Semalt Advice On How To Perform SWOT Analysis For Your SEO



SWOT analysis is a term you must have come across when analyzing your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in search. As marketers, you are constantly on your toes for SEO initiatives that have a never-ending list of on-site and off-site optimization tactics and tasks performed based on an overwhelming amount of data.

With the limited resources at your disposal, it is important that you focus your attention only on those items with the potential to provide big returns on your investment. One way to narrow down the list of things you should do to the most important is by conducting a SWOT analysis of your web presence. A SWOT analysis identifies areas of priority from keywords to content, and so on. Conducting a comprehensive SWOT for SEO draws a vivid roadmap that points you in the right direction of how critical tasks can be systematically tackled. 

While Keyword research is an ongoing activity, we can conduct a SWOT analysis on just keywords. Doing this helps us have a broader SEO view assuming the analysis, in this case, is based on a well-defined set of target keywords. 

Figuring Out Your SEO Strengths

One factor search engines use to determine your organic search visibility is your strength and authority on a specific topic or group of keywords. It identifies those keywords for which you have already gained some level of authority in the eyes of its users, which leads us to the conclusion that your momentum is an excellent area to focus your attention. 

Becoming the authority on a specific subject is becoming more difficult to attain, and it takes time to establish, so why not build on what you already have? When you set out to build on your strengths, the first question you should ask, should be: "What contents do I currently have that ranks well for my primary keywords?" Here, ranking well isn't always the webpage that appears on the first, second or third page of SERP. It could be the webpages that rank in the first 20 pages of SERP. 

You recognize where you have existing strengths and leverage them in one of three ways: 
  1. Look for new opportunities to link out to or from the best contents on your site. Doing that can dual benefits for your SEO effort as it reinforces your strong content while providing more comprehensive answers to a wider variety of questions your audience might have. It also piggybacks on the authority of the strong piece. 
  2. Perform full-page keyword, link, and technical audits on all the webpages that rank between the 5th and the 20th SERP pages. After the audit, we can identify areas where improvements can be made. 
  3. We Determine if the "right" landing pages are ranking for the right keywords. Sometimes a page can be ranking for the wrong or unintended keyword. While it may be great to have your landing pages rank for several of your keywords, you are likely to have fewer conversions because it isn't optimal, and visitors will have to keep clicking and searching to find the answers they need. Instead, we determine which of your webpages provides the best answer and optimize it to usurp the position currently occupied by the homepage. 
We are careful in paying attention to the types and characteristics of your strongest content as they indicate the most suitable type of content to create moving on. For example, if you have videos that are performing well on YouTube and Google, we create more videos. If your content gets pushed down on SERP by blog posts, we create and publish more blog posts. 

Knowing Your Weaknesses

Knowing your strengths alone isn't enough; you also need to figure out your search weaknesses. Every website has weaknesses, and when it comes to SEO, it is important that we recognize them early so we can save you a great deal of time, effort, and money. 

Keywords And Content

While there are essential keyword groups, there are also groups of keywords that require too much time and effort. It is important to let go of such keyword groups. Generally, a quick review of SERP results will indicate the keywords that are out of your reach based on the size, age, reputation, and quality of content. In this case, it may be necessary to rely on specific long-tail keywords as an alternative. Another solution will be to consider other methods of generating visibility, conversions, and traffic, such as PPC. 

Technical SEO

Another common area of weakness that can be easily rectified may be the quality of the content on your webpages. This varies from keyword relevance, depth perspective, and technical / structural factors. As we begin discovering the areas of weakness on your website, we start by conducting an audit. One of the tools we use in conducting an audit is Google Lighthouse. It provides a prioritized list of issues and errors found in webpages, links, codes, tags, keywords, and several other areas. 

As stated above, we start by fixing any issues found on the pages with the highest level of authority based on search engine results. Once we've perfected these webpages, we can proceed to other priority web pages based on their strategic importance. 

Backlinks

Backlinks that are obtained organically and are of high quality are still very important ranking factors. They can do a lot in enhancing the authority of the site to which they are linked. Like keyword research, several third-party tools are great in showing the status of where we should maintain backlinks. 

These tools also provide valuable insights on the backlink sources of your strongest competitors. When possible, we can reach out and obtain links from those sources. 

Capitalizing On Your SEO Opportunities

For those who know where and what to look for, there are several SEO opportunities. 

Keywords And Content  

Tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs offer web experts the opportunity to discover top-ranking keywords and contents. They also help us discover content gaps that may have been causing us to lose out on a great deal of traffic. These tools can also create a prioritized list of high-value keywords based on the estimated monthly search volumes, relative competition, and organic traffic. It answers one of the most important questions you have ravaging your mind: "What high-value keyword is my competition ranking for that I'm not?"

Part of this analysis includes considering the level of effort needed to achieve a higher authority status relative to the potential returns or benefits of establishing organic visibility. It is important that we analyze if that opportunity is worthwhile. 

Another method of discovering keyword and content gaps is by auditing your competitors' sites. We spend time studying their primary pages and observe their use of keywords and how they use those keywords in their title tags, and headings. Also observer their internal linking structure. While doing this, we avoid their mistakes and follow the best SEO practices when implementing these new discoveries on your site. 

High-Quality Backlinks

There are three primary sources we rely on when we need to get quality inbound links: 
  1. Search engine results for our target keywords. The websites that top SERP for our primary keywords are the natural starting point as these websites are not only relevant to the search engine but are also related to your webpages. The sites ranking ahead of yours do so probably because they have a higher authority which can benefit you if you get a link from them. We look for any non-competitive backlink opportunity such as directories, association listing, or even blogs and articles to comment on. 
  2. Google Search Console Links Report. This is the next best place to visit for backlink research as it indicates what google considers of the domains linking to your content. Here, we can validate the accuracy and quality of the links currently sending traffic to your site. We can also use this too to vet other promising opportunities to obtain links from these same domains. 
  3. As mentioned under weaknesses, we use several backlink tools to identify promising backlink sources where you can find links to your competition. Some of these tools take it a step further by ranking the authority of links and prioritizing the value of each one and the potential source, which saves us a lot of time. 

Knowing What Threatens Your Dominance In Search

There are some things or actions you can take that will threaten your organic authority to search engine bots. These actions could be intentional or a mistake but may land you in danger and potentially damaging penalties. Our audit fishes out these threats and neutralizes them before they can cause significant or irreversible damage. 

Conclusion

Having your SEO SWOT analysis and data in hand, we can get working on fixing the issues that limit your site. We can also take advantage of the newly found opportunities to build your authority and advance your organic visibility. This will no doubt drive in more traffic and revenue to your brand. 

That is why we advise our clients to conduct SWOT on a quarterly or semi-annual basic to measure success and fish out any issue that exists.