Are you tired of seeing your competitors outrank you on Google? Do you feel like you're missing out on valuable organic traffic and leads? It's time to level up your SEO game with content gap analysis.
In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through everything you need to know about the content gap analysis - from what it is and why it matters, to a step-by-step process for conducting your own analysis and filling those gaps with high-quality, optimized content.
Whether you're an SEO, content marketer, or website owner, this guide will give you the tools and insights you need to boost your rankings and crush your competition.
Content gap analysis is the process of identifying topics, keywords, and questions that your target audience is searching for, but that your website doesn't sufficiently cover. It involves analyzing your own content as well as your competitors' to find opportunities to create new content or optimize existing pages to better meet searcher intent and outrank your rivals.
When you have content gaps, you're missing out on valuable opportunities to rank for relevant keywords and attract qualified traffic to your site. Your competitors are likely taking advantage of these gaps to outrank you and steal your potential customers. By identifying and filling content gaps, you can:
While content gap analysis and content audits are related, they serve distinct purposes:
A content audit evaluates your existing content for quality, performance, and alignment with your goals. It helps you identify your strongest and weakest content so you can make informed decisions about what to improve, consolidate, or remove.
Content gap analysis, on the other hand, focuses on identifying opportunities to create new content that you're currently missing, based on competitor research and keyword analysis. It helps you find untapped potential to expand your organic reach.
Content gap analysis helps you uncover keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you're not. By identifying these opportunities and creating targeted content to rank for them, you can expand your organic reach and drive more qualified traffic to your site.
No piece of content is perfect. Content gap analysis not only shows you what your competitors are doing well, but also reveals areas where their content falls short. You can use these findings to create more comprehensive, valuable content that outshines your competitors and better serves your target audience.
With endless content possibilities, it can be overwhelming to decide what to create next. Content gap analysis provides a data-driven framework for prioritizing content creation based on the topics and keywords that offer the greatest potential for organic traffic and conversions.
Google favors websites that demonstrate expertise and authority on a given topic. By methodically filling content gaps and creating comprehensive resources on key topics in your niche, you can solidify your site's topical authority and improve your chances of ranking for related keywords.
Start by identifying the websites that consistently outrank you for your target keywords. Use tools like SpyFu or Ahrefs to analyze your keyword rankings and see who owns the top spots in the SERP. Focus on competitors who target the same audience and offer similar products or services.
Dive into your competitors' websites and analyze their best performing pages. Look for patterns in the types of content they create, the topics they cover, and the keywords they target. Use SpyFu's Kombat (gap analysis) tool or Ahrefs' Content Gap feature to find keywords that multiple competitors rank for, but you don't.
Review your own website and content through the lens of your competitors' top pages. Identify topics and subtopics that you haven't covered in-depth or at all. Use keyword research tools to find related keywords and questions that your audience is searching for, but your site doesn't currently address.
Organize the content gaps you've identified based on factors like search volume, keyword difficulty, and relevance to your business. Prioritize the gaps that represent the greatest opportunities for organic traffic and conversions. Create a content plan outlining the new pages you need to create and existing pages you need to optimize to fill these gaps.
Use this content gap analysis checklist to stay on track:
When auditing your existing content, it's crucial to identify and address various gaps to enhance effectiveness and user experience. Here are some key aspects to examine:
By focusing on these areas, you can significantly improve the quality and performance of your content, making it more attractive and valuable to your audience.
To conduct an effective content gap analysis, you'll need a reliable keyword research and competitor analysis tool. Some of the best options include:
Filling content gaps is not just about creating more content, but creating better content that comprehensively covers a topic and satisfies searcher intent. Follow these best practices:
As you create new content to fill gaps, make sure each page is optimized for search and ready to outrank your competitors:
Content gap analysis is both wide and narrow. Wide analysis considers the range of topics that your website covers with every piece of content. When you analyze that for gaps, you are finding new topics to address through new written content and videos. A good gap analysis usually includes a deep look at what your competitors are covering well that you are not.
For example, an adventure tour company could learn from a site-wide gap analysis that it needs to develop new content on ziplining for beginners. Their competitors put out informative content on it, but their own site just touches on its available zipline tours.
A glaring gap like that keeps their site from pulling in visitors who have concerns about whether first-timer zipliners should sign up for their tour.
Contrast that with a page-level analysis. The same adventure tour company has a page on kayaking. Reading their page tells you that novices can kayak on their own, two people can share a kayak if they'd like, and that yes, you can bring your dog with you in the kayak. It's a good, full page. Compare it to a competitor's higher-ranking page on kayaking, though, and they might find a list of details they never thought to address.
Much like with site-wide gap analysis, page-level content gap analysis works by looking externally too. It compares the specific topic on the page to what the competition puts out. That micro-comparison finds ways that the other page might be better, giving it an advantage on the SERPs.
Closing that gap not only improves your page, but it gives it a chance to surpass competitors in the ranks as it checks the same boxes that they do.
This is the narrow part of content gap analysis--more like fine tuning. RivalFlow AI automates this page-to-page comparison for content marketers.
RivalFlow, a content improvement tool, starts with the full website to find pages that would pay big dividends with the easiest updates. Then, it suggests competitor pages to run analysis against. And since it takes on one page at a time, you can also zip past RivalFlow's recommendations to pick your own page to improve. Every page gets a head-to-head comparison against a higher ranking competitor to analyze the content gaps on that specific page.
It breaks that analysis down into bite-sized suggestions that you can cover by adding new content to the page, and RivalFlow's AI writer even creates original content that blends those important new details in with what you've already written on the page.
SEO trends come and go, but content improvement always pays off. Why wouldn't it? Google rewards content that answers users questions and elaborates on the details. By improving your content through additional information, points of view, examples and helpful descriptions, you give your audience a deeper understanding of the topic. You're explaining it in ways that are sure to answer their questions.
In some cases, you may be able to fill a content gap by updating and expanding an existing page on your site, rather than creating a new one from scratch. Evaluate the page's current keyword rankings and content to decide whether to update it or create a new page. If the page is already ranking well for relevant keywords, update and optimize it to rank even better. If the page is not ranking or covers an unrelated topic, create a new dedicated page to fill the content gap.
For example, I improved an existing post in several ways:
These changes helped my post finally crack the first page of search results, which led to a significant organic traffic boost. This clearly demonstrates that improving existing content can have a substantial impact on your site's performance.
By making these targeted updates, you can leverage the authority and existing ranking of your current pages, thereby maximizing their potential to drive traffic and engage readers effectively.
Creating comprehensive content to fill gaps can be time-consuming. AI writing tools like Jasper and Copy.ai can help you streamline the process by:
While AI tools can be a helpful aid, always review and edit the generated content to ensure it meets your quality standards and brand voice.
To measure the success of your content gap analysis and optimization efforts, track these key performance indicators (KPIs):
Isolating the impact of your content updates can be challenging, but there are a few ways to attribute ranking gains to your efforts:
Content gap analysis is a powerful strategy for any business looking to boost their organic search performance and outrank tough competitors. By identifying untapped keyword opportunities and creating content that comprehensively addresses searcher needs, you can attract more qualified traffic and establish your brand as an authority in your niche.
