Discover how to prioritize SEO activities for better authority, organic visibility, traffic, and conversion using the well-known SWOT paradigm. The majority of businesses must gather and analyze a sizable amount of keyword, content, analytics, and competitive data to create a successful SEO (search engine optimization) plan.
When prioritizing keyword, content, structural, and/or linking duties to fix problems or increase already-existing organic search authority, SEO specialists must use this data.
The SWOT framework is a well-known strategy of prioritization that works well for aiding in helping to focus attention and frequently maximize limited SEO and marketing resources.
By definition, a SWOT analysis is intended to help identify factors that pose the greatest threat to growth.
The breakdown of organizational SEO priorities that follows presupposes that keyword research has already been completed and is being used for the website, SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and competitive data the cornerstone of a successful SWOT analysis.
Often, keyword research alone is worthy of its SWOT analysis.
Strengths
An organization’s relative strength and authority for a topical collection of keywords are one of the important elements search engines use when assessing your organic search visibility. A great area to start focusing your attention is on the keywords for which the company already has some authority, or as some like to call “momentum” in the eyes of the search engines.
Why not build on what you currently have the authority is typically hard to come by and takes effort to acquire. What material do I have that ranks highly in the search engines say, let’s in the top 20 results—for my main keyword groups? should be your initial inquiry.
Identifying your areas of strength can be used in one of three ways:
- Find opportunities to connect to or from your best content by keeping an eye out for them. By linking to in-depth responses to your audience’s inquiries, you may strengthen your original piece of content while also drawing on the authority of the most authoritative item.
- All pages that fall between positions five and twenty should undergo full-page keyword, technical, and link audits to determine where enhancements may be made to help them rise in the SERPs. This could entail updating links to more recent or pertinent sources or changing title tags and headings.
- Check to see if the “correct” landing pages are ranked for the search terms you wish to appear for. Having your site appear in search results for multiple of your keywords may seem amazing, but this is not the best situation.
Searchers who arrive on your homepage looking for a certain result will have to click more times or conduct further searches to get the precise response to their query. Determine which of your pages offer solutions, and concentrate on getting those pages to usurp the homepage’s present dominance.
It’s time to construct these pages if you find out they don’t already exist. As you plan your future content creation, pay close attention to the categories and traits of your best-performing pieces. For instance, by all means, make more videos if your current ones are performing well on Google and/or YouTube.
If long-form blog entries frequently appear at the top of search results for your main keywords, this is a sign that you should continue publishing and disseminating them.
Weaknesses
We all have our areas of weakness, and when it comes to SEO, being aware of them and accepting them early on can help us avoid wasting a lot of effort, time, money, and potential clients.
Keywords And Content
It’s crucial to let go of keyword groupings that will take too much time and/or effort to create authority for, even though there are probably some for which we feel we must be found. A simple scan of the search engine results will typically show you which keywords are unattainable given your rivals’ size, experience, standing, and caliber of material.
In this situation, considering other options (including paid) to increase exposure, traffic, and conversions may be important, as well as looking at more precise long-tail and intent-driven keyword alternatives. The wisest course of action will occasionally be to use supplementary paid search strategies while you build your organic search authority.
Technical Audit
The quality of your website and content from a technical/structural, keyword relevance, or depth standpoint may be another area of weakness that you may more easily control.
By carrying out an SEO audit, you may start identifying weak points.
The Core Web Vitals Report and Mobile-Friendly Test in Search Console and Google Lighthouse, two excellent free and paid tools, will provide a prioritized list of problems and/or errors found in the title and heading tags, internal and external links, website code, keyword usage/density, and a variety of mobile-friendly factors.
As was mentioned before, you should concentrate your efforts on and address any problems on the pages for which you already have some authority based on search engine rankings.
The odds of these pages rising in the SERPs can only be increased by optimizing them.
Based on website analytics information or their strategic value, you can move on to other important web pages.
Opportunities
Opportunities abound in SEO for those who know where to look, how to look, and take the time to look. Moving from one opportunity to the next is essentially what SEO is all about. Once a certain set of keywords or pieces of content have undergone optimization and been declared effective, it is time to move on to the next subject where authority can be built or strengthened.
Keywords and Content
When you enter your website’s name, the domains of your known competitors, or a specific set of keywords, several keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and others can find keyword and content opportunities or gaps.
Based on predicted monthly search volumes, organic traffic, and/or relative competition, the majority offer prioritized lists of potentially valuable phrases.
In other words: For which valuable keywords do your rivals rank that you do not? Similar to the Weaknesses listed above, part of this study should take into account the amount of work necessary to create authority concerning the potential return on doing so.
Is this a good opportunity?
Conducting a reverse website audit on the websites of competitors is a more labor-intensive method for finding keyword and content opportunities.
Alternately, take some time to just examine the principal pages of your top rivals, paying close attention to the keywords utilized in the title tags, headings, and internal link anchor text.
Content Refresh
The option to update successful or complementary content is another possibility inside an online presence. Find older content that is ranking for goal keywords or supporting other main content pages by first scanning the SERPs using a favorite keyword tool. Review the content after that to determine if there are any areas where text, graphics, internal or external links, or any other elements, might be updated. There might be a chance to improve the piece by producing and including photographs or videos.
Finally, re-share this content through the proper networks. You may even think about finding new outlets because a piece of previously successful content would probably succeed again. A wonderful opportunity to establish authority exists in existing content, often with little more than a little extra work.
Threats
Numerous actions, whether deliberate or not, might jeopardize organic authority in the eyes of search engines and should be prioritized to avoid potentially harmful penalties.
Content
Duplicate content which, as its name implies, is content repurposed on a website without proper attribution to the source is the main content problem that most people are aware of. By referencing the source content in the headers of the pages that include the duplicate content, you must include rel canonical tags to prevent being penalized for employing this kind of information. In other words, as long as the source is acknowledged, it’s acceptable to have some duplicate information on a website.
Backlinks
While relevant, high-quality backlinks can increase your authority, irrelevant, low-quality inbound links from questionable websites (especially those that are a part of bought link schemes) can be detrimental over time and may even result in a manual penalty. A possible loss of organic visibility and traffic is the danger in this situation.
Additionally, recovering from a manual penalty is a difficult and prolonged procedure. Simply put, you have to avoid paying for backlinks and make sure that any links you obtain were not acquired on your behalf by a third party, such as a marketing firm.