SWOT Analyses for SEO (SWOT the Competition)
Photo Credit: Raul Valdez / runhmc on flickr.com.The SWOT analysis is a (rather old-school) method for strategic planning. It can be used to analyze a new business venture, a particular marketing move, or positioning relative to a competitor.
The SWOT analysis can also be used to drive a search optimization effort. I use this technique in order to compare the optimization efforts of my competitors to my own, focusing my efforts on their areas of weakness.
A Shot of SWOT:
SWOT analyses require a predetermined objective which will be analyzed with regards to internal and external factors. Given this objective, factors are identified and categorized:
- Strengths: Internal factors supporting the objective.
- Weaknesses: Internal factors compromising the objective.
- Opportunities: External factors supporting the objective.
- Threats: External factors supporting the objective.
It should be clear how this information, when well organized can provide a substantial jumping-off point for your SEO effort. By targeting you most direct and most visible competitors, you will gain a better understanding not only of the "low-hanging fruit" opportunities your competitors might have left open, but also of inherent strengths within your own site that you may have overlooked.
SWOT Analysis for SEO, an example:
Remember Strengths and Weaknesses are internal, while Opportunities and Threats refer to external factors.
- Strengths: High-social media penetration; Organic KWs well-targeted for market, PPC KWs less competitive.
- Weaknesses: Young domain age; Limited on-site content depth.
- Opportunities: Competitor only targets highly sought-after KWs; Limited social-media involvement; High-traffic, low conversion rate.
- Threats: Competitor dominates most competitive organic KWs, out-bids us for PPC; Competitor has "authority" status and content, receives backlinks as a "resource" to our market.
Put it To Work:
Presented with the competitive relationship above, between my site and one of my competitors, what do I take away?
- We have a good presence in SM, our competitor has little. The competitor has backlinks based on authority. We should work to carry over the success in SM to popularity among bloggers and SM opinion leaders. Provide top-quality content in a new media venue.
- Our KWs targeting organic search work well for our market, but yield less traffic than competitor's best KWs. We must optimize our content for conversions, or else take some of the competitor's competitive search market share through optimization for rank.
- Competitor outbids us for top PPC KWs, we focus on "value" keywords. We have the cost advantage per click-through over the competitor. What can we do for our potential customers with that savings?
- We have comparitively limited content depth on our site. Create a blog, generate target-market relevant content, help our market solve problems related to our industry. Cross-pollinate content by inviting guest blog posts on relevant topics, and sharing out expertise with other outlets.
Just as many competitive factors can be identified, many actionable plans can be decided upon from a given competitive relationship and resulting SWOT analysis. Through creative and critical thinking you can create effective plans to help you position your site competitively even against well-established "authorities."
I welcome your comments, opinions, and questions below, or you can email me at ben@checkpageranknow.com. While you're here, why not also check out our free SEO tools.
posted by Ben Weller at
1:00 PM
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