Content Gap Analysis: The Complete Guide for SEO Marketers

No one likes FOMO, especially when it comes to SEO because that means losing out on 1) high-ranking content, 2) your target audience’s interest, and 3) website traffic.

To soothe that FOMO, you want to do what you can to avoid those three things happening. But where to start? Perform a content gap analysis to make sure you’re ticking all the boxes with your content.

Here’s everything you need to how about how (and why) to run a content gap analysis on the reg:

What is a content gap analysis?

Content gap analysis is the process of finding what you’re missing in your current content strategy that could bring more leads and conversions. This involves evaluating your own content, but also comparing it with that of your competitors.

Why is it important to identify content gaps?

Content gap analysis is important to building trust and authority as a business, showing your target audience and Google that you know your stuff when it comes to your product, industry, and niche. It’s an E-E-A-T opportunity, to prove your expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

By identifying content gaps, you can:

• Perform better and gain visibility on the SERPs
• Spot where your content is lacking (and where your competitors are winning)
• Create a comprehensive content plan that appeals to your audience
• Increase engagement from your target audience
• Become a go-to knowledge center for your users and prospects

In other words, you can use content gap analysis to assess the strengths and weaknesses of your content, spotting areas of opportunity and threat in an ultra-competitive search landscape, so you can optimize your SEO content plan.

How to do a content gap analysis

Now you know the various content gap analysis benefits, you might want to get started. Here’s how to analyze the holes in your content:

1) Audit your website

Step one of the SEO content gap analysis is auditing your own website. The best way to do this is split your content into topic clusters and keywords. And yes, that means going through all your content to determine what needs:

• Updating: Remember that outdated content is not Google’s friend
• Optimizing: Keep your content valuable and relevant to your audience
• Rewriting: Make sure your content is high-quality, full of examples and detail
• Simplifying: Because complex topics shouldn’t be described in a complex way
• Deleting: Get rid of content that isn’t seeing much traffic and create relevant redirects
• Creating: Spot the topics or keywords you’re not fully targeting… or targeting at all

All this needs to keep inline with your ideal customer profile and your research into your buyers’ journey. You want your content – whether its blog posts, product pages, social media, email marketing, and so on – to tick the boxes for search intent:

✅ Informational

✅ Investigational

✅ Navigational

✅ Transactional

By making sure you have content that caters for each user and their search intent, you will build trust, authority, interest and engagement as a business, pushing them down the funnel to a conversion. Kerching.

2) Choose your top 5 competitors

Now you’ve had a website audit, now it’s time to look at how you compare against your competitors and their content.

Ask yourself:

• Who is ranking well on search for my core keywords?
• Who’s dominating the SERP features for these key search terms?
• Who has good social media engagement in your field?

Or, dive a little deeper by using competitor analysis tools. With tools like Similarweb, you can get a true understanding of who your real competitors are, using data that goes beyond public knowledge to see insights like:

Their website traffic and engagement

How they use their marketing channels 

Whether or not they are targeting the same demographics

And you never know – that list of top 5 competitors you had just from stalking the SERPs and social media might change up just a little.

3) Spot your opportunities

Now it’s time to audit your competitors’ content strategy, to benchmark it versus your own.

This means spotting the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (otherwise known as SWOT analysis) to determine where you are lacking, where you could do better, and where you’re doing well in terms of range of content and content topics.

Then, you want to take those learnings and apply them to your own content and SEO strategy to make it bigger, better and more streamlined than ever.

So, where to start? Here’s where that competitor intelligence tool comes in handy again.

Content opportunities

A good place to start when it comes to analyzing your competitors’ content is to have an understanding of:

Which pages Google is loving and ranking high

❤️ Which are the popular pages with your target audience

The marketing channels they’re seeing the most engagement on

You can do all that using one competitor analysis platform? Yeah ya can.

Example: asos.com’s top organic pages in the US, including its traffic share, number of keywords that link to that specific page, and its top keyword.

