It’s recommended to do a content gap analysis at least once a quarter for best results. First, make a copy of our free basic-as-all-hell content gap analysis spreadsheet. Content gap analysis in SEO is the process of identifying gaps in your content to improve upon. I’ll share with you our completely free content gap analysis spreadsheet template and how to use it. Content Gap Analysis is a method used to identify gaps within your existing content to help you improve upon them. In the world of SEO, ranking on Google is not just a matter of having great content, some backlinks, and good technical optimization.
So we’re going to be looking at content, we’re going to be looking at links, and we’re going to be looking at tech SEO. We’re going to look at how our competitors perform from each of those and how we compare. My name is Lidia Infante, and I’m the Senior SEO Manager at sanity.io. Today, I’m going to be talking to you about SEO gap analysis, and yes, I know it’s a very unsexy topic, but bear with me because it’s worth it. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Lidia Infante shows you her recommended strategies for successful SEO gap analysis.
You can find the areas of overlap between your content, your competitors’ content, and the content that already exists to pick out specific keywords and rank higher. By taking a look at what types of information they want but are unable to find, you can start to see the gaps between the content you create and the content that users on a web browser are searching for. In this article, we’ll answer all of those questions and help you improve your content marketing game so that your articles can be discovered by your audiences.
With the right insights, you will be able to see what makes this content stand out and rank highly, such as the backlinks going to the content and how often they use the keyword in question. You can then use these insights as you write and optimize your own material, looking for weaknesses in the other content that you can capitalize on to drive your own material higher up on the SERP. If there are particular topics that aren’t getting enough attention, take action right away by creating the content marketing strategies including those subjects. This could involve researching and writing blog posts, creating new web pages, or even producing videos to add the missing content. Several keyword research tools, such as Google’s Keyword Planner and SEMrush, can help you identify and create a list of target keywords with the most popular keywords and phrases related to your industry. Keyword gap analysis provides valuable insights into your competitors’ keyword strategies, giving you an edge.
- However, getting your site to the first page of Google takes time, effort, and a strategic approach.
- Evaluating your website content against top competitors in organic search should be an ongoing aspect of your website or blog development.
- This article will walk you through the importance of a content gap analysis and provide a step-by-step plan to perform one.
- These days I would recommend Ahrefs over SEMRush as a general SEO tool to most people anyway.
- You want to determine what KPIs are going to be most useful in measuring the success of your content gap analysis.
These will also be adaptable enough to suit whatever type of business you run. In this post, we will discuss what a keyword gap analysis is, how to conduct one and what insights you can get from it to inform your SEO and content strategy. Now that you have all of your competitors’ performance data in a nice spreadsheet, it’s time to draw some insights. If you have been using my SEO gap analysis template, this will be straightforward, as the conditional formatting that comes built in will point out your weakest pillar (in red or dark orange).
While there are many amazing SEO tools on the market, there’s not 1 in isolation that gives you the complete picture for a content gap analysis. A content gap analysis involves auditing what you currently have and then laying out a content strategy that meets users at multiple touchpoints. You can also use SEO tools like SEMrush to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and align these with some new content ideas. In conducting your content gap analysis, you’ll want to identify whether you have content for the Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Success stages of the funnel. Filling content gaps also means that a website is more likely to drive traffic away from its competitors, because it will be providing more relevant information.
In most cases, it’s about evaluating your website content vs your top-ranking SEO competitors. The structure and variety of the content on competitor websites are inspected. This allows gaps in your own content to be detected, potential to be developed and new high-potential topics to be activated. Finally, in the content gap analysis, specific strategic measures are determined, from which the bridging of the difference and the development of actual and target conditions are expected. When we conduct a content gap analysis, SEO is a key factor to keep in mind.
You Can Help Customers Along Their Customer Journey
SEO tools use a variety of methods to automatically evaluate competitive content gaps. One common method is to use keyword research and analysis to identify the keywords and phrases that are being targeted by competing websites but not by your site. Professional SEO software tools help automate tasks related to content and keyword gap analysis. And with artificial intelligence (AI) now becoming more mainstream, SEO tools with AI capabilities are in a good position to provide smarter and more insightful content gap analysis. Once you have your keywords and theirs, you need to compare and categorize them. You can use tools like Excel or Google Sheets to create a spreadsheet and filter the keywords by different criteria, such as search volume, ranking position, difficulty, or intent.
While you can use our free SERP similarity tool, it only gives a maximum of 3 keywords. (ie. You can examine up to 3 keywords to understand how much of the SERP they share together). If you’re only using our Keyword Discovery module, there’s no need to export each file as you can push the projects direct into the clustering module. Once the ‘seed keywords’ are identified, we now find all relevant keywords relating to that seed keyword. The workflow needs to be more holistic and mindful of content clusters, user journeys and what brings results. Below are classic examples of keyword search volume differences between Ahrefs and Semrush.
