Combining Business Assets and Historical Data to Conduct SEO/Website SWOT Analysis

A classic staple of business school is the SWOT analysis—identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats faced by a business or project. As we saw in Chapter 3, by combining data from your business asset assessment and historical tracking data (and visitor analytics), you can create some very compelling analyses of your organization and its marketplace.

Identifying strengths is typically one of the easier objectives:

  • What sources of traffic are working well for your site/business?

  • Which projects/properties/partnerships are driving positive momentum toward traffic/revenue goals?

  • Which of your content sections/types produces high traffic and ROI?

  • What changes have you made historically that produced significant value?

Determining the weaknesses can be tougher (and takes more intellectual honesty and courage):

  • What content is currently driving low levels of search/visitor traffic?

  • Which changes that were intended to produce positive results have shown little/no value?

  • Which traffic sources are underperforming or underdelivering?

  • What projects/properties/partnerships are being leveraged poorly?

Parsing opportunities requires a combination of strength and weakness analysis. You want to find areas that are doing well but have room to expand, as well as those that have yet to be explored:

  • What brainstormed but undeveloped or untested projects/ideas can have a significant, positive impact?

  • What traffic sources currently sending good-quality traffic could be expanded to provide more value?

  • What areas of weakness have direct paths to recovery?

  • Which website changes have had positive results? Can these be applied more rigorously or to other areas for increased benefit?

  • What new markets or new content areas are potentially viable/valuable for expansion?

  • What sources of new content/new links have yet to be tapped?

Determining threats can be the most challenging of the tasks. You’ll need to combine creative thinking with an honest assessment of your weaknesses and your competitors’ strengths, and consider the possibilities of macro-events that could shape your website/company’s future:

  • In your areas of weakness, which players in your market (or other, similar markets) are strong? How have they accomplished this?

  • What shifts in human behavior, web usage, or market conditions could dramatically impact your business/site? (For example, consider the “what if people stopped searching and instead navigated the Web in different ways” perspective. It is a bit “pie in the sky,” but we have already seen Expedia partially destroy the travel agency business, Craigslist make classifieds obsolete, and Facebook start to take advertising market share from the search engines.)

  • Which competitors have had the most success in your arena? How have they accomplished this? Where do they intersect with your business/customers?

  • Are there any strategies implemented by start-ups in similar businesses that have had massive success in a particular arena that could be dangerous to your business if they were replicated in your market?

Conducting SWOT analysis from a web marketing and SEO perspective is certainly one of the most valuable first steps you can take as an organization poised to expend resources. If you haven’t taken the time to analyze the landscape from these bird’s-eye-view perspectives, you might end up like a great runner who’s simply gone off the course—sure, you’ll finish fast, but where will it take you?

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