Many content marketers often hit a creative block when trying to come up with new content ideas.
Despite thorough keyword research and brainstorming, they still struggle to create blog topics that address customers’ needs. While some turn to social media for inspiration, others try different keywords but without success.
To get out of this slump, content marketers can try various strategies, and one effective method is the content gap analysis. When done right, a content gap analysis can help you discover high-quality content ideas, keep an eye on your competitors, and improve your SERP rankings.
But let’s go back to basics. What exactly is a content gap analysis? How can content marketers use it to find winning topics? Let’s take a closer look.
What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
A content gap analysis is when you examine your competitor’s content to find weaknesses or missing pieces in your own content. Essentially, a content gap analysis goes beyond just finding high-volume keywords. It involves discovering relevant content that can enhance your marketing efforts and help guide customers through various stages. This analysis reveals where your content might be lacking in meeting customer needs.
To maximize the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, you might also consider exploring conversion rate optimization strategies to improve your website’s performance.
Content Gaps Impact SEO Performance
When you neglect content gap analysis in Search Engine Optimization, you miss crucial chances to rank for relevant keywords and attract qualified traffic to your site. Your competitors are likely exploiting these gaps to surpass you in rankings and capture your potential customers. By identifying and addressing content gaps, you can:
- Enhance your website’s relevance and authority within your niche.
- Attract more organic traffic for a broader spectrum of keywords.
- Deliver a superior user experience by comprehensively addressing searchers’ queries.
- Position your brand as a leading resource in your industry.
Additionally, understanding the digital marketing strategy for the global market can help you tailor your content to attract a wider audience.
Types of Content Gap Analysis
There are three primary types of content gap analysis:
- Competitor-based content gap analysis
- Topic-based content gap analysis
- Buyer-based content gap analysis
Each approach provides a distinct viewpoint to improve your content strategy. By integrating all three, you can uncover hidden opportunities and generate content ideas that go beyond the obvious keywords.
Competitor-Based Content Gap Analysis
The first method for content gap analysis is competitor-based gap analysis. As the name suggests, this involves examining your competitor’s website to understand their target market, content strategy, keyword choices, and product use cases to see what works for them.
Although it can take a lot of time, especially in competitive fields, the insights you gain are very valuable. Here’s how to do a competitor-based content gap analysis:
Step 1: Identify 5 – 10 competitors in your niche
Before collecting any keywords, identify 5 – 10 major competitors in your niche. Finding direct competitors is easy; you can do a quick Google search or ask your sales team for companies mentioned by potential customers during sales calls.
Step 2: Create a list of relevant and trending keywords
Once you’ve found 5 – 10 organic competitors, the next step is to gather keywords from their websites. Your goals are to:
- Identify the keywords that help your competitors rank higher in search results.
- Find untapped keywords that both your competitors and your content might be missing.
- Compile a keyword list to help your page reach the top of the search results.
Step 3: Group your keywords into topics to find opportunities
After exporting your keywords, group similar keywords under parent topics to find unexplored opportunities. This step provides clarity and allows you to remove irrelevant keywords. Prioritize:
- Keywords are relevant to your audience.
- Long-tail keywords with low to medium search volume.
- Keywords that highlight unique product use cases.
- Valuable keywords drive significant traffic and backlinks to your competitors.
- Keywords with high purchase intent.
Step 4: Remove duplicate keywords and content overlaps
Having duplicate content and keywords is bad for SEO as it affects search engine rankings. After grouping keywords, eliminate any duplicates and content overlaps.
Step 5: Create a new content plan or adjust your existing strategy
With your keyword cluster, develop a content plan. A good content plan organizes the process of researching, writing, and distributing content. It helps you understand what types of content your audience finds engaging and how best to publish it. Your content plan could be an editorial calendar or a roadmap showing the content types you’ll create and how you’ll distribute them.
This is a simple approach to performing a content gap analysis through a competitor-based method.
Topic-Based Content Gap Analysis
Topic-Based Content Gap Analysis is a strategic approach used in digital marketing to identify and fill content gaps in a website’s coverage of relevant topics. By analyzing existing content against a set of key topics that resonate with the target audience, marketers can pinpoint areas where the content is lacking or underperforming. This analysis helps in discovering opportunities to create new, high-value content that meets audience needs and improves search engine visibility. By addressing these gaps, businesses can enhance their content strategy, attract more organic traffic, and establish authority in their industry.
