Content gap analysis is an indispensable step when creating a content plan. It allows you to find topics that your competitors rank for, and fill in your own gaps on a specific topic in your content plan.
Furthermore, by performing content gap analysis you can diversify topics and avoid publishing similar content.
Using Topic Research, you can check which subtopics are covered on your (or your competitor’s) website in a few clicks.
How can this be done?
- If you don’t know your competitors, go to Organic Research and enter your domain. Click on the ‘Competitors’ tab and get a list of your organic competitors.
- Go to the Topic Research tool and enter a topic you want to check.
- Add your competitor’s domain to see if they have any content on that topic.
- Next, select your location up to a city level and click on the ‘Get content ideas’ button.
- Go to the ‘Cards’ section, and check the green cards - these are the topics covered by your competitors that rank in the top 100 Google results. Add headlines and questions to your favorites (if you want to compete with your competitor for a topic), or vice versa - add the rest as your favorites (if you want to cover topics that your competitor doesn’t talk about yet).
- Repeat this analysis for several competitors using the same topics to get a bigger picture.
- Next, start a new Topic Research and enter your own domain.
- Be sure you are not planning content on the topics you already rank for.
- Sort subtopics by search volume to find the most searched topics, keyword difficulty to see the toughest keywords to compete for, and topic efficiency to get topics with the best SEO potential first. Add grey topics to your favorites to create content about them later (as your domain doesn’t rank for these topics in the top 100 Google results).
Next Steps
When you finish your content gap analysis, you can use the following tactics to create content around the topics you’ve gathered:
- Once you’ve found content gaps to target, you can use our streamlined process to write more SEO-friendly content.
- Start creating content that your competitors don't rank for to get relevant traffic and less competition. Use subtopics as a high volume keyword you want to focus your future content on (use it in title, h1, meta-description, etc.). Select the most relevant questions and answer them in your article to create valuable and unique content. Use questions for your article’s structure (H2, H3).
- Study the competitors’ content and try to outperform them by producing better and more unique content, e.g. create an article on the same topic, but add answers to users’ frequently asked questions.
- Create an SEO-optimized brief for your future article - get actionable SEO recommendations for your future article, find recommended keywords to add to your text, suggested word count for a particular copy, websites to get backlinks from, and more.
- Export your favorite topics in an XLS file.