SWOT analysis stands for checking out the strengths and weaknesses of your SEO strategy and identifying the threats and opportunities connected to it. This detailed analysis helps you find out the loopholes within the strategy and compare it with the strategy used by the competitor. It benchmarks the performance of the currently employed SEO strategy and compares it with the success of the strategies the competitors devised.
What is SWOT Analysis?
SWOT analysis comprises four components: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It is basically an examination of how well your SEO strategy is working. Alongside this, it lets you have a good review of the market and check out the competitors’ performance compared to your own! It is a great view of monitoring the performance of your SEO activities.
Simply put, the main purpose of performing an SEO analysis is to identify and analyze the internal and external factors contributing to the success or failure of a strategy.
Accessing Competitors Using SWOT
Source: Metranomic
SWOT analysis is a great way to access the competitors and identify areas of improvement. Some ways through which you can do for yourself are as follows:
Find out Competitor’s Strengths
First things first, check out who is your competitor and make a list of them. The list should include the competing websites that are getting high ranks on SERPs. Alongside this, you must check out the website that offers the most enthralling views and images. Finding out the competitors’ strengths that help them get the highest traffic in the business will open new doors of awareness for you and your marketing team.
If you are new to the business and are developing the website, you might be confused about who your competitors are. In such a situation, you can use various available tools to search for competitors working in similar businesses. From niche players to game changers, you need to know about their positive points or strengths.
Check out Competitor Weaknesses
Once you know your competitor’s weaknesses, you can capitalize on them easily. At times, you will really have to look deep into the website to find out the weakness. Initially, you may not even be able to find it. However, every website has at least one weakness, and you need to find it out!
If you spot the weaknesses efficiently, you could work on those points on your own website. They could include broken links, doubled meta descriptions, or even duplicate pages.
Put an Eye on Competitor’s Opportunities
Now is the crucial point! If you can spot the opportunities, you will be able to locate the gaps in the market. By doing that, you can efficiently fill those gaps and have an edge over the competitor.
For instance, there could be the latest content that your competitor may have overlooked working on. If you spot that, work on it immediately, and it will help you capitalize on the opportunity before your competitor.
Or, there could be some target KWs that are missed by your competitor as well as you. Spot them and use them to reap the benefits of this efficiency.
This is the best way to kill the competition and go ahead of the competitor in the market. Also, this will bring organic traffic to your website, making you more successful than others.
Competitor’s Threats
The threat is a possible hurdle that affects performance. As you and the competitor are working in the same market, anything that threatens your competitor would also be a threat to your business.
While working on SEO, your competitor’s main threats include Google Algorithm Updates, Spammy backlinks, and even spam content. The thing is, once you identify these threats, you should work on them before your competitor gets a chance to do so!
Why SEO Competitive Analysis is Important?
Source: Gameplanfi.com
SEO competitive analysis is important if you want to excel in the market and bring maximum organic traffic to your website. It also enlightens you about your competitors in the market, which you wouldn’t have probably bothered to learn about had it not been for the SEO competitive analysis.
With the help of this SWOT analysis, you also learn about the gap in the market and filling it up helps you enhance your market share to a greater level.
How to Do Competitor SWOT Analysis in Detail?
A lot of website owners are confused about how to do Competitor Analysis. If you are one of them, don’t worry; this article enlists all the steps involved in this process.
Find Out Your Organic Competitors?
The first step in the SWOT analysis is finding your organic competitors. When it comes to bringing organic traffic to your website, you need to see which other websites are posting similar content. It’s a war to fetch the clients using the same kind of content.
Put, after comprehensive keyword research, you choose some compelling KWs and use them in the content. Websites that use similar KWs are the ones that become your organic competitors. Finding them and picking them out is necessary for you to rule the market!
The process of finding organic competitors is simple! All you need to do is Google the top KWs you are looking forward to using in your content and check out the top ten websites shown on SERPs. These are the organic competitors that are basically competing against you for the same KWs.
Deciding Who Not to Compete With
While composing a plan of action for the future, you must act smart. You don’t need to spend your time and effort on actions that offer no value to you! Hence, you need to pinpoint the main competitors you need to focus on and skip others. It will save you a lot of time and energy, making the entire process extremely efficient for you.
It’s completely your choice whether you want to compete with the big market players or pick easier targets!
Analyze Your Competitor’s Top Pages
This step requires analyzing your competitors‘ top pages and seeing what works so well for them. The website’s top pages give away a lot regarding the SEO strategy used by your competitors. Check out the average monthly visits on these pages, the traffic sources and demography, and the pageviews.
Find Keyword Gaps
The ‘Keyword Gap’ measures the discrepancy between your keywords and those of your competitors. You can compare the keywords you rank for with those your competitors rank for with most keyword research tools.
When examining keyword gaps, you’ll usually use a keyword research tool to find the keywords your competitors rank for and select the ones you think are the best ones.
Identify Strengths and Weaknesses.
Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor will let you know of its and your prospects in the market.
Authority
An important ranking metric for websites is their authority, also called domain authority (DA). MOZ, a software development company, brought forward this concept and has become a prominent part of website SWOT analysis. As a matter of fact, identifying the authority gives you a clear picture of the competition and lets you know the exact prospects.
Content
The content of the website matters quite a lot. If there is spamming of the content, or it showcases some loopholes, it may showcase the weakness of the competitor’s website. However, if the content is top-notch and is presented quite well, you can consider it its biggest strength, which you need to tackle.
Technical SEO
A technical SEO strategy involves optimizing your website and server to make your website more search engine spider friendly. Essentially, it is the process of making a website compatible with the technical requirements of modern search engines to improve organic search engine rankings. Website architecture, crawling, indexing, and rendering are important aspects of technical SEO.
This could be your competitor’s weakness or the sole reason it’s gaining so much organic traffic!
Mobile Responsiveness and Friendliness
In case your competitor’s website opens swiftly on the phone and showcases a super user-friendly interface, it will be a successful site even in the future. However, the case can be taken vice versa as well!
Internal Linking Issues
Internal linking will be helpful in bringing some organic traffic to the web pages. The links on your website direct the readers to specific pages. The link leads from one domain page to another, letting the user navigate through the entire website efficiently.
Lost and decline of Keyword Rankings
Loss or decline of the keyword ranking is the major threat to the competitor, which you can capitalize on for your success. Google rankings can be affected by a variety of factors. Our most common explanation for drops in SERP ranking is a change made to the website. Still, they can also be caused by an algorithm update, technical issues, improvements competitors made, changes to the SERP layout, or a penalty from Google.
Analysis on Page by Page Basis
Each page of your competitor’s website opens new secrets of its successful SEO strategy to you. Simply analyzing the top pages of the websites is not enough. Rather, you need to opt for analysis on a page-by-page basis as it would help you in tweaking your own SEO strategy efficiently.
Backlinks Analysis
Analyzing backlinks on a website is a comprehensive process to analyze a site’s performance and identify the sort of issues that could adversely affect its ranking in search engines. Once this analysis is made extensively, you can easily identify all the quality backlinks that will help you kill the competition in the market.
Final Thoughts
Competitor SWOT Analysis is a great way to identify your exact competitors in the market, analyze their SEO strategy and check out their prospects. A comprehensive plan of action in this regard will help you defeat competitors in the same market and let you divert all the organic traffic toward your website. By considering the results of this detailed analysis, you could devise an entirely new SEO strategy for your website, which will give you better results!
