Make sure your content is captivating, comprehensive and tailored to your target audience interests. As you create a lasting digital marketing strategy, you must remember that there is more to succeeding in the SERPs than following only standard SEO best practices. You must also consider what your competitors are doing and how you can out-maneuver them.
Content gap refers to the missing pieces of content that your audience wants to read but haven’t been created yet. It’s safe to say that almost every brand is involved in the content marketing game. Once you’ve carried out a thorough analysis of your results, you’ll be able to see which gaps should be filled, as well as the best course of action for doing so.
Implementing this workflow will help you to stay up-to-date with your competitors and possibly outperform them when executed correctly. To facilitate access to your documentation, you can consider creating an educational space for your development team on your shared workspace – wherever that might be. Since 2002, I have been working as a web developer and gradually moved into SEO over time. Beginning in 2014, I began working full time in SEO, mostly focusing on the technical side of things.
- For example, you can look for keywords that all of your target competitors rank for in organic search, but you do not.
- If you rank well for keywords where your top competitors don’t appear, that may be a sign that you’re spending time building content for search queries with limited commercial appeal.
- The first step in this process is to ask yourself how your audience is searching for the product or service you provide.
- For example, if we look closer at the terms that Betterment outranked Ellevest for, you can see exactly which pages rank.
- Understanding the wisdom of the crowds is simple – if two or more of your competitors rank for a particular keyword or have a backlink from a specific site, it’s worth pursuing for your own website.
- When done properly, a content gap analysis is the unlock code to achieve incredible SEO results.
Both results are very valuable because you see who you are competing with currently to be ranked but also what your “real life” competition is up to. Most SEO tools offer some form of site auditing and give you an overall score for the site. The metrics below can give you an idea of how much your competitors are investing in technical SEO.
What Are You Going To Do Next? A Content Gap Analysis Has A Strategic Value
In this matrix it becomes apparent what requirements are not yet addressed by existing content. So, say you’re producing great content, but other sites still rank higher in search engine results. Well, it’s not enough to be “great”, you need to cater to what the search engine wants – and you need to do it better than competing sites. While focusing on short and popular keywords may seem like the way to go, long-tail keywords tend to have less competition. You can take advantage of this and achieve a better ranking than sites only using generic target phrases. However, simply checking your pages isn’t enough – you need to fill those potential gaps as well.
How To Do A Content Gap Analysis For Free
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.
For example, if you have a content gap for people searching “[competitor] alternatives”, that’s a quick win (as the searcher is closer to the point of purchase). Conducting a content gap analysis is a smart way to find the “gaps” in your content. Along with a blank template, you can also download an excel content gap analysis example to more easily understand how it works and where information needs to be entered. Powerful, authoritative links have significantly more weight than lesser-known websites. This is because Google often values reputable news outlets as trusted sources.
In an ideal SEO world, you want to see relevant competitors in that list. First, it’s advised to focus on high-value keywords for your business with a high buying intent. You should prioritize high-volume keywords with realistic keyword difficulty. A good starting point is keywords you already rank for as close as possible to page-one results. Now that you have an overview of the content landscape across competitors, you can take it a step further and look at what kind of traffic they are focusing on to develop your own content strategy. You can expect to see most of the keywords your competitors are targeting by looking at the number of keywords ranking at positions 1–30.
Why Should You Care How Search Engines Work?
From this report, you can identify any pages on your site that are not ranking well for certain queries. You can then create new content to target those queries and improve the ranking of those pages. Once you have this list, you’ll want to examine it and identify any gaps. This could be content that is missing from your site or content that is outdated or performing poorly. While many companies invest heavily in SEO and marketing tactics like keyword research and content optimization, they often overlook this key strategy that can help them gain a competitive edge. The goal of B2B content marketing is conversion at each stage of the buyer journey until, ultimately, the sale is made.
Content gap analysis is the process of assessing existing content topics to determine if there are gaps or lost opportunities that can be improved. Performing content gap analysis is a smart way to find a “gap” in your content and aims at attracting more traffic, transforming more leads into customers, and adding more value to your target audience. It helps in finding new opportunities and understanding how to update older content that can significantly improve your SEO, including rankings and improving organic traffic. By identifying the gaps in your keyword strategy, you can create content that targets those keywords and improves your search engine rankings. For example, if your competitors are ranking for “best SEO tools,” you can create a blog post or page that targets that keyword and provides valuable information about the best SEO tools.
SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool helps you to identify keywords that other companies target to drive traffic to their sites and rank in search, but your site doesn’t. This provides you with a list of keywords that could be valuable for you to target and gives you an insight into the type of content your competitors are producing to rank for these. In this section, we’ll look at exactly how to conduct a holistic SEO content gap analysis. Follow these steps carefully, and you’ll be able to identify any significant gaps in your content plan.
The fact HubSpot already ranks in the top 50 likely means the keyword is interesting for them and somewhat related to the page that ranks. One of the strongest SEO signals you can give Google to understand what your website should rank for is topical authority. Adam has a background in journalism and almost a decade of experience in SEO. He’s passionate about data, content and cricket – although not necessarily in that order. There is also TELEGRAM CHAT FOR SEO , the research phase where customers will look at reviews, FAQs and try to learn more about a product or service before converting. There are a million and one ways for you to improve it, make it more powerful, and custom tailor it to your business.
