If your content is not performing well, its time to revisit your content marketing strategy. Content gap analysis is the process that assesses the disparities between your content and a content is already ranking to meet specific goals. By identifying these gaps, you can refine your content strategy to enhance relevance, address audience needs, and optimize overall performance. If you want to know more, this guide to content gap analysis will help you understand what it is all about.
Content Gap Analysis Definition
Content gap analysis for SEO is one of the most powerful strategies to give your website a much-needed boost. It’s a data-driven way to find content that is related to your topic, but which isn’t already out there and can be optimized for better search engine rankings. Understanding how this gap analysis works, and utilizing it effectively, can help you get more traffic, leads, and conversions for your website.
How Do You Identify It?
1. Analyze your competitors’ content: Take a look at what content is being produced by your competitors, and see what topics are missing in your own content.
2. Monitor your analytics: Analyze website traffic and other metrics to identify which topics are resonating with your audience.
3. Listen to social conversations: Keep an eye on conversations happening on social media to see what topics are of interest to your followers and potential customers, and get insight into your customer success process.
4. Leverage keyword research: Use keyword research tools to uncover the topics and questions that people are searching for related to your industry.
5. Conduct surveys: Ask your customers and followers directly about their interests and needs to get valuable feedback using the right customer feedback tools.
Benefits of Content Gap Analysis
This analysis has several benefits that will help your business shine among your competitors.
Gives you a lot of content opportunities: SEO content gap analysis is a process that can help identify content opportunities to increase visibility and rank.
Analyzes content: This analysis analyzes your competitor’s content to determine what type of content they are producing, how it is performing, and where the gaps in their content are.
Gives valuable insights: It gives you valuable insights into what topics you should target, what content formats are working best, and which keywords you should target.
Boost organic traffic: With the information this analysis provides, you can create better content that aligns with content architecture, helping drive more organic traffic to your website.
The gap gives an idea about what’s missing in your strategy: This analysis can also help identify holes in your content strategy to optimize current content, such as adding additional keywords or updating already-written content to better match the topics you want to target.
How to Do a Content Gap Analysis?
The analysis process helps you determine which topics to focus on when creating content, what content types are most effective, and ensures that your content stands out from the competition. This analysis can be done through keyword research, competitor analysis, customer surveys, and other methods.
Select an SEO Tool for the Analysis
To fill the gaps in your content, it is important that you use an SEO tool for effective results. If it’s your first time and you don’t want to spend much on the tool, use Ubersuggest. It is a Chrome extension that’s free to use. You can enter any keyword of your choice and get to know the trending topics around that keyword.
You can also see additional ideas for your content by going through content that is already ranking on SERP for your particular keyword.
You just have to install the extension, and you can start your analysis quickly. Once you find the topics relevant to your business, go through them and check for any gaps. You can either repurpose existing content in new and creative ways or create a new one. Just be sure to use the target keywords mindfully so your content can rank better on the search engine.
We have suggested a few more tools later in this article on which you can use for free.
Connection Between Your Content and the Buyer’s Journey
Not all guests who visit your site will be primed and ready to purchase. Many may research, compare their choices, or search for the most advantageous solution.
Your mission is to craft content for every point of the buyer’s voyage, whether “problem-conscious,” “solution-conscious,” or at the ultimate decision stage of the buying experience.
To maximize the efficiency of their content strategy, many site owners are focused on creating informative blog posts to attract a larger audience and “money” pages to convert those users to customers.
However, this approach can lead to a lapse in content that those still deciding which option to take may miss out on. Therefore, when performing a gap analysis, it is vital to recognize the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages of the funnel.
Awareness:
Creating awareness pages with keywords relevant to your audience’s issues is a great way to provide valuable information and offer insight into the problem without expecting an immediate conversion.
Consideration:
At the Consideration stage, people are scouring the internet for the best solution to their problem. By reading comparison guides, reviews, and “best of” posts, they can determine which of the available options is the best fit for them.
You can help them make an informed decision by providing content that compares your service/product with competitors or simply feature your brand as one of the solutions in a round-up post.
