In competitive digital marketing, the online battle for visibility is fierce. One of the best starting points for any business looking to drive a competitive advantage in search engine results is to do a keyword gap analysis. A keyword analysis helps you to identify gaps in the online strategy of your website, and find opportunities you might be able to exploit to get more traffic or beat your competitors. By analysing opportunities for better keyword performance, you have a chance to improve your website content, boost your organic search engine optimisation and capture an audience that has not yet found you. In this article, we will discuss how keyword gap analysis works and walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to do it. This way, you too can benefit from the power of competitive gap analysis to increase your online visibility and grow your business sustainably.
Beyond showing you the keywords your competitors are ranking for, a keyword gap analysis should highlight any gaps your business may have and opportunities to fill them. Performing a keyword gap analysis can help any business improve their SEO, boost their organic traffic, and rank higher in the SERPs. Despite its apparent importance, it’s surprising how many digital marketers and SEO experts have yet to perform one. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro in SEO, you’re going to learn everything you need to know to run your first effective keyword gap analysis in this guide. We’re going to walk through the process and chart out how you can use this analysis to improve your rankings and outpace your competitors for good.
Understanding the Basics of Keyword Gap Analysis
But as part of an overall SEO plan, keyword gap analysis can be crucial. Missing keywords are those terms that other similar websites rank for but not you. The reason why keyword gap analysis is so beneficial is that it can point out opportunities for growing organic traffic. When missing keywords are discovered, you can create local, authoritative and trustworthy content, which increases the likelihood that your website will rank higher in search engine results. If you know what keywords appear in your competitor’s content and not in yours, that is a valuable keyword gap that you can address to get a leg up on your competition. Knowing how to perform keyword gap analysis will get you started on the road to performing SEO gap analysis correctly.
This means filling in useless keyword gaps is not the goal of a real keyword gap analysis, but being able to understand the competitive landscape. It involves gaining insights into the search behaviour or ‘search intent’ of your potential visitors and then using this knowledge to find patterns your competitors are taking advantage of. In other words, you’re learning to understand what your audience is looking for, and how to provide it to them in a way that makes your website more relevant and visible on search engines. This basic knowledge is key to making informed decisions about the right kind of content to create and where to direct your SEO energy in order to be successful.
Tools and Techniques for Performing Keyword Gap Analysis
To conduct a keyword gap analysis, you need to make use of tools designed to help analyse keyword gaps effectively and quickly. Digital marketers commonly use tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz to conduct keyword research and uncover valuable insights. For instance, you can compare your website’s keyword profiles with your competitors’ to identify areas of traffic you might be missing, and discover how your competitors are getting talked about more than you are. Knowing the right way to use such tools is key to conducting a successful competitive gap analysis.
Each tool offers you key features that can support your keyword gap analysis: SEMrush can help you get more details about overlapping or competing keywords between you and the other site. They can also find any gaps in the other site’s keyword targeting which could be exploited. Ahrefs similarly can give you competitive analysis around search volume and advertiser competition, or ranking difficulty, for a keyword. Using supertools will allow you to gather keen insights into the tactics of a competitor that can support your strategy. Perhaps more importantly than simply using the tool, though, is understanding how to interpret the data you gather. What happens when you benchmark your ranking against the competitor’s? What makes a keyword more or less competitive? What does a high level of traffic mean? How does it compare to lower volumes? And is there a strategic value to targeting a keyword in your content?
Identifying Competitors and Their Keyword Strategies
Before you start filling in the blanks from varying website traffic levels, however, you need to know who the real competition is for your business. It might not be the companies that share your exact industry or market, but rather those that are also ranking for the keywords that are relevant to your business. Knowing who your competitors are is the starting point for conducting an effective keyword gap analysis. You need to begin by thoroughly analysing the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords to see who is ranking consistently in top positions.
After you identify your competitors, the next crucial step is to mine their keyword grey matter. Identify what they rank for. Scrutinise the SEO templates and contours of their interlocking content. Understand what they’re doing well (and what they’re doing poorly). Perform a little competitive gap analysis to determine what kinds of strategies you can utilise to start targeting keywords they might have slipped on, or what areas you can bolster their efforts by creating even more optimised content for the same keywords.
