How to Do Content Gap Analysis
One of the most important guidelines to running a successful website is to ensure you have fresh, unique content that is valuable to your visitors. Making your own content is an incredibly important part of retaining visitors and giving them something unique, something they can’t get anywhere else. By doing so, you are encouraging them to come back and re-engage with your website!
Table of contents:
- So What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
- Why Should I Do a Content Gap Analysis?
- How to Do a Content Gap Analysis?
- What are Some Good Tools to Use?
- Content Gap Analysis Can Bridge the Gaps in Your Website
This article will explain what the content gap is, show you the importance of content gap analyses, and how to complete them with several different tools, ensuring success with your new content. So, keep reading to find out, how to do content gap analysis.
So What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
In order to understand what content you might want to consider writing, you need to be able to analyze what’s already out there and see what content is lacking. A content gap analysis does exactly this – it identifies ‘gaps’ in popular search queries and allows you to fill the niche that is there. By finding these gaps, you can more effectively plan and position your content for the biggest effect, thereby filling a need and getting traffic to your site at the same time! This is the most effective way to plan future content and meet emerging market demands.
Content Gap Analysis is a great way to find the content niche on your market. Finding the content your competitors do or do not have on their site gives you the possibility to deliver valuable content to new potential clients.
Why Should I Do a Content Gap Analysis?
Being able to effectively plan and execute content that fills market demand are the ultimate reasons why you should know what is a content gap analysis and how best to leverage them. When you fully understand what the content gap is, you will always have a plan ahead of you and always know where you’re going with your site’s content. This will allow you to get unique content to the people who need it and encourage them to stay at your website for an extended period of time. Simply, it’s finding holes in the market and filling them with content your visitors desperately want! Here are some of the benefits to executing this strategy well:
- Visitors will have fresh, relevant content that appeals to them.
- They will be convinced that you know what they need, boosting retention and word-of-mouth advertising.
- It will give you better SEO rankings as more site back-link and share.
- It will give you direction and goals, allowing you to better hone your content to perfection.
What Information Can Content Gap Analyses Provide?
One of the most important things to consider when looking into proper content gap analysis is what you get from doing them. With a successful glimpse into how your market is operating, you will immediately gain numerous benefits that would otherwise be inaccessible to you.
New Topics
The most obvious benefit of content gap analysis is the ability to see what articles need to be written. If you’re a pet grooming service, for instance, and you notice that there is no good article anywhere about the best way to trim your shy dog’s nails, writing that content for the internet is a no-brainer idea that will pay off in the long run! Predicting and reacting to the market is essential for content creators of all kinds.
New Keywords
Not only topics but keywords are a huge way to improve the overall responsiveness and retention of your website. With content gap analysis you can see what keywords are currently in use – and which are not being used at all. This has obvious benefits! If you are one of the first to use a given keyword or phrase, you can immediately start building brand recognition and association with that keyword.
Competition Keywords
Content gap analysis will also allow you to see what the competition has in store for you. Simply by looking at the landscape of content in front of you, you will immediately be able to see the competition’s most important keywords, allowing you to react instantly. It’s always best to use the best keywords – so why not include some of the ones from your competitors?
New Content Types
Just like finding new topics to create content about, content gap analysis will also allow you to see if the particular content you’re making is still relevant and what new things you can do to attain more visitors. If you’re solely a video creator, for instance, you might consider adding some articles to your site, or vice-versa!
Information is key to a long-lasting website and knowing all you can is essential to move forward.
How to Do a Content Gap Analysis?
Finding out what is a content gap is only the first step. One must learn how to actually complete them as well! This is a simple process that involves a few steps, but after you complete it you will have a guideline that will help you and your website move forward.
Step 1
The first step of the process is one of the most important. This is where you need to analyze the content you currently have to see not only what keywords and articles you are ranking for, but how people engage with your content and determine if they stay or leave your site. Retention rate is a critical variable here. This step will give you a baseline to determine the overall success of the analysis.
Step 2
This step will have you choosing from a variety of SEO tools, like Ahrefs and SEMrush, in order to precisely measure certain variables, so make sure you choose one that you like and that has extensive breakdowns of all the variables you will need moving forward.
Step 3
Start with the competitor analysis and see what your competition is up to. For the purposes of a content gap analysis, you will specifically be looking for what things they write on their blog, the types of content they produce that give them high search rankings, and any other relevant variable that might help your situation. This should give you a list of possible keywords, topics, and more that will align with your content gaps.
Step 4
This should give you a great direction for your site already – the gaps in your content can be filled by what you see your competitors writing, and the gaps in the market that neither you nor your competitor has filled can also be worked on at this stage. You should have a lot of potential work simply from this process!
Step 5
Remember that this is an ongoing process – you are never truly ‘finished’ with a content gap analysis because the market will always be shifting and changing, causing more and more gaps as time goes on. Always make sure you’re tracking your market and the influence of the content you create!
What are Some Good Tools to Use?
One of the important facts of the matter to consider is that using a tool (or tools) to properly conduct a content gap analysis is essential. Using a tool will allow you to have access to more information than you thought was necessary before, but will turn into very important data that will ensure your success. Here are two such tools to use and how to use them for content gap analysis.
SEMrush
SEMrush offers a versatile platform to analyze data and is a responsive, comprehensive option to perform content gap analysis.
Step 1
Head to the main dashboard of SEMrush and input the site you want to work with. In most cases, this will be your own website.
Step 2
After inputting a website, click the Positions tab on the left side of the screen.
Step 3
This will give you a comprehensive outline of the keywords your site is currently using. Hit the “Export” button in the top right in order to save this list to your disk and analyze it later with a different program (like Excel).
Step 4
Now, hit the “Competitors” tab on the left-hand side of the screen. It will populate a similar list with your competitor’s pages.
Step 5
This list can be manipulated in much the same way as the one above – look through all the data, export it with the button on the top, or tally it in any way you choose! This list of competitor data will be crucial when planning the next direction for your website.
Ahrefs
Like SEMrush, Ahrefs is an industry standard and is perfectly capable of helping you analyze the content you are trying to find gaps with. It’s easy to set up and work on and is a very powerful tool in your arsenal.
Step 1
Start by loading up Ahrefs and simply putting your site into the domain box.
Step 2
Then, hit the “content gap” tab on the left-hand side of the screen. You will see the following boxes where you can input the websites of your competitors.
Step 3
Once you hit “show keywords” Ahrefs will populate a table with all the relevant data that you searched for! This page can give you an incredible wealth of information, allowing you to plan content accordingly.
Content Gap Analysis Can Bridge the Gaps in Your Website
It’s easy to see why content gap analysis is so important to websites. By performing this simple action, you can immediately get relevant statistics for your site and a roadmap of where to move going forward. Lots of the time, websites are not great at tracking the needs of their customer base, but with the proper analysis, you can immediately see where your strengths lie. Proper content analysis is crucial for website longevity and after reading this article, you’ll know exactly how to do it!