Decision:
At the Decision stage, you’ll come across the “money pages” – these are the sales and service pages that serve as the ultimate checkpoint before customers commit to buying from or contacting you.
Check Your Existing Content
After identifying the buyer’s journey, go back and look at your own content. Check if it fits all the stages and see if anything is missing that you can add. Now, it’s not just blogs that companies publish; there are other kinds of content, too. hese can include a hevc video, long-form content, a podcast, a whiteboard animation, ads, etc.
You can focus on personalizing content for specific audiences or segments. This can involve creating content tailored to a particular group of people’s interests, needs, and preferences. Personalization can help make your content more relevant and engaging for your target audience.
This can also involve crowdsourcing ideas or content from your audience or encouraging users to submit their own content, such as reviews, testimonials, or photos. User-generated content can be a great way to engage with your audience and create fresh, unique content. UGC marketplaces like social media platforms provide an opportunity to easily discover and reshare authentic user content.
You can also crawl your website using the Screaming Frog tool, which will show you all the URLs on your website, using which you can see which content is relevant and which is not.
Perform the Analysis Manually
If you are not comfortable using a tool, you can also perform this analysis manually. For this, you just need to identify your competitors. Then, open each website and review their content to see what topics they discuss.
Once you have your list, you can develop different piece of content on those topics. Through this self-content audit, you can also see what content is relevant to the present times and whether they are according to your goals. If you feel any content is not aligning with your vision, you can remove it.
This self-audit will help you close the gaps in your content and assist you in improving the quality of your content that connects with your audience and is valuable to them.
Make Use of Google Search Console
If you want to look for gaps in the your website’s content, Google Search Console can be a helpful tool to work with. You must “log in” to your GSC account and look for “Search Results.” Then, set up your project by clicking on the “+New” option.
After a window pops up, select “Page” and enter the URL of your best-performing page. You’ll be able to see the keywords ranking for that particular page.
Doing this will give you an idea of whether your page content is missing any important keyword and if you are using the right and top-performing keywords that can help you rank better.
Performing A Content Gap Analysis The Advanced Way
If you want to work on content that’s already ranking but at a lower position or not ranking at all, go through the following steps. These steps focus on analyzing content at a niche level, allowing you to discover many new content ideas.
Step 1: Open Ahrefs and go to the Keyword Explorer.
Step 2: Select a seed keyword according to your topic to find topic opportunities.
Step 3: For example, we’ve taken the keyword “fitness.” You’ll see a list of keywords and their search volume.
Step 4: Click on matching terms and choose the one that focuses on your area.
Step 5: If any keywords are irrelevant to your business, exclude them using the filter option.
Step 6: Now, remove the words that have low search volume. After this, you’ll have a list of topics you can use to create the content you want.
Step 7: In the final step, export the list to a keyword grouper tool, Google Spreadsheet, or Microsoft Excel, where you can list the keywords and work on them seamlessly.
Best Practices For Better Analysis
Finding gaps is easy but does require several steps for an effective content gap analysis. Therefore, there are a few things you need to pay attention to if you expect to get a favorable result.
Check Google’s First Place Holders
It is evident that if you want to get not even the first place but the top position on the search results, you need to do better than the ones that already exist. You need to produce content that is better than them in terms of information and relevancy.
This way, you will have high chances of ranking better. Just a simple topic analysis will do the job for you. Based on the missing topics, you can work towards your content creation process.
Work On Your Existing Content
We cannot help but emphasize this point, as working on your own content is very important. Before running your website content for a gap analysis, do a content audit. It is then important that you work on those gaps to create thorough content across all your pages. Only then will you expect to see your content rank better.
Focus On Long-tail Keywords
Yes, we know that using short-tail keywords is common in popularizing content, but everyone now runs behind common things.
So, instead of getting stuck in stiff competition, think differently! Look for long-tail keywords to use. These have less competition, but if used to create appropriate content, you can surely see yourself ranking up the results.
