What is Content Gap Analysis?
Content gap analysis is the method of analyzing existing content on your website and finding opportunities to update it.
In simple words, this process analyses the content and finds gaps in your content development strategy to make improvements.
Content gap analysis helps you make better content for your website, improve your website performance in SERPs, enhance user experience, and generate revenue.
In CGA, you compare the existing content performance with the desired one. Then these gaps are filled by adopting various strategies either by optimizing the current content or creating new content.
A content gap analysis often investigates the following content related to your website:
Blog posts or articles
Social media content
EBooks, PDFs, and other downloadable content
Web pages
Online courses
Why is content gap analysis important?
Running a content gap analysis is crucial for a smooth SEO strategy. It helps in the following ways:
Strengthen your SEO strategy
Finding and filling the gaps in your content marketing strategy will help you improve the overall SEO of your website.
Everyone wants to rank on the first page of Google, but without proper content - that meets the search intent of the searchers – it is almost impossible to rank.
Optimizing the content for your audience will give your visitors a platform to stay on and satisfy them by answering their queries.
Better connection with your targeted audience
Content gap analysis helps you find loopholes in your content. You can fill these gaps by adopting a good and optimized content strategy.
When you satisfy your audience by answering their queries or what they are looking for on your website, you strengthen your ties with them.
They used to stay on your website more and will return when they need relevant information.
Improved website performance
Filling the content gaps will help you reduce your bounce rate and increase the average time on the page. That will gradually help you build your authority in your industry.
Increased conversions
When people find your business online, there are possible chances of becoming more customers. The content gap analysis will also help you in getting more sales.
Fix all the problems related to your content throughout a buyer’s journey. It will flatten a customer’s journey and enable them to move through the funnel easily.
Outrank your competitors
Outranking your competitors must be part of your content marketing strategy.
When you audit your website to find content gaps, you must fill those gaps by considering your competitors.
Discover all the topics your competitors have or haven’t talked about.
Find all the content opportunities and improve your search visibility by writing on them.
What are the different kinds of content gaps?
The content gap may exist in three forms on your website:
Keyword gaps
Keyword gap analyses the keywords on your competitor’s website to see which keywords work best for your competitor but not for you. Based on this, you may adopt a content-writing strategy.
In short, keyword gap analysis looks for the gaps in keywords to drive more traffic to your website.
Many helpful tools will help you identify the keywords your website is lacking while your competitors are ranking for them.
Topic gaps
Like keywords, topic gap analysis looks for the topics your website hasn’t covered but your competitors did.
There are three things you need to remember while performing topic gap analysis:
Does your website cover all the topics in your niche?
Is the content on your website useful for the readers?
Have you adopted a comprehensive approach to providing content for the readers at each level?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no, " your website has a topic gap.
This is an opportunity to fill the gaps by providing fresh and well-researched content on this topic.
Media gaps
A media gap indicates the lack of visual content in your website content. Websites with more visual content perform much better in SERPs than those without visual elements.
According to a survey report released in 2022:
“86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.”
There are many benefits of using visual elements on your website:
They add value to your site by enhancing user experience
Increase onsite time
Make the reader's journey smooth by using visual guides
Help visitors better understand the content of a website
Google also loves images and videos that are optimized for search
How do you do a content gap analysis?
You can perform a content gap analysis manually or by using different tools.
Manual audit
In a manual audit, you need to look for the gaps in your own content by comparing it with the others ranking on the first SERP of Google.
Suppose you want to rank for a keyword, “How to perform an SEO audit”. You will type the query in Google and will look for all the results one by one.
Like:
When was the content last updated?
Is it thorough enough?
Is it worth sharing?
Does it provide all the information you were looking for?
You can create or update your existing content based on all these questions.
If the websites, ranking on the first page have old content that has not been updated lately, or if it has some missing information – you may fill those gaps by creating your own content.
Make sure not to replicate your competitor’s work, rather look for the ideas, keywords, topics, and gaps.
Content gap analysis by using tools
You can speed up your content gap analysis by using various tools. These tools will give you plenty of valuable information you can use to improve your content strategy.
SEMRush
This tool can help you speed up your content gap analysis process by finding the content that has gaps.
This will tell you about the keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you are not.
You will also learn about the keywords you may use in your content marketing strategy and the type of content your competitors use to rank for.
Use Semrush Organic Competitor Report to identify your competitors and the keywords they are ranking for. Use the Keyword Gap Tool to enter your and a competitor's website URL.
This will show you a report of Shared keywords. Go to Missing to find the keywords your competitor is ranking for, but you are not.
Now Export this data and sort out the keywords you think will be helpful to write for.
Pick these topics one by one, and manually search for what others have done to make this piece of content better.
Ubersuggest
This one is the most straightforward tool used for content gap analysis. Just go to the homepage of Ubersuggest and enter the URL of the website you want to get a report on.
Here you will find the keywords for which competitors are ranking, but the website you have entered or analyzed isn’t.
Now, you need to add those keywords to your existing content and update it.
Make sure not to use it haphazardly; instead, focus on creating quality content where keywords are used naturally.
You may also create a fresh piece of content by choosing the keywords you have found in Keywords Gap.
Google Search Console
You can also use Google Search Console to see the content gaps. Just log in to your GSC account and go to the Search Results at the left side of the page.
Now enter the URL of your desired pages or the pages you think are not performing well.
Here you will find a list of all the keywords a page is ranking for (not necessarily on the first page).
Even you will find the keywords this page has not included in its content but are showing up there.
So what you need to do is optimize this piece of content by adding a portion related to these keywords or write a separate post on them.
Ahrefs
The content gap report of ahrefs is also helpful in finding and filling the gaps in your website content.
You can see a comparison report of up to ten competitor’s websites. If you do not know about your competition, go to the Competing Domains option on the left side of the page.
Enter the URL of your website and get a list of competitors in your niche.
To see the gaps, enter your website URL at the bottom after your competitor’s websites. Now hit the Show Keywords button.
You will find a list of all the keywords your competitors are ranking for, but you are not.
Go through all of them and extract the keywords you think might be helpful to you.
Write a piece of content on these topics or update your existing content with helpful material.
Things to remember while doing a content gap analysis
You must keep a few things in mind while performing content gap analysis.
Content auditing
You do not only want to see your competitors work to fill your gaps, but you should also audit your own site's content to see where the gaps still exist.
A regular site audit will help you see the topics or keywords you haven’t covered.
Regular content gap analysis of the website
Some people think that doing content gap analysis once will help them. This is not true.
The information you have added to your content may get outdated after six to twelve months.
So you need to update your content regularly. This is only possible when you do a content gap analysis.
It will make your content fresh and updated and increase your chances of ranking higher in SERPs.
Keep it relevant
While performing content gap analysis, make sure to be relevant to your niche. It is not wise to just take advantage of gaps just because you find them. If it is not suitable or relevant to your business, you can leave it.
For example, if you are a kid's clothing supplier and find keywords related to men’s clothing while doing CGA - it will make no sense to write content on men’s clothing while you are a supplier of kid's clothing only.
The bottom line
A content gap analysis should be part of any SEO campaign because it finds the gaps in your content and provides opportunities to fill those gaps.
That provides potential opportunities for your website to rank higher in SERPs.
You can perform content gap analysis manually or using several free or paid tools.
Analyze the competitor’s keywords and see which keywords or topics you haven’t covered.
Update your content that is already ranking but has gaps, and lastly, identify the gaps in the content of other websites that are already ranking and cover this information in your content.
You can do this by updating the existing content or creating a new piece.
See content gaps as opportunities to drive more sales, attract new audiences, and increase traffic to your website.