What is SWOT Analysis and How to do it?

Business owners can use SWOT Analysis techniques to analyze their business in relation to their competitors and marketplace as a whole.

SWOT stands for?

•  Strengths

•  Weaknesses

•  Opportunities

•  Threats

Strengths – are generally capabilities in the organization which provide an advantage in market.

Weakness – are generally capabilities in the organization which cause a disadvantage in the market.

Opportunities – are actions the organization could take to create an advantage in the market.

Threats – usually are activities which could take place within the environment and cause the organization to be disadvantaged.

The first two points Strengths and Weakness focus primarily on the internal areas of the organization. The last two points Opportunities and Threats focus primary on how the organization might be affected by external events.

A SWOT Analysis is applied to a company and it used to prescribe high level strategy to achieve a company’s objectives. These objectives can be profit or growth.

 

So… 

Well…the right SEO strategy for company is difficult. In my personal experience most of the clients come to us with an expectation which looks something like this:

“Grow our company sales via non pay traffic from A to B.”

There are so many ways one might go about doing that – right? Do you focus on head terms or long tail keywords? Do you really need links to improve rankings of keywords? Or is it the site’s poor architecture demritorious the chances? Has the site ever been penalized?

Who can stop you to achieving your targets? Competitor activity? Algorithm updates? What are Google up to? Have your competitor’s leap into your vertical.

Well, a SWOT Analysis may just help.

Added Advantages 

You’re presenting something in a familiar, easily formatted, I don’t like a long document – long documents don’t get read and even if they read people can leave thinking, but how does this all fit together? What are we actually doing? 

You’re forced to be different and make recommendations that will work for that specific company,

rather than taking the general terms.

Sample SWOT Analysis for SEO 

OK – Let’s start. I am going to do SWOT Analysis for fictitious site.

Factors (Internal)

Strengths

• They look and sounds like a brand

• Clean Backlinks profile

• Strong on Social Media

• Already creating some content via blog.

Weakness

• Poor on page SEO, bad keywords targeting

• Low rate of conversions

• Little in the way of ‘link-worthy’ content

• No PR or outreach resource

Factors (External) 

Opportunities

• Improve On Page SEO and keyword targeting
• Conversion rate optimization
• Create more shareable and link worthy content
• Train in-house PR / Outreach team

Threats

• Competitor’s with higher page
• Algorithmic update (NB unlikely to cause problem) 

So, where we are going with this?

The aim of this analysis is to turn around weakness, change strengths into opportunities and neutralize threats wherever you can. You can see that opportunities can nearly be translated into tactics which will help them achieve the goals.

•  Improving On-Page SEO and keyword targeting will likely win them some long tail traffic

• Conversion rate optimization will help them get more sales from the traffic they get.

• Creating more ‘shareable’ content will help them to grow their social following, thus     furthering their reach and generating traffic.

•  PR / Outreach resource (whether Internal or External) combined with the shareable content will help build domain strength and enable them to increase search visibility. Whilst this won’t neutralize the threat of their stronger competitors in the short term, over time they’ll begin to catch up.

Obviously, that example might not be quite relevant to your own situation, but hopefully you can see how you might utilize it for your own site’s or your client’s site.

Important points 

It seems only right and proper that I should highlight that the SWOT technique (like many other techniques) does of course have its detectors. 

It’s also probably important to note that I am definitely ‘bending’ SWOT analysis into a framework that suits my own purpose. A true SWOT analysis should look at all channels to market – not just SEO.

Furthermore it’s entirely conceivable that in some circumstances your SWOT analysis might be lead you to conclude that actually, organic search isn’t appropriate route to market. For example if Google’s leaping into your vertical in a big way and / or if you’ve strong, well-established competitor’s with bigger budgets you might not be able to compete in any meaningful way.

And so dear readers – over to you, do you already use SWOT Analysis for SEO / Online Marketing? Find it useful? Or do you use other techniques? Do let me know via comments.