TL;DR: What is a content gap analysis?
A content gap analysis is the process of identifying missing or underperforming pieces of content on your website that are preventing you from ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
By comparing your content with that of your top competitors and competitor websites, this analysis helps uncover opportunities to create new, valuable content assets that can attract more organic traffic and improve your website's search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
For beginners: Content gap analysis in SEO
A content gap analysis involves scrutinizing your existing content and web pages to find areas where they fall short compared to your competitor websites.
This process helps you identify topics you haven’t covered yet or those that need more depth.
This kind of analysis or audit an essential part of a robust content strategy, enabling you to fill in the gaps with fresh content that meets the needs of your target audience and aligns with user intent.
Content gap vs. keyword gap analysis
While a content gap analysis focuses on the broader picture of missing content across your website, a keyword gap analysis zeroes in on specific target keywords that your competitors rank for but you don't.
Both are crucial for enhancing your visibility in search engines, but they serve different purposes.
Keyword gap analysis helps you discover untapped related keywords and opportunities, while content gap analysis guides you in creating comprehensive content that aligns with user intent.
Why a content gap analysis matters for SEO
Identifying missed opportunities and underperforming content
Content gap analyses help you identify missed opportunities by highlighting topics that your competitors cover but you don’t.
They also pinpoint underperforming pieces of content on your site—those that aren’t ranking well or driving traffic.
By addressing these gaps, you can create content that better meets the needs of your audience and attracts more organic search traffic.
Role in a comprehensive SEO strategy
A comprehensive marketing strategy isn’t complete without a content gap analysis.
It informs your content creation and optimization efforts, ensuring that you’re targeting the right list of keywords and providing valuable content that satisfies user intent.
This type of competitor analysis also aids in discovering top on-page SEO practices across your industry (and even coming up with new content ideas and tactics for social media), helping you understand what content is working for your competitors and how you can do better.
The insights you gain from a content gap analysis—and the work you choose to take on afterward—can:
Impact your search engine rankings
Enhance user experience across your site
Affect your organic traffic and conversions
Impact on search engine rankings
When you create content that addresses content gaps, you’re more likely to rank higher on the first page of SERPs—especially when you use appropriate internal link building practices.
Search engines like Google reward web pages that offer comprehensive, relevant content by ranking them higher, leading to increased visibility and the ability to drive traffic to your site.
Enhance user experience through content optimization
Your content gap analysis should focus not only on boosting rankings, but also on enhancing the user experience.
By ensuring your content is relevant, engaging, informative, and sharply fulfills search intent, you meet the expectations of your visitors, which can increase engagement, reduce bounce rates, and increase conversions.
Affect organic traffic and conversions
Content gaps can lead to missed opportunities in driving organic traffic and conversions.
When potential customers search for information and your website doesn’t provide it, they’re likely to turn to your competitors.
By filling these gaps, you can work toward capturing this traffic, guiding visitors through the buyer’s journey, and increasing conversion rates.
How a content gap analysis works
High-level process for conducting a content gap analysis
Conducting a content gap analysis involves several key steps, starting with identifying the tools and methods you’ll use.
Here’s a high-level look at the process, and we’ll walk through each step below:
Prep your SEO tech stack
Analyze your competitor’s content
Assess search intent and audience needs
Using SEO tools or platforms for analysis
Make sure you have the right tools in place in your marketing tech stack to streamline your content gap analysis.
SEO tools like Clearscope, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are invaluable for content gap analysis.
These tools allow you to compare your website’s content against your competitors, identify gaps, and find target keywords.
For example, SEMrush’s Keyword Gap Analysis tool lets you compare competitor websites to see where you’re missing out.
And Clearscope’s Content Reports feature allows you to know exactly how to optimize your content to meet search intent more sharply than your competitors.
Analyze competitors' content to find gaps
Analyzing your top competitors’ content is crucial in content gap analysis.
Tools like Ahrefs’ Content Gap feature help you see which keywords your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t.
This allows you to discover what topics and keywords are driving traffic to their sites and plan your content accordingly.
Assess search intent and audience needs
Understanding user intent is key to effective content gap analysis.
By assessing what your audience is searching for and what type of content they prefer, you can ensure that the new content you create meets their needs.
