Google has come a long way since the advent of its PageRank algorithm.
The fundamentals of PageRank still exist.
However, the good ol’ days ofassigning numerical weights to sites based off the number of nodes (or links) pointing to it is a thing of the past.
It’s since grown into a much more complicated mathematical formula.
As a result, SEO marketing experts need to look beyond the myopic strategy of only building links.
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By now, most SEO experts know that Google loves to readjust the 200 ranking factors that determine its own search results.
So much so that, according to Moz, Google emphatically reconfigures those factors up to600 times per year.
With increasingly competitive SERPs comprised of constant PageRank tweaks,multifaceted featured snippets, and mobile first indexing, one question probably comes to mind:
“How can I ensure my site remains competitive?”
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That’s where we can help.
In this article, we’ll be providing insight into creating an SEO marketing strategy that truly works.
We’ll discuss the importance of SWOT analysis for SEO.
This entails defining SWOT analysis, discussing its purpose, exploring SWOT opportunities, and explaining how SEO and SWOT marketing are interconnected.
What is SWOT Analysis?
One of the best sources for formulating SEO marketing strategies comes from basic marketing principles rooted inacademic research.
You’re likely auditing your current SEO strategy in preparation for Q1 2019.
If that’s the case, you should start with a SWOT analysis.
SWOT is a dynamic framework used for strategic planning that examines internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats – thus the name, SWOT!
Essentially, a business SWOT analysis determines what your organization can and cannot do based on factors both internal and external.
This can assist with strategic planning, goal-setting, and visualizing new opportunities.
Similarly, you can do a SWOT competitor analysis to investigate potential weaknesses of others in your industry.
What Does a Business SWOT Analysis for SEO Take Into Account?
Visually, a SWOT framework consists of a simple matrix.
The top row examines strengths and weaknesses, which are internal factors.
The bottom row examines opportunities and threats, which are external factors.
A good example of an external factor that would impact your business’ SEO would be a Google algorithm update.
Keep in mind that determining your external factors often requires a bit more time and secondary research.
While business SWOT analysis tends to be more applicable for overall strategic planning.
Back to Basics: Applying SWOT to Your SEO Marketing
To effectively use SWOT analysis as an SEO marketing tool, you should begin by getting a holistic overview of your company’s product positioning and current strategic objectives.
Creating a brief case study on your company can go a long way, since it shows how each of your channels plays a part in your broader marketing mix.
Keep your current marketing objectives in mind.
And then, dive into the internal factors from an SEO perspective.
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How to Evaluate Your SEO Marketing Strengths and Weaknesses
Addressing the strengths and weaknesses of your SEO marketing strategy should involve evaluating your brand’s:
Technical site health
Content strategy
Keyword rankings
Link building initiatives
But don’t be afraid to step outside the box and include things like your sites user experience, check-out process, video content, and any featured snippets that appear in search results.
Consider This:
We’ve outlined a few example questions of both strengths and weaknesses for you to ask yourself during the evaluation process:
1) Is your site leveraging tools to improve page speed, such as browser caching and accelerated mobile pages (AMP Pages)?
AMP is an open source project backed by Google to improve page speed and user experience.
4) Do I have a clear and influential call to action on my product and landing pages?
How to Evaluate Your SEO Opportunities and Threats
In accordance with the SWOT analysis procedure, it’s time to take a closer look at your opportunities and threats.
Remember, these should be external to your business.
However, more often than not, SWOT opportunities tend to be an extension of your strengths and weaknesses.
So, I suggest taking the time to flesh out opportunities from the weaknesses you’ve already identified.
Consider This:
Here are a few example questions relating to both opportunities and threats to ask yourself:
1) Do all the pages on my site have unique title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 headers?
If not, this is the perfect time to add more keyword focus to your pages and improve site health.
While seizing the opportunity to create a unique meta description is essential, remember that it won’t always be displayed.
Regardless of this fact, Matt Cutts of Google confirmed that it’s always better to leave meta descriptions blank rather than to have duplicates on your site.
Well, PageRank value is earned when another site links to yours.
So, whichever page on your domain the backlink is pointing to is the one that receives PageRank.
