This will give you an idea of just how much new content is needed moving forward. It’s also crucial that you use a content audit template because it will allow you to identify gaps in your current strategy. First, it helps you make sure you aren’t missing any gaps when it comes to content. Second, it allows for optimal organization of your newly found information (including topics and keywords). You must cater to important viewer questions, and draw out various options you may be considering.
- Your competitors could be direct rivals in your niche, or indirect ones that offer similar solutions or target the same audience.
- Incorporating analysis of content gaps and missing keywords into your SEO processes isn’t terribly difficult, but it may be a new step for some SEO practitioners and website/blog content developers.
- A content gap is where your website lacks coverage or information on a particular topic.
- The “At least one of the targets should rank in top 10” toggle is on by default to enhance relevance.
- Either of the cases above may surface opportunities for new or updated content that also improves your overall SEO performance.
- The content gap analysis process can boost a website’s rankings in SERPs and improve its overall performance.
This is one area where the SEO tools for keyword research and competitor analysis really help out. Working with an experienced SEO agency can help you to research, create and implement an effective plan to improve your website’s online visibility. Deciding on where to even begin looking for gaps in your search engine footprint can, in some cases, be the most difficult part of an analysis.
The actual value of a content gap analysis is to create a strategic advantage over your competitors. Along the way, you’ll deploy your resources wisely, saving your company both time and money. Ultimately, your SaaS business will create awareness, be top-of-mind in the consideration phase and build a healthy organic sales pipe. Many of the SEO content gap analysis and keyword gap analysis tasks described above can be greatly assisted or even automated by SEO tools.
The Competitive Gap Analysis Is Done
The Wix website builder offers a complete solution from enterprise-grade infrastructure and business features to advanced SEO and marketing tools–enabling anyone to create and grow online. Now that you’ve selected the right pillar to focus on, it’s worth your time to look a little bit deeper into the numbers to understand what the right strategies for your brand are. Look at the total number of keywords that your competitors rank for and then take a deeper dive by position. In the very early days of its ranking algorithm, Google extrapolated the way that the world of academia uses citations (the more cited a study is, the more one can trust it). As the word suggests, “ranking” involves comparing content against other content and ordering them by how likely it is that a given page satisfies the user’s intent.
The answer to beating another company’s SEO is to find the gaps in their strategy and be tactical with how you regain market share from them. Once you’ve accounted for TF-IDF and readability optimizations, plug your article into an editing tool (we use Grammarly) to catch any spelling or grammatical mistakes. Our team focuses on term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF for short). The calculation identifies the frequency of words appearing in a small cluster of content versus a larger cluster of content. Words appearing a lot in a small grouping that rarely appear in a larger cluster of content would be more semantically relevant to the content in the smaller cluster.
Take advantage of these opportunities to maximize your traffic and solidify your content funnel. Then, you can determine whether you are missing content that bridges the gap between one stage and another. Use Google Forms to create a simple, anonymous survey to send to your target audience. But this creates gaps where people who are still considering various options may fall through the cracks.
Some tools also analyze factors such as the length and depth of the ranking competitive content, the use of images and other multimedia, and the overall quality and relevance of the content. Also consider using SEO content optimization tools, such as Frase and similar platforms, to do real-time content optimization based on their integrated SERP analysis and dynamic content scoring features. For WordPress users, leverage trusted SEO tools like Yoast, All In One SEO, RankMath, etc., to optimize your content for search engines. For a selection of your most important keywords or search queries, manually inspect (carefully read) the top few ranking content pieces that appear in the Google SERP.
Simply put, a content gap analysis is a process of identifying missing content from your site. However, “missing content” can mean many things and there are a couple of ways to go about finding it. So, SEO content gap analysis will involve multiple steps and an audit of your site. Following this step-by-step tutorial, you have learned the significance of keyword research by uncovering content and keyword possibilities that your competitors are capitalizing on. With MEDIUM SEO CHAT TELEGRAM of a keyword gap report in Excel, you have the necessary data and insights to further optimize your content strategy. To help you understand how your competitors are performing in search we have developed the Domain Rank Tracker.
If you start a free trial and let it expire, you’ll be put on their free account tier. These days I would recommend Ahrefs over SEMRush as a general SEO tool to most people anyway. They’re both at the same price point and Ahrefs simply has killer data and a powerful UI. You assume that the vast majority of your readers want to put this paint up in office buildings. Before we dive into Content Gap Analysis, it’s worth pointing out that “Gap Analysis” has been around for a very long time. There are very few true ‘evergreen’ pieces of content that do not require some sort of updating and improving as time goes on.
