Most of the time we are caught in a situation and tend to ask a common question to ourselves, “How do I discover a new topic or what else to write about?” finding answer to this question and doing keyword research can help to discover the topic on your website, but there are some other potential opportunities than the traditional way of searching. The content gap analysis helps to develop ideas or find “holes” in your content that leverage more quality traffic and visibility to your website.
Sometimes when your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts are not enough to get the results, so it may be the correct time to perform a content gap analysis. This activity supports parallelly your SEO strategies and finds missed opportunities.
What is Content Gap Analysis?
The Content Gap Analysis (CGA) is a report that discovers areas where you can increase organic visibility and identify opportunities for missing content creation to increase traffic and engagement. It is the process of evaluating and identifying “gaps” in existing content on a topic. One of the main reasons to do a content gap analysis is to understand where there are opportunities for you to either create new content or update existing content on your website. Some common content gaps are:
- Fresh Content: Find when was the content published or updated?
- Informative: Does the content provide thorough information for users?
- Usability: Can users easily read and understand what is on the page?
- Contentment: Is user happy or satisfied with your content?
This is important to uncover the greatest opportunity to improve branded rankings as well as grow non-brand rankings across the key topics. The content gap analysis also explains the optimization process that aims to support content demand in different categories for your website.
How to Do a Content Gap Analysis?
Executing a content gap analysis is a three-part process. It starts by reviewing your existing content, then your competitor’s content and most importantly analyzing where the market is going. Looking into market trends and the behaviour of search engines helps to set goals for analysis before you dive in.
Content gap analysis needs you to identify that you have all the required content for all stages of your customer’s journey including awareness, consideration, decision, and success. This process involves mapping your customer journey stages with existing content optimizations and identifying new opportunities.
Reviewing Your Own Content and Competitor’s Content
Always be sure the content on your website is aligned with the customer journey and does not miss the gaps. Explore all your website pages and determine how to line them up with each stage. Then you can identify the missing content that fills the gap between stages. Also using SEO tools, you can find gaps on your website to discover potential keywords that you may need to be targeting with your existing content. From the existing keywords rankings, you can determine the most opportunities within striking distance keywords.
On the other hand, analyze your competition to find out some white space, what are they doing, and where is your website lagging to bridge the gap between stages. If your competitor’s strategies are similar to yours, look at the content they have created to lead the user through the stages. Analyzing your competitor’s content strategy helps you discover more keywords and relevant topics that you might be missed while mapping the journey.
Tools for Content Gap Analysis
Content gap analysis is a data-oriented process, and it requires some research. To scale this process there are a few amazing tools out there including ahrefs, SEMrush, SimilarWeb and Answer the Public. To find out competitors' keywords if they are ranking for some new topics or content ideas, you can use tools SimilarWeb, ahrefs and SEMrush. Answer the Public tool is used to understand the question types users generally ask about the topic on the internet.
SEMrush is the most popular and commonly used by SEO analysts as it provides more features than any other tool to discover keyword gap, backlink gap and bulk analysis.
Initially, it starts with discovering the keywords where competitors are ranking and you are not, you can obtain competitors ranking with the SEMrush organic competitors’ report. This report helps to determine top competitors, common keywords, and traffic.
The next step is to use the Keyword Gap Tool, this step provides keywords ranking for your website against competitors you have listed. Here you can also determine their ranking with you for not ranking keywords.
You can also export the data from the filters include missing, weak, strong, and untapped to build a keyword list. Using that list you can update the existing content or determine a new topic.
The content gap analysis is the way to find those missing gaps in your present content strategy so you can discover new content opportunities that generate traffic and leads to achieving goals. Once you have done your content gap discovery, you can finalize the topic and publish that on your website thus grabbing more eye balls.
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