and come up with actionable plans on how to get there. The technique might be simple but doing a SWOT Analysis allows you to get an overview of your business’s current situation and how you want to move forward.
In this article, we introduce to you more about SWOT Analysis and how it can help you in developing an effective online marketing strategy through SEO.
What Is SWOT Analysis?
SWOT means Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Using a SWOT Analysis, you asses the four aspects of your business.
It allows you to make the most of what you got to your organization’s advantage and mitigate the potential risks by knowing what you lack and eliminating the potential hazards to your success.
So you must be wondering: “how does this apply to my SEO strategy?”
How You Can Use the SWOT Analysis to Your SEO Strategy
Using a comprehensive SWOT Analysis for SEO gives you a roadmap with what tasks can systematically be tackled in your SEO marketing strategy.
For you to really put the whole idea into perspective, let’s consider a fictional business. Take Arbiter Law, LLP
Arbiter Law, LLP Online Marketing Overview
Arbiter Law, LLP has a WordPress website with full lots of content about bankruptcy law and consumer law. They serve individuals dealing with bankruptcy and debt collection issues in Lorton, Virginia, and they are trying to reach out to communities surrounding Lorton through local SEO.
However, they are having a hard time expanding their reach in local results when users search with local intent. And though publishing articles about bankruptcy law and other consumer law cases have been helpful, the content does not rank on the first page and receives very little traffic from search engines.
Arbiter Law, LLP uses different SEO tools that report issues but currently, there is no set plan yet on how to improve local search results. The website is also not well-optimized to make it visible locally. There is currently no SEO plugin in place for the WordPress CMS, and SEO software is currently reporting some broken links.
The law firm has identified the important commercial keywords and currently ranks on the middle section of page 2 for these terms. On the other hand, their competitors rank in the Top 5 in organic, as well as the local search results.
Arbiter Law, LLP has done business in Virginia for 10 years but newer law firms are showing up on the front page of search results. Comparing these businesses, we find the although they are newer law firms, they are more actively engaged in improving their SEO, thus, they are acquiring more traffic.
Strength
- Vast experience in the field
- Expert, quality content
Weaknesses
- Poor rankings in commercial keywords
- Low domain authority metrics
- The site is not optimized well
- No relevant SEO plugins or technical optimization
- Very basic analytics setup with no conversion tracking
- Not part of the top 3 rankings in local search results
Opportunities
- Rank in the top 5 results in commercial search terms through proper link building and establishing authority
- Improve the ranking of existing useful and relevant content
- Continuously publish relevant content
- Build links to useful content to build authority
Threats
- Newer and less experienced competitors are overtaking search results because of good SEO strategies
- The gap between the major competitors is increasing
Action Plan
The SWOT Analysis provided above becomes a guide to the action plan we will do moving forward. So some of the action plans based on the information provided could be the following:
- Install relevant SEO plugins to improve technical SEO
- Develop webpages to be SEO-friendly through on-page optimization
- Resolve technical SEO issues reported by your SEO tool
- Target local SEO results by finding relevant keywords that would best fit your location and add it to your website
- Devise an effective link-building strategy to build authority
- Regularly publish content in a set schedule and invest in SEO and content marketing
This is simply a quick overview of how you can perform a SWOT analysis for your company when doing online marketing. Of course, you can make your SWOT Analysis and Action Plan as detailed as you can. Making doable tasks and small achievable goals can help you work your way through search engine rankings over time and increase the traffic of your website.
SWOT Questions to Get You Started
Perhaps coming up with ideas for your SWOT does not come easy, especially when it comes to SEO marketing. If so, then we’ll provide you with question guides for each category to get you started:
SEO Strengths:
- What keywords are you ranking well for?
- What type of content is getting more traffic on search engines?
- What are your digital assets?
- What content drives the most organic traffic?
- What are your best links?
SEO Weaknesses:
- Which areas of your SEO need improvement?
- What are your competitors’ strengths and how did they maximize them?
- How far are you behind on your competitors?
- Which SEO tactics have you performed but have failed to give the results you want?
- Does your company have an SEO expert?
- Do you have the budget required to reach your SEO marketing objectives?
SEO Opportunities:
- What kind of content can be created that would have a significant impact on your business?
- What aspects of your website can be optimized to improve rankings and results?
- What weaknesses can easily be solved?
- Are there any changes in the search engine result that you can leverage?
SEO Threats:
- Are newer and less experienced competitors good with their SEO strategy?
- Is the gap between you and your competitors growing?
- Do they have a significant asset that you cannot follow to your strategy?
- Are there any new startups that are aggressively acquiring market share?
These are just some of the questions that you can use as a guide in creating your SEO SWOT Analysis.
If you need help with your website’s SEO strategy, have our professionals at Binary Ideas help you.
Binary Ideas: An Expert in SEO Marketing and Local SEO
When it comes to improving your online visibility in search engines, our team at Binary Ideas is ready to help you. We are well-equipped with the latest strategies in SEO marketing and always up-to-date on the latest reforms and changes in search engine ranking factors.
You can guarantee that we will work with you in ensuring your business becomes visible on relevant keyword searches and ultimately increase your website’s traffic in the process. This will, in turn, get you more clients and increase your revenue.
Work with our team today by getting in touch with us via email or hotline. Contact us to know more about digital marketing in Fairfax Virginia.
