How To Do a Content Gap Analysis | Brafton

A content gap analysis is an important arrow in the content marketing quiver. Not every organization conducts these analyses, though. While a gap analysis can seem like a lot of work, there’s a good chance you do many of the steps involved anyway. It’s just a question of bringing all the actions together to find out how you can refine your content strategy.

What Is a Content Gap?

A content gap is something missing from a website, blog, app or other platform. It’s an unaddressed topic that a target audience is looking for but can’t find. Low-quality existing content can create a gap if it lacks depth or doesn’t fully satisfy user intent. Gaps can also arise if there’s a topic that a competitor covers, but you do not. 

Creating great content is key to brand building, and there are many benefits to be had by publishing landing pages, blogs and other assets that capture search intent, inform your audience and use on-brand messaging. But it’s impractical to expect a content marketer or writer to organically address every topic and keyword opportunity that would meet all audience needs and maximize SEO performance. That’s why gap analysis is key to content marketing.

What Is a Content Gap Analysis?

A content gap analysis involves identifying missing or underperforming content on a website by comparing it to competitor content and audience search intent. This analysis helps reveal topics, keywords and questions that your audience is looking for but which your site doesn’t cover sufficiently. Effective content gap analyses enable you to establish a content matrix for creating new content and improving existing pages to attract more traffic, satisfy more readers and improve search engine rankings.

It’s important to note that this kind of content audit isn’t just for your own site. A fully formed content strategy likely involves performing a gap analysis on your own site and a competitor analysis for the sites of other businesses in your field. Doing this allows you to identify content that your site isn’t covering but the competition’s site is, and also to capitalize on their weaknesses, ranking high where they aren’t. This might involve periodically looking for missing content on your site as a whole, as well as conducting a more targeted page content analysis for an individual page or blog post. 

Why Content Gap Analyses Are Important for SEO

A content gap analysis doesn’t only benefit your SEO strategy, but SEO is the major impetus. Keyword research often guides gap analyses, and by including more keywords in your content, you’ll naturally address more topics, making more valuable content for more readers.

An SEO content gap analysis means focusing primarily on what keywords a site isn’t hitting, and this provides the most tangible results for content marketers. By looking at the search volume of relevant keywords, organizations can see what people are searching for, and whether their site — or their competitor’s — is doing an effective job of providing that information.

Effective content gap analysis in action

Consider an automotive repair shop. Maybe website traffic has been down this quarter. The marketing team performs a keyword gap analysis and discovers the site ranks high for brake repair, windshield replacement and some other automotive services. However, the team identified gaps in comparing their site to competitor websites. 

The competition ranks high for tires and related keywords. If it’s Q4 and the shop is in a region that experiences cool falls and cold winters, then people will be searching for winter tires, tire replacement and tire storage. Filling content gaps by creating more assets centered on tires will improve search results and narrow the gap with other websites.

How To Analyze Your Content (and Strategy) for Gaps

Here are some steps for performing a content gap analysis:

1. Audit Existing Content

The content audit serves as the objective, data-backed foundation for a content gap analysis. Keyword research can tell you the best topics to write about, but without an audit you won’t know how effective your existing content is at ranking for those keywords. Content auditing can identify internal gaps and pinpoint outdated, redundant or underperforming assets that require refreshing, optimization or archiving.

Doing this effectively requires systematic tracking. This starts with compiling a detailed, systemized inventory of every content asset, such as in a spreadsheet or keyword tracking tool. Key metrics tracked can include the primary keywords targeted, the associated hyperlinking structures, the original publication or last updated date and classification by target persona. You can aggregate this performance data using analytics and SEO tools, such as Google Analytics, Semrush and Ahrefs. 

You can analyze organic traffic volume, the current keyword ranking position and engagement metrics, including bounce rates, conversion rates and average time-on-page. Conducting content audits periodically, such as every six to 12 months, can identify how well your content strategy is capitalizing on keyword opportunities. 

2. Research and Analyze Competitors

Examining competitor content can show you what’s currently successful in your industry. This step establishes a necessary external benchmark. Emulating the greats in any field is sensible, but keep in mind the goal here isn’t to copy your competitors who feature more prominently on search engine results pages (SERPs), but to learn what topics and formats are being rewarded by search engines so you can find gaps to exploit.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Identify competitors: Find your business rivals (those selling similar products or services) and digital rivals (those competing for the same keywords and audience attention).   
2. Benchmark keywords: Use SEO tools to run a competitive keyword gap analysis. This pinpoints the keywords for which your rivals rank better than you do and the ones for which you don’t rank at all.
3. Analyze top pages: Look at the competition’s highest-traffic pages. Are they writing general information blogs? Product reviews? How-to guides? What they focus on shows you which strategies are working for them.
4. Check authority: Look at which competitor pages have the most high-quality backlinks (links from other reputable websites). Pages with many natural backlinks are seen as authoritative and highly relevant by Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. This can help you focus your content creation on effective link building.
5. Examine traffic quality: Quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality. If a competitor ranks first but gets very few clicks, their content might not actually be satisfying search intent. This is a high-value gap — you can create ‌better content that grabs more traffic, even if you rank slightly lower. 

3. Identify Keyword Opportunities

If you’ve audited your own site and your competitors, then you already have the keywords you should target. However, you’ll probably have a long list of keywords, not all of which you can or should prioritize. Some might result from services or products your competitors offer but you don’t. Others might be stray keywords that search engines think relate to your business, but don’t. And there may be instances where the keyword difficulty is so high as to make targeting those phrases impractical. 

By sorting through all these keywords, you can prioritize the ones that fill your site’s most pressing gaps efficiently and offer informational value to your audience.

4. Learn More About Your Audience

Of course, to bring value to your audience, you must know thy audience, as Plato might have said, were he a content marketer. If your organization has done any kind of market research, that information can be helpful here. You can also include short surveys at the bottom of your content or as part of email newsletters; these can be as simple as “How did you like this email/blog?” with, “A Lot,” “A Little,” and “Not at All” as the options.

But it’s also valuable to know what else your audience is searching for. Examining the SERPs of related keywords can reveal what other phrases interest your readers. This can be especially helpful for discovering long-tail keywords. 

5. Map the Content to the Buyer’s Journey

Content mapping connects your website to the customer’s buying process, ensuring you deliver the right message at the right time. This helps you guide prospects toward a purchase in a smooth and natural way, making your marketing much more effective. Classifying your existing content into three categories — bottom of funnel, medium funnel and top of funnel — can help create an ordered process of what assets to serve to which potential customers. 

6. Reappraise Your Content Regularly

All content eventually loses its ranking and traffic. This is called content decay, and reviewing your assets regularly can prevent this from being a problem. Reassessment is a vital competitive step that ensures your content stays current, relevant and ranking high on SERPs. The same SEO tools you already use can be helpful for periodically investigating existing content and determining if you need to optimize it.

Creating Great Content Is a Process, Not a Result

Because of content decay, no asset remains effective forever. The occasional content gap analysis — of your own site and those of your competitors — can keep your content strategy focused and beneficial. But don’t be afraid to try new things and play with the tools you have, or to reach out for help if you want it.