This is Similarweb’s Organic Pages, showing you the top pages that perform well on organic search, AKA the SEO team’s favorite kind of page. This will give you full visibility of what your competitors are targeting or focusing on in their current campaigns and content strategies – you can even flick the ‘Newly discovered’ or ‘Trending pages’ filters to keep your eyes on trends or campaigns your competitors are jumping on too.

Then there’s Popular Pages which is same same, but different. These pages are assessed by user engagement, showing what pages get the most views and clearly grab peoples’ attention; the attention YOU want.

Here we have asos.com’s popular pages that are trending this month – that means there has been a large increase (see percentage change to the right) in page views from the previous month.

As an ecommerce brand, you can spot brand partnerships, fashion trends that ASOS users are loving, and questions they’re asking which could inspire your own strategy.

Keyword opportunities

A particularly useful tool to spot your keyword opportunities, but also the keywords you share and the keywords you could easily be gaining traffic from is a Keyword Gap tool, like this one:

You start with a nice, colorful visual on how your target keyword list compares, overlaps, or contrasts from your competitors. A great start for your keyword gap analysis.

Scroll down to see the key search terms, along with all the insights you need to plot your keyword strategy, including search volume, keyword difficulty, traffic share between you and your competitors, and the top URL out of this competitive set.

Selecting specifically non-branded keywords removes branded search terms which you’re not interested in, and leaves the good stuff. Again, as this is a fashion and retail ecommerce business, we get insight into what people in the US have on their fashion wishlists in this specific timeframe. You can even narrow this down to searches in the last 28 days, so you’ll never be behind the trends.

Take your learnings straight to our keyword generator, where you’ll find more specific and long-tail search terms that tend to have a lower keyword difficulty, meaning they’re less competed on.

Let’s take ‘graphic tees’ as an example:

A tool like the Keyword Generator can really benefit you by targeting the specifics that your users are searching for. The more specific you are, the more you resonate with the user – in fact, long tail keywords like these examples have a higher average conversation of 36% for that reason.

Now, you don’t have to be an ecommerce company to benefit from these findings – but if you are, make sure your product descriptions and landing page copy includes these. You might be a fashion blogger, a publisher, or just a graphic tee enthusiast that wants to write a listicle on the 7 best vintage graphic tees on the internet. And that leads us nicely onto our next point…

4) Analyze the topics and create a list of content ideas

You’ve got the content topics and you’ve got the keyword data, now it’s time to create a list of content ideas that are going to help your brand smash the SERPs.

This is where you bring in search intent, which we mentioned earlier. You want to create topical keyword clusters, and dedicate content to each part of the user journey. Something like:

• Informational: Answering questions and showing your authority as a brand
• Investigational: Showing up as a subject specialist, with the product to match
• Navigational: Creating pages and content that align with specific searches
• Transactional: Showcasing your product in a way they can’t help but make a purchase

In the world of SEO and content, this translates as top of funnel (users that have little to no knowledge about your business), middle of funnel (users that are aware of your business) and bottom of funnel (users that are ready to make a decision, and hopefully… conversion).

To dedicate content to each stage of the funnel, you can make the most of your competitor research and their best-performing pages, as well as trending and long-tail keywords from the Keyword Generator.

For informational content specifically, you want insight into the questions people are asking around certain topics. To do this you can make the most of Google’s ‘People also ask’ SERP feature, as well as tools like AnswerThePublic.

There’s also a ‘Question Query’ filter on Similarweb’s Keyword Generator where you can question queries from all time, or the past 28 days (if you want to act fast to create content around a trending keyword or topic, for example).

How to use content gap analysis for SEO

But what does all this mean for your SEO? Here’s how to take your content gaps analysis, and use it to enhance your SEO strategy and performance:

Step 1: Perform keyword research

For your keyword research, you want to focus on organic keywords and organic keywords only, which means comparing yourself against organic competitors.

You can see who comes up when you type your core keywords into Google, however you might want to get a more well-rounded view of your organic competitors, or be specific to different geographies which go beyond your local search engine capacities.

