How To Do A Content Gap Analysis Like A Pro

Key Takeaways

tons of content on the web gets old and stale over time there are very few true evergreen pieces of content that don't require some sort of updating and improving as time goes on the opportunities you could find from content gap analysis can provide massive seo gains including improved ranking positions and organic traffic in this video i'll take you through the general process of content gap analysis the best tools to perform content gap analysis and how to do it for free the idea of gap analysis is to compare the gap between where a company currently is and where it wants to be so content gap analysis is used to identify gaps within your existing content to help you hit your traffic and search positioning targets this could be either gaps in content topics that you're yet to cover or quality gaps in either your competitors or your own content that you could plug your findings from this process will drive you to either update your existing contents or create brand new content basing your decisions on a well-informed strategy that you know will work i'm about to take you through a step-by-step process to content gap analysis but before i do make sure to subscribe to our channel and hit that little bell icon to make sure you never miss a new upload the first type of gap analysis should be performed when you're looking to create new content the idea is to identify gaps in your existing content so that you can plug these gaps with quality well-researched content there are two approaches to content topic gap analysis in seo competitor-based and market-based competitor-based content gap analysis involves building a list of keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you're not market-based analysis is about getting a crystal clear idea of who your audience is as well as their needs and desires then using keyword research to find which topics and questions are not answered in your article page or resource let's say you have a popular article about the best exercise bikes so you assume that the majority of the existing readers of your blog post frequently work out from home however you run a poll and it turns out that 40 of your readers are new mums 30 are avid gym goers and only the last 30 percent are those who already work out from home so on to this information you begin keyword research and you are able to find a ton of keywords surrounding the benefits of working out from home and quick workouts you can do with limited equipment that both you and your competitors fail to discuss creating new content to include these topics is therefore likely to provide a massive boost to that website's traffic and conversions now let's look at how you can find gaps in the topics you've already covered on your blog the first process is a little laborious but it's great for generating a ton of content topic ideas based on popular search terms around a barrage topic and that's by using answer the public searching for exercise bikes will be greeted with a seemingly endless selection of suggested topics in visually appealing but not necessarily the most practical graphics thankfully we can just download the terms as a csv of course you'd need to manually sift through these content ideas to find those that you haven't already covered and carry out detailed keyword research around those topics but it's a great place to start if you're looking to identify gaps in your content and generate some initial ideas thankfully there is a simpler way we've created a free spreadsheet for you to use with formula ready to go which will help you automate the process you can make a copy of this spreadsheet from the link in the description below first we need to find all the keywords that you're ranking for and all those that your competitors are ranking for i'll be using the free moz keyword explorer all it requires is a free moz account start by entering the urls for the articles already published around a particular topic we'll use our keyword research content as an example enter the url into the keyword explorer change the location to your targets view the top ranking keywords and click export do the same for your competitors content ranking for the same keyword and export those keywords now paste your keywords under the your keywords column and your competitors keywords under the competitors keywords column immediately you will see some competitor keywords highlighted as green those are your content gaps the keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not our template is super basic there are a million and one ways for you to improve it make it more powerful and customize it to support your specific research for example you could add a ranking column right next to the volume column right now we know that a competitor is ranking for a keyword but we have no idea what position they are in so this could be beneficial data for you to analyze now i've shown you how to do a basic content gap analysis i want to take you through how to use ahrefs tool built specifically for this research you'll find the content gap analysis tool within their site explorer we're going to take an example from the search results for comfiest beanbags and use greatbeanbags.com say we want to discover what are the keywords competitors that are already ranking for this search term also rank for so we'll enter our domain in the site explorer and click the content gap report from the menu on the left add the articles you are competing against in this example i just chose to and you'll be faced with a list of all the keywords each competitor ranks for that you don't and their ranking position another tip to better your results is to set the intersection setting to one target this will show unique keywords that one competing site ranks for but the others don't it's how you can find often easy opportunities for you to target with your contents i mentioned earlier that you can also use content gap analysis to improve existing content by identifying gaps in the actual content itself for example if you have an existing article about a topic with a high search volume that isn't performing as well as it could you can use this analysis to identify gaps in the article that need to be improved to do this we'd want to look at the contents that's already ranking well in google let's go back to our best exercise bikes example we'll enter this into google search scroll down to the organic results and open the top ranking posts to check for thoroughness how in depth does the content go into each point subtitles are there any subtopics within the article that you've missed in your own media how many images have they included are there unique photos taken by the author or stock images are there any embedded videos looking for these kind of details will inform how you approach updating your own content to get it ranking in the search results we have a more detailed video guide to refreshing old content which is actually a really great way to quickly boost your website's seo i've popped a link in the description below your content marketing strategy will become much clearer with a good content gap analysis and it could be the only edge you need to stay competitive within the search results the next step is to create quality content that is fully search engine optimized so click the screen now to find out exactly how to do this [Music]