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).
Using our investment app example, let’s look at gaps in the top 10 results. You can see that Betterment is outranking Ellevest for some relevant keywords like “what does vesting mean” and “roth ira vs sep ira”. Here, you want to determine the main buckets of topics and keywords you’re targeting.
An SEO gap analysis is a valuable tool for any business looking to improve its search engine footprint. To get the most out of your analysis, working with an experienced agency offering SEO professional services is best. Today we’ll explain what a gap analysis is, why your business should consider one, and who should be charged with creating an SEO gap analysis.
Competitors may continue to produce high-quality content that targets specific keywords or topics, while you miss out on those opportunities. This can result in a lower overall search engine ranking and decreased visibility in the eyes of your target audience. Analysis of a website or blog’s content gaps also plays a role in SEO content optimization, keyword research and targeting, and topic groupings or clusters.
Though, for very low competition keywords, you could see results in just weeks. Make sure that you prioritize the most relevant ones and figure out the best course of action to fill in any existing gaps. Long tail keywords with lower search volumes often yield higher conversions, because searchers looking for something more specific are likely further along the sales funnel and looking to make a purchase.
A content gap template is a spreadsheet that helps you organize and track your findings. It should include columns for the topic, keyword, competitor’s ranking, and your website’s ranking. This will allow you to easily see how your website stacks up against your competitors and where you need to improve. Even if MEDIUM TELEGRAM GROUP SEO are the best writer in the world, the world will continue to evolve. Information becomes obsolete, Keywords change over time, and customers’ interests shift. However, if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you must conduct an audit of your content assets, identify gaps, include new keywords, and create content that fills all the gaps that may arise.
This isn’t noted anywhere in their official guidelines, but over the past decade of ranking websites, referral traffic has had a tremendous impact on sales and rankings. This takes patience and the belief that continuing to do the right thing for the search engines and your users will eventually pay off. Based on my past experience, most websites should expect a minimum of six months before they see traction.
- In copywriting and landing page optimization it’s a useful technique as well.
- You need solid content to bridge the gap between the individual steps of the buyer’s journey, from the initial “problem awareness” to the point of purchase decision.
- You’re dealing with filter management, and it’s a little bit more demanding.
- On top of this, you see how you’re ranking for each cluster and keyword.
- I can provide a few ideas of what to look at, but each industry and tech stack has its own challenges.
Make sure your content is captivating, comprehensive and tailored to your target audience interests. As you create a lasting digital marketing strategy, you must remember that there is more to succeeding in the SERPs than following only standard SEO best practices. You must also consider what your competitors are doing and how you can out-maneuver them.
It also helps us to track the positioning of keywords and to know in detail the CPC and competition for each keyword. To do this, copy and paste the URLs of a few relevant top-ranking pages for your target keyword in the top section. Some of these keywords represent relevant subtopics that we missed out and may want to cover. To show that you deserve a place in the top ranking search results, your content needs to be comprehensive. Use the All Intersections filter to only show keywords where multiple or all competing websites rank.
A Tool For Analyzing The Gap Between Words
One of our favorite content development approaches to drive results is to use Ahrefs’ Content Gap tool. Plug in your website and your two biggest competitors’ sites and the Content Gap tool will reveal a list of search queries where your competitors rank well and your site doesn’t rank. Linking to other quality websites can be a great way to increase visibility and drive website traffic. Building relationships with other website owners and bloggers can help you expand your network and improve those rankings over time. Now that you’ve gathered some background information, it’s time to get organized and find resources and tools to do your analysis.
Content Gap Analysis is the process of evaluating existing content on a topic and discovering “gaps” in that content to improve upon. It also helps a brand gain more authority on search engines, steal away competitor traffic, and expand their breadth of knowledge to help their customers. When you have a list, you can then start working your content plan around those specific search queries and fill in the gaps where there isn’t enough content for a keyword. You want each piece of content you create to target a keyword, and your keyword research helps you determine which words or phrases are being typed into Google and other search engines. You want to determine what KPIs are going to be most useful in measuring the success of your content gap analysis. By analyzing existing content, you can identify where your readers may be lacking valuable resources that may buy time.
Are you ready to boost your website’s SEO performance and drive more traffic to your site? How do you know what to write about when it comes to content marketing? What topics should you cover in your niche to attract new traffic, leads, and customers? How do you differentiate yourself from the competition and rise above the din? Be sure to update your content to include any missing keywords that will continue improving your rankings.
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.
There Is A Reason Why You Should Do A Content Gap Analysis
The content people produce is getting higher in quality and companies are investing boatloads of cash into their content marketing strategies. If you have a website that is pulling in a lot of traffic from Google, it is your responsibility to protect that asset from newly created, competing content. The goal is to identify valuable keyword opportunities by not copying but taking insights from your competitor’s targeted keyword strategy. How do you know whether to refresh an existing page or create a new one?
We’ve already mentioned some ways you can manually gather data, such as by entering keywords into search engines. You can also perform a keyword gap analysis using Google Search Console. Competitive analysis is often overlooked in digital marketing strategies, as search marketers instead focus on keywords and backlinks. Without successful competitor intelligence, however, it will be a challenge to really succeed in the SERPs. For your brand to have a strong digital presence, ranking well on the SERPs is nonnegotiable.
If your ranking tool provides a top 20 SERP report, you will not need to track the rankings for each of your competitors. You don’t need to do a complete competitor analysis for this, you can simply try finding topic gaps that you can fill in. With Ahrefs, you can also filter based on many factors and view data in terms of keyword intersection, search volume, difficulty, and more.
Both results are very valuable because you see who you are competing with currently to be ranked but also what your “real life” competition is up to. Most SEO tools offer some form of site auditing and give you an overall score for the site. The metrics below can give you an idea of how much your competitors are investing in technical SEO.
Use your competitor’s performance to set some SMART goals and work backwards from them to create a list of actions to perform on your end. Make a plan that covers the next three to six months, and then reevaluate your chosen pillar. This will give you insights into how aggressive your competitors are when it comes to link building and help you understand how fast a competitor can potentially catch up with your link profile. Personally, I like to use Semrush because of how easy it is to find link and traffic metrics without having to download them into a separate spreadsheet.
In other words, content audits can reveal content on your site that’s underperforming. Then, check out the first page for each of those keywords, one-by-one. No dog and pony show or big sales pitches, we will explore the project with you and if there’s a good fit, we’ll work hard to earn your business. You can even ask your current customers what kind of content was most helpful or what they couldn’t find through interviews or surveys. Ask yourself what your customers are doing as they become aware of your brand, consider your brand, and make a decision with your brand.
However, as we said, they’re automating a process that was already available to experienced Excel users. While they’re all important to your content-building strategy, there are a few things you may want to pay special attention to. It’s now time to start optimizing for this newly discovered keyword opportunities. Use the SEO content assistant to create SEO optimized content that’s able to outrank your competitors.
