Understanding your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (S.W.O.T) is fundamental to any strategy. The SWOT analysis is important to feed into your marketing plan. It gives you the data that highlights the pitfalls which you need to avoid in order to be successful. SWOT gives you the opportunity to analyse your own internal strengths and weaknesses and see the opportunities and threats outside of your company.
Chapter 4. Understand Competitors’ SWOT
Strengths
Analyse the strengths of your competitors, what they are doing well and why? How can you do better than them? For example, do they have excellent customer service? Do they have a lot of reviews on their site reflective of speedy delivery and quality product? What do the customers see as their biggest strength? Is the company a market leader?
Then analyse their content, do they keep their blog updated? Do they send out great email newsletters? Are they ranking for Universal SERPs?
What do their customers see as their biggest strength? If they are offering more features than you, is this something you can do? Can you focus on one area of your product and develop it further?
Weakness
What areas are your competitors not doing well? Are they for example paying for paid traffic when they are ranking well ? Do they have poor links?
What are they lacking within their tools? Is the Minimal Viable Product lacking features?
Play to their weaknesses and win customers. For example, they may not have an in-house development team (to fix issues on their site). Their customers may be complaining about their checkout journey. Make sure your buyer journey is smooth with no hiccups.
Jo Juliana Turnbull
Growth Marketer at Authoritas
Jo also known as SEO Jo Blogs is Growth Marketer at Authoritas. She is a Chartered Marketer with over 12 years of experience in SEO and online marketing. She is also the organiser of one of the largest and longest running networking groups called Search London since October 2010. SEO Jo runs Turn Digi an online event which supports entrepreneurs, rising talent and has a diverse range of speakers. Outside of work she is a mentor to other business professionals,is an #IamRemarkable Facilitator and shares budget travel tips on her blog being30.com. She was a Global Freelancer of the Year Finalist in 2020.
Watch our Tea Time SEO session here:
Table of Contents
Analysing competitors’ performance in the marketplace can sometimes help you to get buy-in from your client, or if you are in-house, from your senior management team. This is particularly true if competitors are executing a strategy that you had wanted to pursue and would have been beneficial to your company. Read the introduction.
In all markets there are direct and indirect competitors and it is important to look at both when carrying out a competitor audit. Read more in Chapter 1
In this chapter Carla Thomas delves deeper understanding the performance of sites using examples from the finance and insurance industries. These principles really apply to any industry. Read more in Chapter 2.
At a glance, the concept of a content gap analysis seems pretty straightforward: Find things your competitors are writing about that you aren’t. While this is true, it doesn’t embody the full extent of what those “things” are. Let’s break it down in Chapter 3.
Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats is fundamental to any strategy, learn how you can break it down for your company in Chapter 4.
How can you stay ahead in the SERPs? You need to know how your content is performing, where it is showing and where your competitors are, read more on how to do so in Chapter 5.
In this chapter we will discuss how you should be setting your goals and what you should consider in the process. Head over to Chapter 6.
Opportunities
Think about the ways to get ahead in the market. For example you may have a new product launching. Instead of spending months on the perfect product, why not release a beta version. Invite ambassadors to try and test out the beta version of the product. Encourage feedback which will then give you time to work on an even better version, the go to market one.
What are your competitors doing in the market? Are they exploiting a demand you have not yet thought of or were hesitant to do? For example during the coronavirus, many restaurants who were always ‘dine in’ had to work hard to survive the lockdown. They had to adapt their set up so they could have customers order takeaway from them when previously they did not.
Some companies are very big and cannot move quickly. VIsit the social media channels they are on. Are they consistent or is it on and off? Where are they ranking in the SERPs?
Threats
Can you see new competitors emerging in the marketplace? Do they expose other competitors to new threats? For example the taxi service Uber was a real threat to London cabbies. It undercut their price and with Uber, customers could order and see where their cabs were in real time. This gave them more confidence that the taxi was on the way.
Another example of a threat in the carbonated soda market is bubble tea. Consumers are looking for healthier drinks and alternatives to sodas and they have found it in bubble tea. As a result, it has become very popular outside of Taiwan and China over the past 10 years. The market is valued at $2.4 billion and set to grow to $3.6 billion by 2025.
Can we help?
If you are looking for an easy way to automate much of the advice given in this guide, then please book a call with one of our platform experts to explore whether we have what you need.