Using internal linking to spread PageRank from the content that’s linked to the most can be a great way to spread this value throughout your site.
Make sure to check the links to your site section of Google Search Console to see what content is being linked to the most often.
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3) What does your competitors content look like?
Spying isn’t always bad.
Understanding what your competitors do well and what you think they can improve upon is a great way to orient your own content strategy.
And this is where a competitor SWOT analysis can really come into play.
Competitors that use more interesting visuals within their content – such as gifs and videos – or use original research to support their blog posts have a better chance of beating you on the SERPs.
4) Are you reaching your maximum PPC potential, or can your competitors target your branded search terms?
Branded search is becoming an increasingly important organic ranking factor.
Thus, make sure your competitors aren’t crowding out your branded PPC ads and stealing traffic in paid search.
If they are, this can reduce the chances of users seeing your brand.
It can even potentially cause your traffic to dip.
Exploiting SWOT Business Opportunities to Maximize Your SEO
The last stage of your SWOT analysis should be identifying a plan of action.
Moreover, your SEO SWOT analysis should help you capitalize on your strengths, address any weaknesses and opportunities, and defend against potential threats.
Your best course of action might be to start identifying what opportunities will take the most amount of time.
Items such as improving internal linking or expanding your guest posting efforts may be time-consuming but also the most worthwhile.
Or, your main takeaway could be that you want to make the most of your strengths.
You may prefer to maintain existing keyword rankings using tools like SERPclix or by expanding the backlink profile of your highest performing pages.
Using SWOT analysis as an SEO marketing tool can be an extremely effective in maximizing your ROM.
Author bio: Armand Ghersin is a marketing junkie and experienced SEO account manager at Taktical Digital. He primarily focuses on link building, technical SEO solutions, and sustainable growth marketing for his clients in the software, legal, and insurance spaces.
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Growth Hack #1 – Free Stuff Sells 82% More Than a Good Deal:
Everyone wants a good deal. But, when deciding to give your customers an offer that’s either a discount/bundle or includes free items, the choice is clear. This A/B test proved what the people want –and increased sales by 82%.
1. A package deal of a cupcake and 2 cookies for $10.
2. A cupcake for $10 + 2 cookies for free.
For the same cost, this study showed that people buy option #2 at a 82% higher rate than #1.
Growth Hack #3 – Turn a Feedback Tool On Your Competition:
The company User Testing offers a chance for real people test your website or product, then get feedback on what they liked and didn’t like. Its the focus group for the 21st century.
But why stop there?
Use usertesting.com on your RIVALS. Find out what they’re doing right and wrong, get inspired, and find opportunities.
This means you only have 25 characters (Facebook’s recommended headline length) to impress someone.
Unbounce exemplifies how simplicity can work for your Facebook ads.
A strong visual keeps viewers engaged without being distracting.
Meanwhile, the 22 character headline is a clear call to action.
The text above falls within Facebook’s suggestions of 90 characters in the body text.
This is just enough to grab the viewer’s attention without going into too much detail.
One of the worst Facebook ad mistakes to make is to say too much in your headline or text.
Doing so can lose customer interest and they’ll end up not clicking through.
They’re either overwhelmed or see no value in clicking through to learn more – they already learned everything they need to know from your ad’s description!
Don’t Make the Mistake of Only Using Static Visuals in Your Facebook Ad
Video marketing is in right now, and video advertising on Facebook is no exception.
When captions aren’t included, CTA clicks fall by 26%.
The duration of the video also matters.
Facebook video ads that are 30 seconds or less are the ideal length.
Videos that are 16-20 seconds in length have been shown to yield the highest conversion rates, and are the most popular length for Facebook marketers.
Using video advertising on Facebook is an excellent way to get greater engagement than just a photo.
Just make sure to avoid classic Facebook ad mistakes that involve overstuffing the video with too much content or making it too long.
As long as you keep it short and sweet, and remember to include captions, Facebook video ads should always have a place in your social media marketing strategy.
Partnering with notable figures in your field helps build trust.
Once a potential customer trusts your brand, they’re more likely to take the next step and hit the CTA of your Facebook ad.
