This can be a serious issue, as Google is increasingly penalizing websites that do not have the relevant information their customers are looking for. Content gaps can be found on any website and in any industry, and they can be caused by a variety of factors such as a lack of time, resources, or expertise. The two activities are also complementary since content gap analysis helps identify topics and keywords that you can use for related keyword gap analysis. If you’re serious about creating a bulletproof content marketing strategy, you need to conduct a 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.
The first place to find gaps in your analysis is by looking at your competitors. It’s here that a keyword clustering tool can drastically improve and streamline the process. A key part of the process, (that most tools don’t service), is keyword clustering. Most marketers have a slow and laborious gap analysis workflow that doesn’t even uncover all the ‘gaps’. The responses you get to your market research survey will provide you with a treasure trove of content ideas, all of which align with the real needs and concerns of your potential customers. Awareness pages target keywords related to a problem your audience is facing.
There are plenty of options out there, so you’ll want to research them carefully before selecting the one that works best for you. Thus, the content gap is vital to know how far you are from your competitors in terms of content and can give you ideas of content and keywords of opportunity that you had not found in the Keyword Research. Of course, the whole purpose of a content gap analysis is to generate lead flow and optimize for conversion. Ahrefs Content Gap tool allows you to compare multiple competitors quickly. Ahrefs says it’s simple and allows you to hone in on the deficient keywords your competitors are actively ranking for while you are not. This is a bit more of a standard/manual approach to finding keyword and content gaps, but it’s still pretty straightforward.
It’s A Question Of A The Right Competitors Should Be Identified
Understanding where competitors are, and how they pursue their SEO strategies, must be considered every step of the way. For more guidance, download the BrightEdge eBook, 4 Proven Steps to Competitive Analysis. The functions I use the most are position tracking and content optimization based on keyword recommendations according to the best positioned competitors. Here, we see other competing lists of marketing ideas ranking for 112 keywords where we don’t. MEDIUM TELEGRAM GROUP SEO on the Organic Competitors report to see which websites rank for the same keywords as you. The Content gap report shows you the keywords where one or more websites, URLs, or subsections rank for, but another target doesn’t.
It’s A Good Idea To Steal From Your Competitors With A Content Gap
There are obvious phrases like brands and models of shoe that all competitors will be targeting, but what about the niches? There will always be gaps in content based on questions and queries that can be exploited with some savvy planning to get your site ranking well, regardless of what you do. All you have to do is plug in different domain names and you’ll be presented with a list of keywords that each site ranks for that you do not. “Keyword Gap” and “Bulk Analysis” (as shown below) are most useful for our purposes. It does exactly what you’d imagine—allows you to see what types of backlinks your competitors are receiving that you’re not. Just like Ahrefs, SEMRush has various gap analysis tools for you to try out.
Updating your article to include these not-so-much discussed topics will provide a massive boost to that article’s traffic and conversions. The first three steps in that sequence can involve a single button click. If you’re in eCommerce, it’s especially important to explore how your competitors are managing their faceted navigation. Analyze your PageSeed Insights scores for mobile and desktop to get an easy idea of how much your competitors are investing in web performance optimization (WPO) on their key pages. Analyze how many links your competitors had 6 or 12 months ago and calculate the percentage of growth.
This will show unique keywords that one competing site ranks for but the others don’t. It’s how you can find real unique (and often enough easy) opportunities for you to improve your content. In my opinion, Ahrefs’ content gap tools are far superior to SEMRush’s and you’ll see why quite soon. Remember, once you’ve identified your gaps you’ll want to implement a scalable content strategy to pull in all the potential wins you spot. It’s also very insightful to see your current organic competitors based on the keywords you rank for. That might give you an idea of what Google thinks your page is all about.
See if your own content fits into the buyer’s journey you just mapped and the keywords you’ve selected through your research. It will also assign a keyword difficulty score to demonstrate how competitive an organic keyword SERP is- the higher the search volume of a keyword, the more difficult it’ll be to achieve ranking success. Before you start conducting your content gap analysis, you should equip yourself with the right services proposal templates.