This involves analyzing search queries, user behavior, and audience demographics to tailor your digital marketing strategy.
LEARN MORE: Search intent vs. keyword optimization: Which is best?
Evaluate your current content
Evaluating both your content and your competitors’ rankings is essential in identifying where you’re falling short.
Let’s look at how you do that for your own content.
Auditing your own content for gaps
Start by conducting a thorough content audit of your website.
Identify which pages are underperforming and compare them with your competitors’ top-ranking content.
Use tools like Clearscope, Google Search Console, or Google Analytics to assess metrics like organic traffic, content health, content decay, bounce rates, and keyword rankings.
Identifying keyword opportunities and missing keywords
Keyword research is a vital part of content gap analysis, helping you find opportunities to target new keywords.
Your content library should target many keyword types, including long-tail and short-tail keywords and keywords with transactional, commercial, and informational intent.
A quick note on long-tail keywords: They’re often less competitive and more specific search queries that can have a higher conversion rate. Identifying and targeting these keywords can help you capture niche traffic that your competitors might be overlooking.
Keyword research tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Clearscope Keyword Discovery are essential for finding relevant keywords—and depending on the tool you use, keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t.
These tools provide data on search volume, keyword difficulty, and other metrics that help you prioritize which ones to target and add to your strategic keyword list.
Best practices for effective content gap analysis
Complete regular content audits
Optimize for different types of content formats
Create high-quality content that aligns with searchers' intent
Incorporate visuals and improve readability
Monitor and adjust based on metrics
Address pain points for your audience
Align content creation with the buyer’s journey
Do regular content audits to keep content fresh
Performing regular content audits ensures that your content remains relevant and up-to-date.
This practice helps you continuously identify gaps and optimize your content marketing strategy accordingly.
Optimize for different types of content formats
Different types of content—such as blog posts, case studies, white papers, and landing pages—serve different purposes.
Optimizing these formats based on audience needs and user intent ensures that your content is effective and engaging.
Create high-quality content that aligns with searchers' intent
Good content that aligns with user intent is more likely to rank well in search engines.
Ensure your content is comprehensive, informative, and meets the expectations of your audience to drive better SEO performance.
Incorporate visuals and improve readability
Visuals like infographics, videos, and images can make your content more engaging and easier to digest.
Improving readability through clear formatting, concise language, and effective use of headings can also enhance user experience.
Monitor and adjust based on metrics
Continuously monitor your content’s performance using metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and bounce rate.
Adjust your content marketing strategy based on these insights to ensure ongoing improvement and effectiveness.
LEARN MORE: What is SEO monitoring?
Address pain points for your audience
Identifying and addressing the pain points of your target audience should be at the core of your content gap analysis.
By providing solutions to their problems, you create valuable content that resonates with them and improves your SEO performance.
Align content creation with the buyer’s journey
Ensure that your content aligns with the different stages of the buyer’s journey—from awareness to decision.
This alignment helps guide potential customers through the sales funnel and can boost your website’s SEO performance.
Common questions about content gap analyses
Q: Are SEO content gap analyses overrated?
While some might consider content gap analysis as overhyped, it’s an important piece of a successful SEO strategy.
Essentially, this should be part of overall market research for your industry to develop a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
Properly executed, a gap analysis can provide deep insights into where your content is lacking and how to improve it.
The benefits of conducting regular content gap analyses outweigh the effort required, as it can give you clear direction for your overall strategy.
Q: How can a content gap analysis improve my website's SEO performance?
A content gap analysis can improve your website’s SEO performance by identifying missed opportunities, optimizing your content marketing strategy, and ensuring that your content meets the needs of your audience.
By filling in these gaps, you can drive more organic traffic, improve search engine rankings, and increase conversions.
Q: How much work is a content gap analysis?
The amount of work involved in a content gap analysis can vary depending on the size of your website and the depth of the analysis—but this is no small task.
However, the right tools can help automate or streamline parts of your workflow.
And after completing a few content gap analyses, you may eventually develop an analysis template that works best for you an your team.
Additional resources
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content from Google Search Central
A guide to Google Search ranking systems from Google Search Central
Why a content gap analysis should be part of your SEO strategy from Search Engine Land
