Content Gap Analysis: Benefits and How to Get It Done

Content is always king, and what your website covers directly reflects your brand’s visibility on the SERP and in the marketplace. Also known as a competitive keyword gap analysis, a content gap analysis carefully measures your keyword positioning against your closest competitors and identifies new topics to cover.

A core component of successful SEO, a content gap analysis is a smart way to gain share of voice and attract new, qualified customers.

What Is a Content Gap Analysis?

A content gap analysis (or keyword gap analysis) is an SEO strategy that identifies:

• Keywords your domain outranks competitors for
• Keywords your competitors outrank you for
• Keywords competitors rank for that your domain doesn’t rank for
• Keywords you rank for that no competitors rank for

The Benefits of a Content Gap Analysis

A CGA offers invaluable insight into which topics your brand is well-represented for on the search engine results page (SERP). It also identifies opportunities to improve visibility for topics specifically targeted by your competitors – i.e., the keywords your shared audience is searching.  

How to Do a Content Gap Analysis

You can conduct a competitor keyword gap analysis against a competitor’s entire domain, a few competitor domains at once, or specific subfolders (just service pages or just blogs) on competitor sites. You’ll need a dedicated keyword gap analysis tool; Semrush is our favorite, but there are options out there. Or choose a dedicated SEO partner to handle it for you.

Competitive keyword research analysis should be an ongoing part of your organization’s SEO strategy. Use keyword research to find low competition queries that drive qualified leads and mix in high-volume terms when they make sense for your brand.

Use your preferred competitive keyword research tool to analyze keyword data in these categories:

• Shared keywords: Keywords that all audited domains rank for in the top 100 positions on the SERP.
• Missing keywords: Keywords your competitors rank for but your domain does not. (More on this in our content gap analysis example later!)
• Weak: Keywords that all audited domains rank for, but your competitors hold better positions.
• Strong: Keywords that all audited domains rank for, but your domain holds a better position.
• Unique: Keywords your domain ranks for, but the competitor does not.

1. Getting Started: Know What You Want to Know

Before you start, decide what your CGA will cover. Your goals should fit the size of your business, your market and industry, and the role your website plays in attracting and serving customers. A local content gap analysis, for example, will focus on direct competitors within your service area. Enterprise brands may need to consider a wider range of national or even international competitors, which introduces richer data and bigger opportunities (e.g., multi-language content or new product lines).

2. Choose Your Competitors

The more competitors you include, the more potential keyword opportunities you’ll discover. However, there’s value in keeping it relevant and simple. Limit your CGA to competitors with the biggest impact on your business, and with significant crossover with your keyword rankings. This may mean analyzing a single domain or a few.

3. Decide on the Battleground

As mentioned previously, you can focus your efforts on a single content category or the whole site. Depending on the number of keywords your domain holds and the number of competitors you have with a strong SEO footprint, it may make sense to narrow down your view so it’s easier to extract action items. For example, just compare your homepages and your core service or product pages. You can always audit again later to compare something else, like your blog folder and theirs.

2. Start Analyzing

Using the keyword gap analysis tool in Semrush (or another option), start sorting and cleaning your “Missing” and “Weak” keywords. Ignore any irrelevant branded terms for products you don’t sell or services you don’t provide. For example, a Ford dealer isn’t likely to rank for “Chevy Equinox Traverse City.”

Similarly, don’t try to outrank your competitor organically for their brand name. While it’s worth noting how much search volume their brand receives per month, it’s unlikely that you’ll hold a higher position on the SERP (although you can target competitors with a smart PPC campaign).

Once you have removed irrelevant terms, organize your spreadsheets of keywords into clusters of related keywords based on what they’re about. You may use conditional formatting, separate sheets, or other favorite methods to boil down the data into a list of topics.

Finally, look at each topic separately, and identify which page on your domain holds similar keywords and has potential to be optimized for the missing terms. If there isn’t a page on your domain that covers the topic yet, plan to create a new page.