One of the worst Facebook ad mistakes to make is rushing customers through the sales cycle.
If they feel pressured, they’ll be less inclined to click and convert.
Take a look at AdStage’s Facebook ad for an example of how to do influencer marketing right.
They not only mention the influencers they’re highlighting in the caption, but also include visual proof via their headshots.
A photo goes a long way to enhancing the foundation of trust you’re building with consumers via this Facebook ad strategy.
A Failure to Incentivize on Facebook is a Mistake You Can’t Afford to Make
Your Facebook ad needs to provide value to the viewer.
Without seeing value in your product or service, they have no incentive to click through or engage.
Getting caught up in creative, focusing too much on buzzwords, or trying to appeal to every kind of user are all Facebook ad mistakes that detract from building real value.
Instead, consider creating value in your Facebook ad with physical prizes, access to exclusive information, or by solving a customer pain point.
Whatever you decide, be sure you’re incentivizing your audience in some way.
Offering a prize for people as an approach mentioned above is one Facebook best practice to consider.
Survey Monkey did just that by running a promotion that entered users for a chance to win from a suite of prizes.
Their ad avoided some common Facebook mistakes and worked in a few different ways:
Providing enough of a reward: A $300 gift card is enough to entice people to click through and sign up. Depending on what you’re asking people to do, the incentive can be smaller or larger.
Using an image of the reward: It may be a rendering, but the Facebook ad’s visual is enough to let users imagine themselves holding the gift card.
Instilling urgency: The sweepstakes only runs for the month of November. Survey Monkey’s Facebook ad mentions this twice, getting users to act quickly and making the ad more effective.
Running a promotion through Facebook ads gets more Likes, Comments, and Shares for your brand.
It also gets customers excited about any future contests, and makes them more likely to engage in the future.
Discover Your Own Facebook Best Practices
Just remember that there’s no single secret to success in Facebook marketing.
It takes trying a variety of tactics and seeing what resonates with your target audience to figure out the best social media advertising strategy.
Looking to these examples as a guideline for what to do with Facebook ads can help you avoid the worst Facebook ad mistakes.
Then you can figure out how to advertise on Facebook in a way that’s best for your brand.
For over 20 years, Bezos has been providing unparalleled insight into his business.
These newsletters are also a peek into his way of thinking that has led him to build Amazon into the powerhouse it is today.
And when we say Amazon is thriving, we mean it.
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The platform earned $56 billion in revenue in Q3 2018, and it’s in no small part due to Bezos’ gold standard of business management.
Now, we’re sharing the top 5 lessons learned from those newsletters with you.
We combed through those two decades of material in order to pick out the five that we think provide the best business tips and tricks.
Whether you’re a small business or a corporation, this advice can help you succeed.
So get the notepad ready: It’s time to take a page out of Jeff Bezos’ own book.
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Dream Big and Take Risks
In his 2014 newsletter, Bezos discusses a “dreamy business product”:
“A dreamy business product has at least four characteristics. Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time—with the potential to endure for decades. When you find one of these, don’t just swipe right, get married.”
This piece of business advice can be intimidating.
Essentially, it’s describing the perfect product while subliminally saying you should risk everything to get it.
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The Amazon Example
It helps to see how this concept worked in the scheme of Amazon’s business strategy.
Amazon Prime is the perfect example.
Since it was first founded in 2005, Amazon Prime’s core tenant has been providing members with free shipping at a low annual fee.
Even now, free shipping remains the cornerstone of the $99/year annual membership.
However, the idea to offer free shipping came with no solid numbers to support it.
Whatever the department, everyone in your company should be participating in research and development.
R&D – The Amazon Way
Bezos has always emphasized R&D as a major component of the Amazon business strategy.
To attest to this, Amazon spends more than any other U.S. company on R&D.
In 2017, this number was $22.6 billion, an increase of 41% from 2016.
In the words of Bezos from his 2010 newsletter:
“Our architects and engineers have had to advance research in directions that no academic had yet taken. Many of the problems we face have no textbook solutions, and so we — happily — invent new approaches.”
Every single part of Amazon is rooted in a technology that’s often created internally.
