SEO SWOT analysis

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SEO case study including SWOT, SEO strategy and followup, of a campaign that launched exponential growth of organic search traffic for the client.

Strengths

• Beautiful sleek interface
• Self explanatory new homepage, well targeted copy
• Modern semantic mark-up for the most part
• Modern agile web development framework
• Strengthening user base
• High volume of quality user generated product pages with unique content
• High growth potential in the near future
• Domain name in use since 1998

Weaknesses

1. Duplicated content in and within categories, search and product pages
2. Poorly optimised anchor texts and internal linking
3. Poorly optimised micro-content such as headings and title tags
4. High volume of detrimental temporary internal redirects (302)
5. no-www “designerpages.com” is not redirected to its www version
6. News section flows pagerank to untrusted external sites
7. People section does not reveal valuable data to search engines
8. Nearly no inbound links; site is not getting the “buzz” it should
9. Low pagerank

Opportunities

Numbering is based on the section weaknesses.

1. Duplicated content is currently the main detrimental SEO factor on the Designerpages.com. Search engines actively filter out pages with mostly duplicated content from its databases (indexes). Search engines aim to display diverse and relevant results with regards to many factors. Therefore duplicities in the results are not acceptable. The main opportunity of the campaign is to improve architecture of the site so that volume of duplicated content generated by the application is minimal. This should help increase search engine's ability to index the site and grow rankings for relevant pages. Removal of duplicated content will be achieved using various search engine optimisation techniques such as meta tags, robots.txt, server side redirects and AJAX.

2. Anchor text or the inbound link is the most important off-page element used by Search engines to determine relevancy of a page for a particular search term. Categories, search results, tag pages and other navigation related pages do not use optimal anchor texts to link to product pages. As a result search engines are unable to correctly estimate relevancy of product pages for a particular search terms, however many more factors are involved. This can be fixed with a different structure of the anchor texts based on the extensive keyword research. Keyword research could be used to produce guidelines and help users name the products correctly so that they are easier to find in the internal and external search engines. This will require unobtrusive changes in the application interface.

3. Temporary redirects do not pass value of links to the appropriate pages and therefore cause search engines serious problems in determining the importance of the product pages. These will be changed to correct redirecting techniques during the campaign.

4. Title tag and Heading 1 of the page are most important on-page elements. These elements need tweaking within the application views and layouts to match the industry leading keywords. Massive advantage of the site is its user generated content nature. Users can be educated how to gain benefits from proper naming, tagging and categorising of their products.

5. Two domain names produce unnecessary detrimental canonicalisation issues (related to duplicated content) and need to be adjusted accordingly

6. Correct tagging of the links will ensure the pagerank does not flow off the page and ensure higher rankings.

7. On the one hand application generates loads of unnecessary duplicated data for search engines, on the other hand huge volume of unique data is presumably completely hidden from search engines. Revealing data to the search engines the right way will significantly increase visits to the site as it will appear in the search results for a wider range of terms.

8. Rounded link building strategy will fill the issues such as low pagerank and nearly no inbound links. There are many market opportunities and services I will use to deliver quality and relevant inbound links for the site. I employ both ethical and aggressive link building strategies based solely on client’s decision and with a focus on the target market conditions.

9. Search engine index statistics

   	Google	Yahoo	Live search/MSN
   Indexed pages	20900	713	205
   Backlinks	9	244	n/a

   Search engine index data reveals some interesting facts. Google finds the site very easy to crawl as its algorithms are less sensitive to duplicated content. Low number of backlinks shows youth and untrustworthiness of the site, which is reflected in rankings and subsequent organic search traffic to the site. Yahoo is more sensitive to duplicated content and nearly refuses to scan deep pages of the site. Yahoo also already devaluated the site due to its current architecture. Yahoo rankings and subsequent traffic and leads should increase first as soon as the on-site factors are sorted and site re-indexed.

Threats

Failing to resolve on-site optimisation issues could significantly slow down or stop growth of this project. Resolving the on-site issues will require quick turnaround of advanced web development tasks.

Costs

Cost of the full SEO campaign & consultancy for the first three months is $2000 a month.

There is also an option for an extensive consultancy document for $2000 one-off. Consultancy document does not include hands-on coding and link-building service.