Every business owner and company boss will know the importance of carrying out a SWOT analysis for any new product they might be launching or a new campaign they might be starting. A SWOT analysis can also be very good for starting a SEO campaign when you are in the planning and early stages, as a really good SWOT analysis can be used to set down some really useful guidelines and input for the new campaign.
So, what does SWOT mean or stand for?
S = Strengths – This is a list of the strengths or areas that you identify as key points that your website is strong regarding.
W = Weaknesses – This can be quite hard but you have to be honest to yourself and write down the weaknesses that you feel the website or company may well have. This is important as it can then allow you to spot these in the early days and try to eliminate any weakness you might have.
O = Opportunities – What opportunities do you think your website has compared to your major competitors. Do you have much better SEO? Can you organise CPC in a much more efficient way? It is vital to make sure you spot the opportunities that you feel your website is opening up.
T = Threats – Look at your major rivals and work out how they threaten you. It might be due to the website age, or maybe they have a much better web design than you. By looking at the threats you can make sure your website takes these into consideration allowing you to make sure you can also be as good.
A SWOT analysis can be used for an SEO campaign; in fact, it is a really good idea to look at doing one for any new campaign that you may be beginning for your new website or re-launched company offering. The analysis you will walk away with after completing one of these simple and quick studies can be imperative to helping you plan a medium to long term campaign to focus your SEO efforts in more efficient and worthwhile manner.
Let’s take a new website we might be setting up which will be selling toys and games for children. The trouble is, there are a few major competitors already in the market, but luckily, we know that most of them are not using SEO to their advantage, have badly optimised sites and do not quite understand how to efficiently make use of a CPC campaign. We can use a SWOT analysis to have a look at what we need to do and take into consideration when it comes to our SEO campaign and how we need to go about things to make it work.
When we have finished, our SWOT analysis would look like something below.
Strengths – Fully optimised website, Good knowledge of CPC, Different product ranges, Ecommerce website, Own control of discounts, Will be implementing SEO campaigns, Know how to use Social Media
Weaknesses – New website which will rank lower for the big keywords, less available stock due to a low start up budget, no real market share at the beginning, Less pages on the site due to less products, No back links due to new website
Opportunities – Most competitors have poorly optimised websites, The majority of the other companies do not use CPC efficiently, Most have not committed to any SEO campaigns,
Threats – Large competitors who have been around for years will initially index much stronger, Competitors able to have lower prices due the market share, Competitors able to control the prices of most goods,
So, by looking at all of the information we have gathered above, we can really begin to identify the areas that we need to build in to our SEO campaign. A quick SWOT analysis might only take you half an hour or so, but if you can use this to help put procedures in place and identify key areas you need to focus on or improve upon, it can really help when starting a SEO campaign for any new or existing website.