For example, we can see organic competitors for asos.com in the US (top) are slightly different to organic competitors in the UK using Similarweb’s Organic Competitors tool:

An all-in-one platform like Similarweb will speed up your keyword research, making sure you’re comparing yourself against most relevant competitors, and getting full insight into their keyword strategies in a matter of clicks using our other (and previously mentioned) tools, including:

• Keyword Generator
• Organic Pages
• Keyword Gap

With the right keyword research and the very best competitive SEO analysis, you can make sure no stone is left unturned.

Step 2: Create a content plan

Your content plan needs to match up with what’s happening in the SERP, because the SERP shows us what users are most interested in.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What’s ranking highly?
• What questions are they answering?
• What solutions are they providing?
• What value are they offering?
• What content types are they including?

Take this information and apply it to your own strategy, except make it 10x better. Obviously.

Consider combining different types of content into one; this means that you cater to all preferences of how people want to take in information, but also Google commends it. So, include listicles and videos in your ‘ultimate guides’, never leave out the images on your product pages, and make sure your schema markup is always up to scratch.

Step 3: Write blog posts to support your target topics

This one’s for the content team! ✏️

Make the most of this structured content and SEO plan – you might want to tick off a topic cluster all in one go or mix it up a little. Whichever you choose, you want to create engaging and original content that appeals to your target audience, and includes all the keywords that gets your content clicked on via search engines.

The content writing process should look something like this:

1. Prioritize the content ideas within the cluster
2. Begin your research
3. Start your draft, following the SEO brief
4. Optimize your content for search engines
5. Press publish
6. Monitor your content performance and…

Step 4: Optimize and track performance

The fun never ends. The search landscape is an ever-changing one, new trends come and go (and sometimes come back again), your competitors are always chop-and-changing their strategies, and you – my friend – don’t want to be left behind.

Monitor the performance of your content using data from Google Search Console and other website analytics platforms, and keep your content fresh and relevant with regular optimizations. Similarweb’s Rank Tracker tool makes it easy to see how content is performing in the SERPs in particular, and helps you spot any threats to your high-ranking pages.

You can also save yourself a lot of time and effort by using competitor trackers. Similarweb’s Competitive Tracker allows you to track multiple competitors on one single dashboard, and sends monthly highlights about your competitors digital performance and engagement straight to your inbox.

Fill your content gaps with Similarweb

While we’ve explained how to do a manual content gap analysis, having an all-in-one competitor analysis tool has proved itself to be a lot more efficient for teams like yours.

With Similarweb, you can uncover your content gaps to discover opportunities, pinpoint where you’re losing, spot competitive threats, and ultimately create an unbeatable content strategy.

Try Similarweb for free today or speak to one of our experts to find out exactly what this tool can do for your business (hint: loads).

FAQs

What is content gap analysis for SEO?

Content gap analysis for SEO is the process of identifying and analyzing the content areas where your website falls short compared to what your target audience is searching for online. It helps you understand where you can improve your content to enhance search engine visibility.

Why is content gap analysis important for building visibility on search engines?

Content gap analysis is essential for improving search engine rankings by creating content that addresses keywords and topics your competitors may not have covered, increasing relevance, attracting organic traffic, and gaining a competitive edge.

Why is content gap analysis important for building brand awareness?

Content gap analysis enhances brand awareness by positioning your brand as an authority in your industry, providing valuable information to your audience, and making your content more relevant to users’ search queries, ultimately boosting your online presence.

How does content gap analysis help in SEO?

Content gap analysis helps SEO by pinpointing areas where your content doesn’t match what your audience is searching for. It allows you to create content that ranks better, attracts organic traffic, and outperforms competitors.

What role does content gap analysis play in competitive advantage?

Content gap analysis provides a competitive edge by enabling you to offer more comprehensive and valuable information than your competitors. This positions your brand as a trusted authority and sets you apart.

How does content gap analysis contribute to brand authority?

Content gap analysis establishes your brand’s authority by ensuring that your content fills the gaps in your industry’s knowledge. This makes your brand a go-to source for relevant and valuable information, enhancing your reputation.