Free SEO Tools to Use
Several free tools can be used to determine the gaps in your content or your competitors’. There are certain keyword gap tool as well which you can use. Some options include:
1. Google Search Console: This tool allows you to see the keywords that people are using to find your website and the pages on your website that are receiving the most traffic. You can use this information to identify gaps and work on new content that targets those keywords and topics.
2. Google Trends: This tool allows you to see how popular certain keywords and topics are over time. You can use this information to identify trends and create relevant and timely content.
3. Answer the Public: This is a keyword analysis tool that allows you to enter a keyword or phrase and generates a list of questions that people are asking about that topic. You can use it to discover gaps and create great content that answers those questions.
4. SEMrush: This tool allows you to analyze the content of a particular website and see what topics are covered, as well as the traffic and engagement for each page. You can use this information to identify content gaps and create new content that fills those gaps. SEMrush comes with a 15/30 day free trial.
5. Ahrefs: This tool allows you to analyze the content of a particular website and see what topics are covered, as well as the traffic and engagement for each page. You look for gaps and create new content that fills those gaps.
Step By Step Instructions On How To Approach A Content gap Analysis Using Ahrefs.com
Ahrefs is a tool that can help you find the gaps on your own website or on your competitors’ websites. To use it, you can follow these steps:
1. Go to the Ahrefs website and sign up for an account.
2. Once you have an account, you can use the “Site Explorer” tool to analyze the content of a particular website.
3. To find the gaps on your own website, enter your website’s URL into the “Site Explorer” tool and click “Explore.” This will bring up a list of the pages on your website and show you information about each page, including the page’s traffic, number of backlinks, and number of referring domains.
4. To find content gaps on a competitor’s website, enter the competitor’s URL into the “Site Explorer” tool and click “Explore.” This will bring up a list of the pages on their website and show you the same information as before.
You can compare the content on your website to the content on your competitor’s website. If you notice that your competitor has content on a particular topic that you don’t have any content on, that could be a gap for your website.
6. You can also use the “Content Gap” feature in Ahrefs. This feature allows you to compare the content on two different websites and see what topics they have in common and what topics are unique to each website.
Conclusion
Advanced content gap analysis acts as a compass for content strategists to improve the performance of their company. By looking deeply into the intricacies of audience interests, competitors, and emerging trends, businesses can pick out the unexplored content areas.
This strategic approach not only ensures the creation of relevant and engaging content but also positions brands as authoritative voices within their industry.
FAQ
How often can I perform a gap analysis?
There is no fixed time to perform the analysis. However, it is suggested to keep regular attention to it on a regular basis. For your content to be effective, you can conduct this analysis every month, before the strategic planning stage, or when your content is not performing well.
What are the different types of gaps?
Different kinds of content gaps help you know which area to focus on. These are:
Topic gaps: Topic gaps are one of the most important gaps for the content marketing team to look into. Sometimes, it can be difficult for them to find a relevant content topic with time. With topic gaps, you can get new ideas to work on relevant content that resonates with your target audience.
Keyword gaps: This gap can be seen when your site lacks the keywords for a specific topic. You can do a keyword gap analysis to find gaps in keywords. Start by looking for the relevant keywords, then compare them with those you’ve used. If you see a difference between the relevant keyword list and the ones you used, then it means there is a keyword gap.
Media gaps: Media gaps are pretty new, but if you notice gaps here, you can surely skyrocket your online presence. Media is now a trend and is helping companies boost their audience reach. This gap shows what media your competitors use on their site. These can be tutorial videos, customer feedback, product demos, or behind-the-scenes clips. Anything that suits your company, you can work accordingly on it.
How do I fill content gaps?
You can go through the following steps for fixing content gaps:
First, identify your competitors. If you are not sure who they are, use the important keywords you employ to find them. You can use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find competitors based on your keyword.
Then, conduct an analysis using an SEO tool. You’ll see a list of topics your competitors have worked on.
Note down the topics and see any missing content on your website.
You can now brainstorm ideas on how to work on them. You can even update the existing ones if the topic has already been used on your site.
When using the topic, make sure not to create similar content. Look for missing topics in your competitor’s content as well and work accordingly.
Finally, run a content audit on your entire site to be more effective and see what can be worked on the old content again.
