Understanding competitors’ keywords is a good practice to create an effective content strategy, it is also a good way to improve organic visibility, uncover new target audiences and engage valuable customers. It helps you optimize content or metadata, improve the customer journey, and build an effective in-link/out-link strategy.
In this article, we try to understand the method to identify content gap by improving competitive keyword research.
What is Content Gap Analysis?
It is the process of identifying the gaps or the difference between keywords for which your website and competitors rank for, in SERP and you don’t.
SEO Benefits of Content Gap Analysis
The goal for every business is to increase organic traffic and conversions through it. Most content strategies fail due to a lack of analysis of the competitor’s keywords. There is a missed opportunity for your business wherever your competitor ranks for a keyword, and you don’t.
Performing competitor's keywords analysis leads to discovering new topics and helps you align your marketing strategies with your customer’s journey, which also increases your website relevancy and search visibility.
How to Conduct Content Gap Analysis
Effective keyword research is not only the way to enhance the search visibility of your business but also an important way to find your true competitors with respect to SEO strategy. Competitive intelligence helps to understand who your actual online competitors are and identify what strategies drive their success. To conduct a content gap and competitor analysis you need a platform through which you can strategize the road map of your customer’s journey.
In this blog, we explore how SEOClarity’s “Content Gap” can help us get access to the competitor’s information that will help increase traffic by discovering the keywords they rank for but not you.
The Content Gap feature in the research grid of this platform, allows you to specify your website or URL, and up to 5 other domains (including yours) whose keywords you would like to compare.
Enter your competitor in the first box and your own domain in the last box. Before looking at the gap keywords you can filter them out by any term/keyword, search volume, rank, and URL with conditions. When analyzing multiple competitive domains, we found that using “At least a specific number of the below rank” and setting it to one less than the number of competitors entered helps to reduce the number of one-off keywords.
The given screenshot above shows the keyword difference between the three domains, to explain missed keyword opportunities. In this report, we can see the potential keyword gap against competitors and potential traffic lost due to them. This is a great way to make strategies and increase search visibility as well.
By scrolling down, you can review the keywords per competitor’s domain where they are ranking on. That makes clear sense, if we target these keywords and begin ranking for them on the first page of search results then we could gain significant traffic advantages over these competitors.
Here SEOClarity shows ranking per keyword which helps you to take your next steps towards closing your content gap analysis. From the given keywords list, you can narrow down keywords by filtering out any band name keywords, ranking, search volume, and many others to track your progress.
Finally, it’s time to review some strategies for prioritizing this analysis result.
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Start with keywords relevant to existing content
Begin with the keywords for which you already have page or content assets. It is obvious to get gain here by adding new terms you have discovered to existing content or using them to create topic clusters.
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Target commercial keywords
The next step is to prioritize commercial keywords that have transactional intent. These will have an impact on your business’s bottom line.
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Find low-hanging fruit
After that, look for any other quick gains. Start finding keywords that your content is already ranked for but has opportunities to perform better, also search for keywords opportunities (having a decent search volume) that you are close to ranking for.
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Conduct a content audit
Finally, conduct a full content audit to understand where you require more content for more visibility against your competitors. By conducting this audit, you can identify low-performing content that needs to be removed or updated with the right intent keywords.
Searching for content gaps through the right tool will help content perform better in SEO and audience shares. With these handful methods, you can cover most of your content gaps. Once you know that your content is better than what is out there, you are good to hit “publish”.
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