The internet is riddled with flaws. Regardless of what you do, there will always be gaps in contentbased on questions and queries that can be exploited with some savvy planning to get your site ranking well.

Using both keyword and content gap analysis, you can create a content roadmap that fills these gaps, making the internet a better, more helpful place for your audience by answering questions that may not have been answered elsewhere.

How to Do an Effective Content Gap Analysis for SEO

What Is A Content Gap Analysis?

The term "content gap" refers to the missing pieces of content that your audience would like to read but has not yet been created. A content gap analysis is the process of determining what those gaps are and developing a plan to fill those gaps in your future content marketinginitiatives. The content gap is primarily concerned with the desires and desires of your target audiences. You can start to see the gaps between the content you create and the content that users on a web browser are searching for by looking at what types of information they want but can't find. Consider the content gap from the customer's point of view. Have you ever entered a specific query in a search engine, only to find that the displayed results answered just part of what you were looking for? Or maybe it didn’t quite answer the question at all, just a related search? That’s the content gap.

Why Is A Content Gap Analysis Important?

There are several reasons to devote time to a content gap analysis. Let's look at some of those reasons and why using content gap analysis as part of your content planning is well worth your time.

It Helps You Guide Customers Along Their Customer Journey

We all want to be effective communicators with our customers, and one of the best ways to do so is through content. A content gap analysis can help identify areas where more content that matches the flow of a customer's journey with your brand can be created. That means you can help customers make a purchase decision by providing them with relevant, timely content that answers the exact questions they are asking at various points along their journey. This makes customers happy and elevates your brand above your competitors.

It Helps You Attract New Customers

Content does more than just move existing leads and prospects through your pipelines. It can also assist you in reaching out to new customer bases and audiences who are unfamiliar with your brand. When you can reach those groups by filling in the gaps, they can join your sales and marketing funnels and pipelines.

It Helps You Rank Better for SEO

Content gaps identify areas and topics for content that have yet to be written. That means there is an inherent opportunity for new SEOrankings and overall SEOscore improvement. You can use the areas of overlap between your content, your competitors' content, and existing content to target specific keywords and rank higher. While considering your content in relation to your competition is part of a content gap analysis, you should still keep the customer in mind and what your new content topics can offer them.

How Do You Determine If New Content Needs To Be Created?

For Keywords That Aren’t Ranking

Poor ranking often indicates that more content is required, but this isn't always the case. Make sure you thoroughly investigate your site to ensure there aren't any pages that could potentially target some of the keywords you discovered in your SEOcontent gap analysis. Why reinvent the wheel when you don't have to?

For Keywords Ranking On Page 4 And Beyond

It's best to go over these pages and see if there are any SEO opportunities. If not, this is a clear indication that you will need to create additional website content.

Content Gap Analysis Strategies

Use Efficient SEO Tools

SEMRush and Ahrefs are two tools that have transformed the way entrepreneurs approach SEO. Similarly, they both provide content gap analysis features.

SEMRush provides a "Bulk Analysis tool," which is essentially the same as Ahrefs' content gap analysis tool. Both tools assist in determining why your page does not rank as high as the competition. All you have to do is enter the URL you're testing, including your own, and it'll give you a detailed breakdown of all the metrics.

It is important to note that both of these tools are paid, but many free tools provide similar functionality.

For one thing, Answer The Public works wonders for comprehending broad-topic questions. For example, here's a diagram of terms generated by tea. Keyword Sheeter is yet another free SEO tool winner.

When you enter a key seed word, it begins to spit out all related keywords. You'll have to filter them to see which keywords work and which don't, but it's a great tool for generating as many keywords as possible.

Scan Google’s First Page

The most obvious way to find gaps is to search what is already on Google's first page.

Assume you want to write a blog post about the origins of high-quality coffee. Look up the following keywords and see what comes up:

Then, one by one, go through the results to identify gaps.

Because there is so much generic content on the internet, creating something unique isn't as difficult as it may appear. Even if you update your old content to fill in gaps, you have a good chance of outperforming the competition.

Revisit Your Old Content

This type of content gap analysis strategy works well for blogs that have previously had time to build up their content library. Many blogs already revisit old content and improve upon it because it works extremely well.

It's also possible that you started the blog as a one-man show. You've probably improved your writing skills and gained more on-page SEO knowledge over time. Similar to editing blog posts a few days after writing them, you may discover many errors in older posts that you were unaware of.

Combine Relevant Content

Do you have several weaker pages that could be strengthened if combined? If the pages are relevant, combining them may result in a single large authoritative blog post.

A topic cluster is frequently caused by monstrous pillar posts.This type of content frequently attracts the most backlinksbecause it provides the most comprehensive information on a topic available.

Always have a primary topic in mind. Yes, combining signals and backlinks from two or more pages improves your SEO. However, combining with unrelated subject matter can backfire if not done correctly. The easier your content is to understand and the faster the reader finds the solution, the better.

Where Are The Content Gap?

A content gap is the space between what users search for on the web and the results they receive. It is essentially a market gap that must be filled in order to fulfill search intent.

What Is A Gap Analysis Template?

A gap analysis template is a graphical tool that compares actual performance to potential or desired performance. A chart can be a useful way to show employees and supervisors where the margins should be in any type of organization, whether it is businessor government run.

What Is The Difference Between SWOT And Gap Analysis?

GAP analysis compares your company's actual businessperformance to a desired level of performance, whereas SWOT analysis assists in determining your company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Conclusion

A content gap analysis assists brands in discovering new areas and topics to rank for that they may not have been aware of otherwise.

It also assists a brand in gaining more authority on search engines, stealing competitor traffic, and broadening their breadth of knowledge to better serve their customers.

After all, the goal of any content marketing strategy is to ensure that your brand is relevant and capable of assisting customers, leads, and prospects in answering questions and finding solutions to their problems.

Check out our blog on content marketing trendsif you are a marketer looking to help your brand grow a successful content marketing program.

You'll learn about the major upcoming trends for 2022, as well as how toimplement them.