According to Bezos in his 2017 newsletter, a positive business culture is the best way to create and maintain high standards.
And high standards are the key to success.
“How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it — it’s a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it.”
It takes a combination of an excellent management strategy, the right recruitment, and effective internal initiatives to create high standards.
The Amazon Definition of High Standards
Bezos boils the management/hiring/internal strategy combination into two concepts that can hinder high standards:
Scope
Recognition
In terms of scope, he is referring to when employees can identify high quality but cannot understand what or how long it takes to reach that level themselves.
When an employee is unable to consider the difficulty of achieving a higher standard, they’ll have greater trouble reaching it.
“To achieve high standards yourself or as part of a team, you need to form and proactively communicate realistic beliefs about how hard something is going to be.”
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Recognition refers to employee understanding of what high quality looks like.
Differentiating between a good job and a bad job is essential for achieving goals.
It’s also a way to create a benchmark for measuring success.
An excellent hiring and management strategy will encourage employees to understand what it takes to reach a higher standard.
Leadership can also help staffers recognize and define quality.
In doing so, your business can continuously create better products for customers while improving internal work culture.
Let Customer Needs Drive Business Decisions
When considering how to run a business, it’s often simple to think about what you’re good at then create a product from that.
This “skills-forward” strategy relies on expertise to drive the momentum of business.
This isn’t always the best method, however.
Take this successful business tip from Bezos himself from his 2008 newsletter:
“The skills-forward approach says, ‘We are really good at X. What else can we do with X?’ That’s a useful and rewarding business approach. However, if used exclusively, the company employing it will never be driven to develop fresh skills.”
When you rely only on an existing skill-set, it inhibits learning innovative and new methods.
As a result, your business’ success can hit a cap as you run out of new ideas.
So instead, consider what your customers want or need.
Then, work backwards to innovate products or services that fulfill this desire.
Leveraging this piece of business advice can open up your organization to product opportunities and expand success into these new directions.
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How Customers Created the Amazon Kindle
When the Amazon Kindle first debuted in 2007, it was the first consumer product from the company.
The concept for the e-reader began with a customer-driven vision, as described by product designer Charlie Tritschler:
“We created that rallying cry of any book from anywhere in the world in 60 seconds or less.”
Bezos led the charge of creating and optimizing the Kindle.
It was his belief that this ease of access was something missing in the publishing industry that customers wanted.
Thus, the Kindle was born from recognizing a customer pain point and working backward to create a product to fill that gap.
By enlisting top talent and launching the Kindle Direct Publishing platform as a complementary product, the Kindle reached immense success.
Now, Amazon commands an 83% share of the e-book market in the U.S.
Following this Amazon business strategy of consumer-driven innovation starts with customer research.
Creating products with customers at top of mind makes it more likely that it will be a hit right from launch.
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Spend Money on Customer Retention
It’s difficult to justify spending money preemptively to build value for customers.
You can’t be sure you’ll see returns – or at what pace they’ll come in.
But, among the best business tips and tricks is the idea of proactively working on your customer retention.
This means building value and pleasing customers by spending more.
Not only will it boost loyalty and attract new consumers, but it’s also a way of getting ahead of the competition.
As Bezos puts it in his 2012 newsletter:
“When we’re at our best, we don’t wait for external pressures. We are internally driven to improve our services, adding benefits and features, before we have to. We lower prices and increase value for customers before we have to. . .invent before we have to.”
Sure, spending is a risk.
But for the sake of customer retention, it’s one that often pays off.
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The Amazon Business Strategy for Pleasing Customers
There’s no doubt that Amazon customers are a loyal group.
That’s mostly due to the fact that the e-commerce platform is a one-stop-shop for online shopping in a way that’s unlike any of its competitors.
It’s what’s led 85% of Prime members and 56% of non-Prime members to visit the site at least once a week.
And it’s why 46% of Prime members make a purchase on Amazon at least once a week.
But Prime wasn’t always such a lucrative business.
As we discussed earlier, it was actually one of the company’s greatest risks.
Even today, the greatest draw of Prime – free, two-day shipping – is putting investors on edge.