Let’s see how to conduct a content gap analysis between your page and your competitors:
Step 1: Analyze the Top 10 Google Results in Real-Time
Start by reviewing the first ten articles that appear on Google for your target keyword. Ben Goodey suggests this helps you understand what’s currently ranking and decide what to include or exclude in your own content. It also gives you a basic understanding of the topic.
Step 2: Find a Unique Angle for Your Content
After examining the search results, think about a unique perspective or fresh approach for your content. This could be a new case study or an insight into why readers still face this issue. Your article needs a differentiating factor, such as:
- Addressing an unresolved pain point.
- Providing detailed, actionable screenshots, images, or videos.
- Using relatable case studies and examples.
Step 3: Create a Content Brief
A content brief outlines the expectations for the article. It ensures you and your writer are aligned on the style and goals, reducing the need for extensive edits later on.
Step 4: Optimize Your Content for SEO
After writing the article, optimize it for SEO. Here’s how:
- Optimize your title to match the main idea of the topic.
- Ensure your keywords match the search intent.
- Organize the content logically with relevant H2 and H3 headings that answer questions.
- Add internal links to improve navigation and help search bots crawl your site.
- Make sure your content goes deeper than your competitors’ without straying from the main point.
- Write an engaging, search-optimized meta description.
- Optimize sections for featured snippets.
Buyer-Based Content Gap Analysis
A buyer-based gap analysis focuses on identifying the difference between what customers expect and what a company provides. This is done by evaluating content at different stages of the buyer’s journey to align the company’s marketing and sales strategies with the evolving needs of its target audience. Addressing gaps in the buyer’s journey helps customers transition smoothly between stages. Here’s how to conduct a market-based content gap analysis in five steps:
Step 1: Map out the buyer’s journey
Start by mapping the buyer’s journey, which represents the process a customer goes through before making a purchase. This journey includes four stages:
Source: moz
- Awareness stage: The buyer identifies a problem.
- Consideration stage: The buyer explores solutions to the problem.
- Decision stage: The buyer chooses a product to solve the problem.
- Post-purchase: The buyer begins using the product.
Step 2: Identify personas and their pain points at each stage
Next, create personas, which are fictional characters representing your ideal customers. Each persona may have different needs and questions at each stage of the journey. To understand their pain points, use methods like:
- Collecting customer feedback through surveys, interviews, or feedback forms.
- Analyzing customer support tickets for recurring issues.
- Consulting your support team for common concerns and challenges.
- Monitoring social media for discussions, complaints, and questions.
- Reviewing website analytics for drop-offs, high bounce rates, and low engagement.
- Using keyword research tools to identify search terms related to your product.
Step 3: Create a content inventory
Take inventory of all the content on your website, including landing pages, articles, videos, images, PDFs, guides, and in-app resources. Conduct a digital marketing audit on this content and categorize it as:
- Keep: Retain content that drives traffic and backlinks.
- Merge: Combine duplicate content into a more comprehensive piece.
- Trash: Delete content that targets the wrong keywords, is underperforming, or outdated.
Map each piece of content to the relevant buyer stage and persona to see if your content aligns well.
Step 4: Identify content gaps for each stage
After categorizing your content, identify gaps in your content pipeline. Look at your competitors’ content strategies to see how they address customer pain points at each stage and what types of content they use. A good starting point is examining your competitors’ blogs for user intent and targeted keywords.
Step 5: Create a content plan for each stage
Finally, develop a content strategy specific to each stage of the buyer’s journey. This means creating personalized content for each audience segment rather than a generic strategy. Identify short-term and long-term content gaps, then conduct keyword research to create new content or update existing pieces to fill these gaps. You might find that incorporating PPC management services into your strategy can help drive immediate traffic while you work on your long-term content goals.
Conclusion
Performing a content gap analysis allows you to pinpoint chances to outperform your rivals. While you can invest a lot of time in thorough keyword research, it’s wise to analyze what’s successful for your competitors and then surpass it. If you’re thinking about undertaking a content gap analysis, utilize one of the three methods mentioned in this article to discover where your content is deficient and make targeted enhancements.