Analyzing Keyword Gaps and Prioritizing Opportunities
The essence of a keyword gap analysis involves the identification of keywords where you have an opportunity gap (neglect) – that is, keywords where the universe of keywords you rank for in Google overlap only partially with the keywords your competitors rank for whilst you don’t rank for them. This exercise can be undertaken by using a tool that allows you to input URL of your site and your competitors’ sites. A tool like SEMrush’s Keyword Gap will then identify these opportunity gaps where you have a gap, as well as show you what traffic you would be able to secure if you were competing in the identified gaps. This analysis of the keyword gaps requires an increased level of granularity to identify opportunities that are worth focusing on.
The next stage is to rank those gaps on how they should be prioritised: by search volume, by keyword difficulty over some predefined period, by relevance to your business objectives, or you can prioritise by any combination of these factors. Some keyword gaps might have a much higher return on investment than others. By ranking the opportunities detected, you can then really stringently review which keyword gaps deserve your time and effort to promote so that you improve your website’s search queries and, importantly, gain more traffic and appear higher in the rankings.
Implementing Changes and Tracking Results
After you identify the gaps and figure out which words are most important to fill, you must then go in and make changes to your content (and in effect your SEO strategy overall). This can include creating or updating content to better target the keywords that fill your gaps, adjusting and enhancing meta tags, building additional internal links, or otherwise enhancing the SEO of your site. By implementing the changes discovered by conducting a keyword gap analysis in your online content and SEO strategy, you fill the gaps that exist in your keyword strategy for your website and enhance the core elements of your website’s SEO so that you can start rankings for the keywords that can get you the biggest increase in traffic and give you the biggest boost in search rankings. Implementation is where all the value of keyword gap analysis is realised.
Monitoring the results of your keyword gap analysis is as important as performing the analysis itself. This involves tracking the movements in your keyword rankings, organic traffic and other key performance indicators (KPIs) over time. Tracking your website’s performance in Google Analytics and Google Search Console, among other tools, can provide valuable insights into how the changes you’ve made are impacting your website. Tracking these metrics regularly allows you to measure the impact of your efforts and adjust your strategy accordingly. This constant tracking ensures that the benefit of your SEO is realised and that your strategy will react to any changes in the competitive landscape.
Best Practices for Continuous Keyword Gap Analysis
Keyword gap analysis is not a standalone activity, but rather a dynamic process built into your SEO strategy – one that must be continually monitored and adjusted for as the digital landscape around you morphs and evolves. Competitors will come and go, and your SEO budget, possibly, will become more flexible in the times of growth and recession. All this requires a continuous eyeball on the SEO space, knowledge of your competitors’ activities and knowledge of your domination space, so you can adjust to the changes and new opportunities. Remember – if you’re not adjusting and adapting your keyword strategy to reflect the changes happening around you, you run the risk of being bypassed by competitors and, in many scenarios, by people simply keen to find the information they need.
To make this a habit, try doing a keyword gap analysis on a regular basis. This can be every quarter, every half a year, or even every year. The schedule depends on your industry and competitors. We like to advise our clients with regular analyses, as well as ongoing best practices such as: Keeping up to date with industry trends Iteratively taking a look at your competitors Staying consistent with content optimisations based on new insights It’s a good idea to approach keyword gap analysis in a proactive manner — this way, over time, you’ll slowly but surely ensure your site remains as competitive, relevant, and long-term “search-friendly” as possible.
Conclusion
Performing an effective keyword gap analysis is a powerful way to enhance your SEO strategy, improve your website’s visibility, and drive more organic traffic. By understanding the basics, leveraging the right tools, identifying competitors, analyzing keyword gaps, implementing changes, and committing to continuous analysis, you can position your website to outrank competitors and achieve sustained success in search engine rankings. The insights gained from a keyword gap analysis provide a roadmap for optimizing your content and ensuring that you capitalize on every opportunity to attract and engage your target audience. In a competitive digital landscape, mastering the art of keyword gap analysis is essential for any business looking to thrive online.
