Last week looked at the basics of the SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis and saw how it could be applied to every aspect of SEO and online marketing. This week, we focus in on how to identify your site’s strengths so that you can replicate and build on them.
When it comes to gauging the strengths of your site, you can factor in such subjective matters as the strength of your brand, the uniqueness of your offerings, and your reputation in the market. You can also carry out more quantitative analyses of both on and off page factors.
On Page Strengths Analysis
The age of your domain itself is a ranking factor though not a very strong one. However, older domains are more trusted. Newly registered ones are often put in a sandbox, especially where competitive keywords are concerned.
If you’ve been working diligently on your on page SEO for some time, your pages should be showing some positive features. These include indexed content which is hopefully ranking well for your target keywords as well as providing value for your target customer.
Using Indexed Content Stats
Checking your pages in Google Analytics for such metrics as page views, bounce rate, and time spent on page can alert you as to which items of your content are working best. You can then identify the topics and themes that seem to resonate with your market and apply them to new content as well as making over those items which don’t show such good results.
If you have a company blog, you can check which posts are getting the most comments and social shares.
Social Media
You can use third party tools to discover how often your various pages have been shared, liked and re-tweeted. This will reveal the types of content your market values. It can also help you develop more effective social media strategies and help with crafting the kind of Tweets and Pins that attract attention.
Other on-page strengths include effective navigation, intuitive navigation and having pages that render well on all kinds of devices.
Off Page Strengths
Theses comprise mainly of the number and quality of your back links. If you’ve acquired links with integrity and followed recommended Google principles, you’ll have a firm base of authority underpinning your site.
One of the best strengths you can have nowadays is a clean and powerful backlink profile comprising natural back links from reputable authority sites with varied anchor text. However, if you entrusted your site to shady SEO artists in the past, you may have a long clean up job ahead.
To see how Smart SEO can help with all aspects of your online marketing, get in touch today.