Enriching your web pages with structured data might also fall under this SEO pillar as well. For example, if we look closer at the terms that Betterment outranked Ellevest for, you can see exactly which pages rank. Of course, this is the initial research, you’ll want to refine your results further to narrow terms down based on keyword difficulty and intent. Now you need to determine where you can get the most value from your keywords. We know the top result in Google gets over 31% of clicks, with some variation depending on the industry, keyword, and device. However, no matter the industry, the number of clicks (and consequently traffic) that goes to your website drops consistently as you drop from one to two and so on.
With this information, we prioritize each content gap opportunity based on its keyword score (calculated through the keyword analysis tool). The score is based on monthly search volume and competition for the query. Look at individual keyword rankings and the securing of rich snippet space, such as Quick Answers. The clearer the picture you can obtain, the better your understanding of your progress will be. As you develop content and optimize it for particular keywords, you will want to look at the pages that already rank highly on the SERPs.
What Is The Difference Between Technical And Non-technical? Techy Tricks And Tips Are Needed For Better Rankings
You should also update your keyword gap analysis periodically and adjust your strategy accordingly. Keyword gap analysis is a process of identifying and targeting the keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. It helps you discover new opportunities to improve your organic search visibility, traffic, and conversions. In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct a keyword gap analysis and find new opportunities in six steps. While you can manually search for content gaps, this process has been made massively easier with the use of various online tools. SEO TELEGRAM GROUP are especially helpful when it comes down to detailed keyword research.
He is editor of the 100+ templates, ebooks and courses in the digital marketing resource library created by our team of 25+ Digital Marketing experts. Our resources used by our premium members in more than 80 countries to Map, Plan and Manage their digital marketing. Sometimes, all a page needs to improve performance is simple tailoring of what you already have, content-wise. None will be as efficient and easy to use as paid software, however, they’re a great start if you’re not sure if investing in these SEO tools will be worth it. Just because you have content on a subject, doesn’t mean it’s optimal.
As a result, pursuing a backlink from that site may not be worth your time. Once Link Gaps identifies your top three competitors, it auto-retrieves the top fifty-thousand backlinks for the domains and compares them against your site and each other. After acquiring a list of your competitor’s backlinks, analyze them manually by exporting them into a spreadsheet.
This will allow you to see which domain is ranking well, the number of keywords they are ranking for and the average rank for those keywords. Born and raised in Barcelona, Lidia has been helping businesses reach their audiences in search across European markets, the US and Australia. She has used her background in Business and Psychology to drive organic growth for e-commerce sites, media and SaaS. When you’ve got very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, you need to be doing better than your competitors. “I’d recommend signing up to Smart Insights for a suite of useful tools from planning templates to strategy docs and a variety of other guides to make your job easier.” To rank among the top pages on Google means to overtake another page’s spot.
Other tools that you can use for this analysis include Ahrefs, Moz, and Sistrix. If you follow the steps above, from keyword research to clustering, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition. Take the data from the content brief generator (H2’s, People asked questions etc) and create the most comprehensive page on the topic. As a reminder, check out our guide on how to create a brief that’ll beat your competition in our guide here.
Tuff can help you with every step of the process, from performing a keyword gap analysis and determining the best course of action to creating content that outranks the competition. Conducting a content gap analysis is key to finding holes in your existing content strategy so you can be sure to create new content assets that generate traffic and funnel users to the point of purchase. When consulting with businesses, we have found that many have a poor target keyword list which is either not detailed enough or poorly structured. This spreadsheet will show you how to create a comprehensive target keyword report and review your performance to help you identify new SEO and content marketing strategies. At Smart Insights, we use this spreadsheet as part of our SEO strategy and it helps us deliver over 80% of the half a million unique visits we get per month to our website, generated through organic search. To do a more advanced content gap analysis using these free methods you can use excel or google sheets and input relevant data you’ve gathered.
Performing keyword research allows you to start connecting the dots between what your customers have told you and what the data from search engines is showing. When you’re able to measure your results, take note of how much traffic is driven to each page, your keyword rankings, organic traffic, and click-through and conversion rates. Using a topic analysis template is crucial, as it will help you identify any gaps that exist for each keyword of interest. It’s essential that you take the time to examine all of your data before moving forward with anything else.
Our keywords template will let you review the keyword strategy for your business or your clients. It’s designed to be practical and actionable – it will help identify ‘quick wins’ to boost traffic, and help you build a stronger keyword strategy for consistently better SEO results. To do this, you’ll need to understand and review the best SEO techniques to increase visits.
All of this is driven by Semrush’s enormous database of keywords and the websites that rank for them. So be sure to keep tracking your most important SEO competitors and also become familiar with the competitive analysis capabilities of SEO software platforms. Your base-level keywords should include shorter and somewhat longer keyword phrases (queries) that are directly relevant to your organization, target audience, and product or service areas. So the best way to find content with gaps is to see what’s already ranking in Google’s first page. Content gaps find areas and topics for content that haven’t been written yet. Or maybe it didn’t quite answer the question at all, just a related search?
