Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something we all may have heard of, whether you work at an agency or in-house on a marketing team. SEO consists of many different facets of content, technical, user experience and authoritative strategies, but at the end of the day it all comes down to business and making our clients or business money.

So when it comes to SEO, where do you start? A SWOT analysis, or Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats assessment is a great tool to get you started. Today, I’ll walk you through how to create a SWOT analysis for SEO and provide a template to get you started right away.

A standard SWOT analysis can be used for any type of assessment, but today we’ll focus on how to use a SWOT analysis for SEO. The SWOT is comprised of 4 quadrants:

Strengths and Weaknesses typically arise from internal resources like business operations, while Opportunities and Threats stem from external factors, like your audience or a competitor.

When creating your SEO SWOT analysis, there’s several questions for each quadrant you’ll want to consider. These questions become your starting point for your SWOT, and after completing, you should have a clear direction on where you need to focus first:

Strengths – internal factor

Consider what you are already doing well

Weaknesses – internal factor

Consider where you may be missing the mark or falling short

Opportunities – external factor 

Consider your strengths and weaknesses, where can you continue building and where could you improve?

Threats – external factor

Consider again your weaknesses, and stack those against the competition