3. Get Optimizing

Optimize existing content by introducing “Missing” or “Weak” keywords on the relevant pages and in meta data. Or, if needed, make new pages.

Here is an example of several missing keywords among two bike shops in northern Michigan, with the average monthly search volume for each term.

• bicycle shops in michigan – 70
• michigan bicycle shops – 50
• traverse city cycling – 30

These keywords could be added to the homepage or About Us page of a website in just a few minutes.

Repeat this process across all your Missing and Weak keywords. If you have a lot of ground to cover, consider getting a little boost from an agency (hey, hi).

4. Prioritize Your Content Gaps

If you have many pages to update and create, prioritize whatever will have the biggest impact on your business. For many brands, this is a good, prioritized approach:

1. Start with your homepage. Your homepage is likely a top source of organic landing page sessions.
2. Focus on services and products. Spend time and money where you make money. Especially in today’s zero-click search environment, you’ll likely generate higher quality sessions and ultimately more conversions by optimizing your product or service pages.
3. Target your best blogs. Most blog subfolders get most of their organic landing page session from a few top performers; it’s the Pareto principle gone digital. Adding more SEO value to the cream of your blog crop will usually generate more SERP impressions and sessions than making similar adjustments to blogs that don’t hold any keywords. Look at your top five, ten, or fifteen blogs based on organic sessions from the past 12 months (to account for seasonality); then compare those topics with your spreadsheet of Missing and Weak keywords. If those keywords fit existing blog topics, plug them in (and take a few minutes to look for additional keyword targets as well!).
4. Create new content. Once you’re caught up on existing content updates, create new product pages, service pages, or blogs. Remember that new pages should be relevant to your business and your audience. If you don’t sell flowers and your audience isn’t worried about chrysanthemums, you don’t need a page on the topic just because your competitor down the street has that content.

Some scenarios call for creating new pages first. Let’s say your bike shop rents out bikes, you don’t have a page dedicated to rentals, and your competitors do have that page. Your top priority should be creating a heavily localized, SEO-rich bike rentals page! In most cases, however, mature domains already have considerable overlap with competitors on core products and services, so optimizations are the priority.

5. Monitor Results

SEO isn’t an overnight thing, and while it may take a month or two to have a real impact on your business, you can monitor results with a monthly dashboard of your metrics. (We can create one for you.)

There are many ways to measure the impact of conducting a content gap analysis and implementing your keyword findings. Here are some of the most important metrics to watch.

Keyword Count

Data source: Semrush or a similar tool

Look at the number of keywords held by optimized pages before optimization and after, especially the ranking position of keywords identified in your CGA. You’ll monitor your page to see if it gains rank for Missing keywords and improves position for Weak keywords in a few weeks or months.

Total keyword count increases are cool, but focus on keywords in the top five positions on the SERP or those winning SERP features.

SERP Impressions

Data source: Google Search Console

Gaining rank and improving keyword position will increase SERP impressions relatively quickly. Monitor impressions for the optimized page(s), and see which keywords (aka queries) are driving increases. You can also use the average position metric to see how your rank for individual queries improves over time.

Organic Sessions

Data source: Google Analytics 4

Monitor organic landing page sessions for optimized and new pages. In addition to monitoring traffic, keep tabs on the quality of those sessions with metrics like engagement rate and average session duration. These metrics signal that your content is reaching a qualified audience and providing useful, engaging information.

We have a nifty resource on the differences between Google Analytics and Google Search Console if you need a refresher on these platforms.

Always try to account for seasonality and other factors when measuring the impact of a content gap analysis and optimized content. Optimizing that bike rentals page likely won’t pay off until spring or summer; judging your success in January won’t tell the full story.

You Know Why a Content Gap Analysis Is Important…

So why wait to get started? Our content gap analysis service provides a comprehensive plan to get more out of existing content, join new discussions, and win market share in the process. You’ll work with a dedicated account manager and a hand-picked team of SEOs, writers, and strategists who know how to get results.

Start your content gap analysis project by getting in touch or calling (231) 922-9977 today. (Tomorrow would be okay, too.)