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 you 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.
- Ranking for top keywords on paid and organic channels translates into more traffic – and more revenue.
- First, make a copy of our free basic-as-all-hell content gap analysis spreadsheet.
- To do so, many companies focus on metrics like Citation Flow which measures the value of a site in relation to how many sites link to it.
- The clearer the picture you can obtain, the better your understanding of your progress will be.
- This is an alternative way of analyzing your content gaps if you don’t like using the visualizations above.
- By answering these questions you can set yourself up for success and have a plan in place to measure and monitor your content gap analysis.
A communications business might instead want to create content about Voice Intelligence and helpful collaboration tools for remote work. And a beauty retailer could generate posts around at-home peels and masks and prebiotic skincare. After you’ve analyzed your main website and any other relevant areas, you can go ahead and analyze your competitors’ content. An SEO competitor analysis report will be crucial for uncovering gaps that exist as a result of them covering certain topics in greater depth than you do. You can carry this out most efficiently by using SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool, as we mentioned earlier. Once you’ve downloaded your content audit analysis template, it’s time to start analyzing the main areas of your website.
The fact HubSpot already ranks in the top 50 likely means the keyword is interesting for them and somewhat related to the page that ranks. One of the strongest SEO signals you can give Google to understand what your website should rank for is topical authority. Adam has a background in journalism and almost a decade of experience in SEO. He’s passionate about data, content and cricket – although not necessarily in that order. There is also the middle ground, the research phase where customers will look at reviews, FAQs and try to learn more about a product or service before converting. There are a million and one ways for you to improve it, make it more powerful, and custom tailor it to your business.
There Are Tips And Tricks To Inform Your Content Strategy
Other tools that you can use for this analysis include Ahrefs, Moz, and Sistrix. If you follow the steps above, from keyword research to clustering, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition. Take the data from the content brief generator (H2’s, People asked questions etc) and create the most comprehensive page on the topic. As a reminder, check out our guide on how to create a brief that’ll beat your competition in our guide here.
While there are many amazing SEO tools on the market, there’s not 1 in isolation that gives you the complete picture for a content gap analysis. A content gap analysis involves auditing what you currently have and then laying out a content strategy that meets users at multiple touchpoints. You can also use SEO tools like SEMrush to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and align these with some new content ideas. In conducting your content gap analysis, you’ll want to identify whether you have content for the Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Success stages of the funnel. Filling content gaps also means that a website is more likely to drive traffic away from its competitors, because it will be providing more relevant information.
SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool helps you to identify keywords that other companies target to drive traffic to their sites and rank in search, but your site doesn’t. This provides you with a list of keywords that could be valuable for you to target and gives you an insight into the type of content your competitors are producing to rank for these. In this section, we’ll look at exactly how to conduct a holistic SEO content gap analysis. Follow these steps carefully, and you’ll be able to identify any significant gaps in your content plan.
From here, you simply choose the best clusters to start with and create pages to match. Next we’ll go through the process of filling content gaps by creating new content. In short, you need to study and get your keywords from websites with a search presence that are relevant to your business. By covering all the important content topics relevant to your audience, you’re in a more secure position. Even during tough economic times, people still search for, and need, content to make buying decisions. For this reason, by finding and optimizing the gaps in your content, you can improve your content’s performance.
In this situation we are going to compare My Swingle’s article on lawncare to its competitors’. For example, it’s easier to use if you’re looking for keywords that you’re not ranking for at all (new content opportunities). It’s possible to filter search queries to look at your competitor’s position compared to yours but it takes some finesse. Furthermore, because we selected the “context” insight earlier on, we can (and should) only filter for the clusters of keywords that trigger informational results. It means we’re doing our content gap analysis without all the noise of looking at transactional pages.
You may also find opportunities for new keywords that you are not currently investigating in your existing content. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to automate this part of the process. But using technology like seoClarity’s Link Gaps and following the steps above will ensure that you don’t waste time reaching out to sites that won’t provide relevant and impactful backlinks.
You will look at data that might even help uncover competitors you did not know existed, such as an exclusively online seller that does not compete with you at all in the brick-and-mortar sector. With SEO it’s important to think of a competitor as any entity that ranks higher than you for your essential keywords, whether or not it is an organization you traditionally consider a competitor. Though it may sound complicated, it’s easier than you think, especially with the right subject matter experts at your side. Hiring a marketing agency can ensure your keyword gap analysis is effective—and even help you implement your findings into your content marketing strategy. So it’s no surprise that SpyFu would also have decent tools for keyword gap analysis — and content gap analysis by extension.
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.
This will allow you to see which domain is ranking well, the number of keywords they are ranking for and the average rank for those keywords. Born and raised in Barcelona, Lidia has been helping businesses reach their audiences in search across European markets, the US and Australia. She has used her background in Business and Psychology to drive organic growth for e-commerce sites, media and SaaS. When you’ve got very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, you need to be doing better than your competitors. “I’d recommend signing up to Smart Insights for a suite of useful tools from planning templates to strategy docs and a variety of other guides to make your job easier.” To rank among the top pages on Google means to overtake another page’s spot.
Prepare Your Plan
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 this matrix it becomes apparent what requirements are not yet addressed by existing content. So, say you’re producing great content, but other sites still rank higher in search engine results. Well, it’s not enough to be “great”, you need to cater to what the search engine wants – and you need to do it better than competing sites. While focusing on short and popular keywords may seem like the way to go, long-tail keywords tend to have less competition. You can take advantage of this and achieve a better ranking than sites only using generic target phrases. However, simply checking your pages isn’t enough – you need to fill those potential gaps as well.
From this report, you can identify any pages on your site that are not ranking well for certain queries. You can then create new content to target those queries and improve the ranking of those pages. Once you have this list, you’ll want to examine it and identify any gaps. This could be content that is missing from your site or content that is outdated or performing poorly. While MEDIUM SEO CHAT TELEGRAM invest heavily in SEO and marketing tactics like keyword research and content optimization, they often overlook this key strategy that can help them gain a competitive edge. The goal of B2B content marketing is conversion at each stage of the buyer journey until, ultimately, the sale is made.
By starting with higher-intent pages, you’re more likely to get quick business results. Like in the ‘card’ view, you can expand each cluster and view all the keywords that can be targeted on a single page. This now means you have a list of clusters with specific keywords for each cluster. We recommend staying within the tool, as you can push clustered keywords directly to briefs from there (more on this below). However, in a given cluster, there are a lot more than 3 keywords that have a similar search intent and search results (which means you need just 1 page for that cluster).
