Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

The first and most integral part of any SEO campaign is keyword research. I’ve outlined some of the tools that I’ve used and continue to use previously (AdGooroo, Google Keywords, Facebook Lexicon, Google Suggest, etc. ) so I won’t go into detail here, but once you’ve selected a preliminary keyword list, the next step is to evaluate how you and your competitors stack up against that list. Here’s where the traditional SWOT analysis comes in. In case you’re unfamiliar with SWOT, it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It’s a great way to evaluate the value you bring to market, as well as your competitors. It also provides insights into possible issues with your campaign or future issues you may encounter. So let’s get into it.

Strengths:

• What content on your site matches up well against your keyword list?
  • Ideally, you’ll have a low page to keyword count (one keyword to one page of content)
• How in-depth is your content base when compared with the top competitors in this space?
  • The key here is not simply volume of content, but also value of the content. Is it unique to your vertical? Is it something unique to the web?
• Are there large portions of your website that don’t match up with your keyword list?
  • If so, are you speaking to your users needs/wants or is your keyword list too narrow to cover everything on your site?

Weaknesses:

• What keywords do you currently lack content for?
  • Who is responsible for generating this content and how quickly can it be created?
• Is there content you can modify to match your keyword list or do you need to create entirely new pages?
  • Again, who can and will do this?
• How do you compare to competitors in this space?

Opportunities:

• Do you have a large repository of content that is in digital format, but not currently on your website?
  • You can host it from your site, as well as sharing the wealth in the social sphere (YouTube, Vimeo, SlideShare, DocStoc, etc.)
• Do you have large amounts of audio, video, documents, pdfs, or images that are currently not optimized to their full potential?
  • Google Universal search loves all forms of content, as long as it has a reference point.
• Do you have any content partners whom could “share the wealth” of content?
  • If you can’t write the content, perhaps you can beg, borrow, or buy your way to new content.

Threats:

• What are the biggest knowledge gaps that exist between your content base and your keyword list, when compared to your competition?
  • Is someone in your vertical dominating one topic area or another? The larger the content base and the more established it is, the longer your efforts will take.
• If your competition decided to start doing SEO tomorrow, how would it effect your results?
  • Mitigate the risk. Assume the worst.
• Are you diverse enough in your keyword list that even if you lose one keyword, your other keywords can make up for the lost traffic?
  • Unless your name is Amazon or eBay, you’re best served with diversification.
• If search engines (specifically Google) changes their algorithm tomorrow, is your content platform robust enough to compensate?
  • (i.e. it won’t take you 6 months to rebuild the platform)

I know this is a lot to digest, but if your SEO campaign is going to have long term success, these are questions you are going to have to answer sooner or later. Have any other points you’d like me to add? Just drop them in the comments and I’ll credit accordingly.

image courtesy of ntrung