Everybody should be comfortable with conducting a SWOT analysis as its one of the most commonly used frameworks for approaching strategy creation. The power of them, like most other frameworks is how they're used. I follow SWOT with Start, Stop, Continue and Accelerate when it comes to the early stages of the strategy discovery process.
If we go back to the beginning. You've decided to create or refresh an SEO strategy so the first step would be an 'all the cards on the table' session where you bring the SEO team together and look at your:
SWOT
Strengths:
These are processes that your team does well or resources that contribute to success. You could, for example say that the quality and relationship with your agency resource is a strength. It could be the breadth and depth of experience of the team. Perhaps its the relationship you have with internal stakeholders. You may have a fantastic array of tech & tooling that meets your needs.
You could also count the strength of your brand as a strength, the platform you optimise against.
Weaknesses:
Organisations typically don't like to use terminology that could be seen as demotivating. Sometimes this quadrant is labelled as "Challenges / Issues", but would cover resources, attitudes, processes, policies or environmental factors that you deem as unhelpful to your current situation.
Examples may be features such as:
You don't have the most useful metrics and goals
You can't get trustworthy data to measure success or define opportunities
There's no clear ownership or RACI on different elements that affect SEO (content, links, tech)
Business focus on initiatives that distract the team from solving core/endemic issues
Lack of historic work logs so you don't know what activities have been done in the past to affect current performance
Overburdened by admin
Supporting functions aren't supporting
Platforms don't have the flexibility or features needed to accelerate Organic performance
Too many sites to work on without clear focus or guidance of their relative importance
Paid traffic is too dominant
You don't have sufficient integration with other channels.
Digital PR links being turned into affiliate dynamically
Typically teams like to focus more heavily on the negatives because that's where they see the opportunity to improve. This is understandable, The S,S,C,A process will help give some focus to improving the situation.
Opportunities
It should be obvious that this section focuses on the areas that can be exploited that you aren't currently. That may be because they're not seen them as a priority before, or you've been stuck in the whirlwind of everyday activity, or you've never 'joined the dots' and ever considered them as an opportunity before.
Examples could be:
Using current agency resource in a different way - think about their strengths and internal weaknesses
Getting closer to internal teams
Reworking processes to be more efficient and effective
Being able to focus and better prioritise
Understanding the business' priorities better
Focusing on certain sections of the site
Developing pillar strategies
Improving access and reliability of data
Improving reporting and insight
Using a new feature you know is being developed and will be released soon
Training on E-A-T, Helpful Content, Tech SEO, Outreach
Realigning the team members to specific pillars.
Threats
You could also see these as risks and you may like to use the PESTLE framework here but view it through the SEO lens. A potential view may be something like:
Political - this could the internal political environment and the relationships or tensions within the organisation. How could this affect prioritisation of developments.
Economic - the allocation of resources could be a threat. Do you have sufficient budget to do what you think you need?
Social - this covers the ways of working, culture and a more granular view of specific relationships in the 'business as usual' view of getting stuff done.
Technological - do you have features of your platforms that you believe are risky? You may see the state of the platforms you're working on as having inherent features that won't be helpful for Organic performance in the future, or the general entropy that happens, especially with ecommerce sites, is a risk in terms of increasing inefficiencies with your teams. Or you could view the future programme of works and known prioritisation in favour of non-SEO enhancements as a risk. You could also view this as having the tooling and tech required to do the job effectively.
Legal - This one is a bit a tenuous, but do have all the agreements with suppliers in place to do the job and what is the ability of those internal, supporting functions like? If you have a lot of resource/tooling/tech to onboard do you you believe the dependencies you have on those functions will block progress?
Environmental - this one is clear. SEOs work with Search Engines and that is your environment. Google, for example, changes their algos daily. But every three months or so there are big or fundamental changes. Whether that's reviews updates, helpful content, or just the core updates. Good SEOs will be aware of the direction of travel for Google and determine that there are risks with either their current approach, the platforms or their prioritisation.
You could also consider:
Demographic - is the business focused on a fixed customer or is it changing? If that change is happening then this would be a risk - especially if you've highly tuned your SEO strategy to one 'type' of customer. Also are the products that your customer is searching for changing, or how they consume them changing. A classic, albeit extreme example, may be the move of (initially) younger audiences moving from buying CDs to streaming and the same for video content. An SEO for Blockbuster would possibly see this before the leadership did. But an SEO couldn't do much about that matching demand to supply - as Blockbuster didn't supply streaming.
Regulatory - there many regulations that SEOs have to operate in. Such as the Advertising Standards Authority regulations on paid reviews etc. or if you work an organisation that offers credit, or even any organisation basically when you're offering services as the content has to be truthful and accurate.
Start, Start, Continue and Accelerate
When you have this organised view of your SWOT take a break - seriously. You need all that information to settle. Then come back and think about what activities you should start, stop, continue doing or accelerate.
This accelerate element should feed directly into your rocks and your more detailed discovery process.
Start - these are new processes, plans or tactics that you believe you should start doing. This may be those multifunctional sessions that you don't go to but you know useful information is being shared. Or it may be start recording your outreach efforts (more on lead and lag measures here), or its may be just changing attitudes to be more positive. These are often feed off the 'opportunities' section of the SWOT.
Stop - If you've identified in a weakness such as you have too many meetings, you may identify, for example, that you don't need a daily session and that could be every other day or once a week. It could be stop doing blogger outreach with gifting because you believe your link profile is a weakness and you've got an associated 'start' of tier 1 digital PR. It could stop spending a week on a report every month that no-body reads (you may have an associated 'start' for automate report creation).
Continue - what are the good things you're doing now that you need to continue doing. It could be something like continue with the delivery model you have with team refinement, dev refinement, development testing etc. It could be a particular session that you do that is massively productive, or it could be continue a specific process of site optimisations.
Accelerate - this is where the rocks come in and this list you create in process here will give you the long-list of candidate rocks for you to refine into the initial areas of focus. You may say you need to accelerate the creation of content mapped to the user journey as specified in your content strategy. It may be accelerate the optimisation of core category pages or accelerate the onboarding of agencies and the delivery of their recommendations against a specific issue you've identified in the PESTLE risks step.
The idea of this entire process is to leave 'no stone unturned' and you'll get the best results when you have a truly open group of sessions where all voices are heard and valued. It's also very important to have a diverse group within the team so you analyse the wider SEO SWOT from as many view points as possible. This will help you effectively prioritise that long list. It's about getting the right, most important rocks to put significant amounts of effort, resource and social capital behind. And then deliver the progress that matters most.