Some competitors have an overlap with each other, and each competitor has a set of keywords only they rank for. This can help you expand your topical authority and improve your SEO rankings. Blogs, while important elements in providing information to the audience, are not the be-all and end-all of closing a content gap. When looking internally, it’s important to identify any low-quality content – such as duplication, bad grammar, keyword stuffing or excessive linking – and fix it.
When you do this regularly – such as quarterly – you are much better positioned to stay on top of your competitors’ strategies and beat them. Topical authority is essentially demonstrating subject matter expertise, and it is achieved by covering everything there is to cover about the topics you want to rank for. Last but not least, when you’re trying to get a pulse on your audience, forums are still a brilliant resource. You can find decades and decades of questions from real people in just about any industry.
To do so, many companies focus on metrics like Citation Flow which measures the value of a site in relation to how many sites link to it. Clients can then download the full backlink report to further investigate opportunities. Filter your entire portfolio, or select specific keyword groups, then slice your data with the following options. Content Gap analysis will help you to see exactly where you are winning, and where you are not.
So, you have to produce content that’s more informative, thorough, and capable of ranking higher than what’s already there. Marketing strategies work well when they are personalized, so while you want to cast a wide net, you can’t cover everyone. Explore who your audience is in terms of both demographics and psychographics. When you analyze content, pay attention to what your audience suggests they want, not just what you think they do. Links are undoubtedly one of the most powerful signals Google uses to rank a website, but not every link is built the same. Popularity, multiple sources of traffic, word of mouth, and association to a product or service make a brand stand out.
This is a clear example of the types of insights you can get from a content gap analysis, and how it can lead to actionable ideas to improve your website and SEO. A content gap analysis should not be a one-off thing, but should ideally be done regularly in order to stay on top of what your competitors are doing. There are many tools out there that will help you identify the keyword gap including, but not limited to, SEMrush. The tools on these platforms allow for a specific page on a competitor’s site to be analysed, identifying which keywords that page is ranking for. Lucky for us, Ahrefs has made it really easy to do content gap analysis.
In essence, a content moat provides you extra protection between your business and the unknown. When you have topical authority, it also means a shorter time to rank (TTR). Google trusts your website and will reward you quickly because it wants to show the best results. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses — and careers. Many marketers and business owners make the mistake of focusing on “money” pages in order to push the sale, or informative blog articles to draw in readers. If your competitor’s funnel is more or less the same as yours, see what content they’ve created to lead users from one stage to another.
(Well, the new version is KeywordSheeter. They both do just about the same thing.) You input a seed keyword (say “lawncare tips”) and it spits out all sorts of results. It’s then your job to gather metrics for each keyword and manually weed out the bad ones. Worth noting that the new Keyword Sheeter allows you to buy tokens to get Adwords search volume for each term. In copywriting and landing page optimization it’s a useful technique as well.
Now, let’s review your SEO performance so that you have something to compare against your competitors later on. My favorite way to do this is using a spreadsheet, so I’ve provided an empty template of my gap analysis for anyone to use. You can also prioritize which opportunities you should focus on by filtering the keyword gap results. Go to the Positions filter, Competitors, and choose to view only the terms that they are ranking for in the top 10 or 20. If you are using Semrush, you’ll go to the left menu and use the keyword gap tool. As per the clustering data, you should be able to see clusters and keywords you’re not ranking at all for.
Before you start your keyword gap analysis, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and who you are competing with. Your goals could be to increase your brand awareness, generate more leads, or boost your sales. Your competitors could be direct rivals in your niche, or indirect ones that offer similar solutions or target the same audience.
You will look at data that might even help uncover competitors you did not know existed, such as an exclusively online seller that does not compete with you at all in the brick-and-mortar sector. With SEO it’s important to think of a competitor as any entity that ranks higher than you for your essential keywords, whether or not it is an organization you traditionally consider a competitor. Though it may sound complicated, it’s easier than you think, especially with the right subject matter experts at your side. Hiring a marketing agency can ensure your keyword gap analysis is effective—and even help you implement your findings into your content marketing strategy. So it’s no surprise that SpyFu would also have decent tools for keyword gap analysis — and content gap analysis by extension.
