Take a SWOT at Your Website

As internet marketing experts, we assist clients with a wide variety of online efforts to boost website performance. But when it comes to analyzing how well your website represents your business, you can benefit from your own expertise. SWOT is an effective business tool that you can use to perform an honest evaluation of your website.

SWOT is an analytic model used to evaluate a business in terms of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Making its first appearance in the business world in the 1960’s, it has since become a valuable tool for organizations of all sizes. The SWOT model for business seems to work best when applied to a focused segment of operations, making it well suited for website evaluation.

SWOT analysis begins with asking tough questions about your business and giving honest, sometimes painfully honest, answers. To make the most of your evaluation, ask several people in your organization, and perhaps even your key customers to participate. Here are some questions to consider:

• Are customers and prospects aware of your website?
• Is your website easy to use and navigate?
• Does your website quickly communicate what you do on the home page?
• Is your website visually appealing?
• Does your website contain information that would be of value to people within your industry?
• Is your website content clear and well-written?
• What aspects of your customer interaction can be effectively handled online?
• Does your website simply list product descriptions, or does it communicate product benefits?
• Do you provide tangible reasons for doing business with your company?
• Are prospects called to some type of action on every page of your website?
• Does your website have a lot of competitor websites competing with you for attention and rankings?
• Are you competing against businesses with huge internet marketing budgets?

While these questions are pretty generic, you may want to add other questions that more specifically relate to your business. Your answers should be listed in one of the four basic SWOT categories:

Once your answers are in place, your task becomes balancing strengths and opportunities with weaknesses and threats. With your SWOT analysis complete, you can use it to develop a focused and specific plan of action for improving your website, which will work in concert with a professional internet marketing strategy.