How to do a full Content Gap Analysis

Welcome to our ultimate guide on conducting a deep content gap analysis. This is essential for any business that wants to enhance its online visibility and achieve topical authority within the industry. Identify and fill content gaps to better serve your audience and outperform your competitors. The following are the steps you need to take to do a comprehensive content gap analysis.

Introduction

Content gap analysis is all about finding the missing parts of your strategy in content: areas where your competitors are talking but you are not or areas where your audience is interested but you have not addressed that. By doing this, it improves your website's relevance and authority in its niche.

Step 1: Know your Competitors

Start your content gap analysis by pulling up a list of your major competitors. Major competitors are the websites ranking well for your targeted keywords and the websites that serve a similar audience to you.

How To Identify Competitors

• Keyword Research: Use Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Keyword Planner to check who ranks for your target keywords.
• SERP Analysis: Manually look up your core keywords in Google and note the significant ranking sites.
• Industry Knowledge: Use industry knowledge to list well-known competitors.

Step 2: Make a List of Competitor Content

Once you have identified your competitors, the next thing to do is build a list of their content. This includes blog posts, articles, videos, and all content they employ to communicate with customers.

Tools to Be Used

• Ahrefs Content Explorer: Use this tool to find top-performing content from your competitors.
• BuzzSumo: Discover popular content through social shares.
• Manual Browsing: Visit competitor websites and manually list their main content pieces.

Step 3: Analyze Your Current Content

Before you can identify gaps, first, you need to know the content that you have. Go ahead and audit the content you've been doing—what do you have so far?

Doing a Content Audit:

• Create a Spreadsheet: List all current content, including titles, URLs, topics, and publication dates.
• Analyze the Performance: Perform a scan on how well each one is doing by using Google Analytics. Some of the statistics you should consider include page views, bounce rate, and the average time on the page.
• Categorize Content: Tag the content into categories of certain topics.

Step 4: Finding Content Gaps

With that accomplished, and now having a clear view of the competitors' content and what you have in your content inventory, it is time to identify gaps. Look for the subjects your competitors are writing on that you haven't covered or areas where your content is underperforming.

How to Recognise the Gaps:

• Keyword Gaps: Use Ahrefs or SEMrush to compare the keywords your site ranks for with those your competitors rank for. What this will help you do is pick out those keywords that they are.
• Topic Gaps: Compare the topics covered by your competitors to yours. Look for subjects that are missing from your content strategy.
• Content Performance Gaps: Find high-performing content on competitor sites that covers a topic you have but has better engagement or higher rankings.

Step 5: Rank Content Opportunities

Not all content gaps are equal: first, work on the ones most likely to have an impact and be relevant to your audience.

How to prioritize:

• Search Volume: Focus on gaps with high search volume keywords.
• Relevance: Make the topics highly relevant to your audience and business goals.
• Competition: Measure the competitiveness of the keywords. Sometimes, less competitive gaps present themselves; in this case, it would be wise to target them to make ranking easier for you.

Step 6: Content Planning

Develop a new content plan that addresses prioritized gaps in content and should include subject matter, format, and creation timeline.

Creating a Content Plan:

• Content Calendar: Develop a content calendar that outlines how you will schedule the creation and publication of new content.
• Content Briefs: Prepare detailed content briefs for each new piece of content, including your target keywords, main points, and SEO instructions.
• Resource Allocation: Allocate resources such as writers, designers, and marketers to ensure timely content production.

Step 7: Produce and Optimize Content

Start working on the new content according to your plan. Make sure all your pieces are of high quality, engaging, and optimized.

Content Creation Tips:

• High-Quality Writing: Focus on creating adequately researched, well-articulated, and relevant content that delivers real value to readers.
• SEO Optimization: Place your target keywords naturally within the content; this should be implemented even on meta-tags, headers, and images.
• Visuals and Multimedia: You can spice up your content with such visuals as images, infographics, and videos to make it look attractive to readers.

Step 8: Promote Your Content

Creating content is only part of the battle. Promote your new content to make sure it gets in front of your audience and drives traffic.

Promotional Strategies:

• Social Media: Spread the content across all the applicable social media platforms.
• Email Marketing: Share your new content with your list of email subscribers.
• Outreach: Reach out to bloggers and industrial websites and share your content or even ask them for a link.

Step 9: Monitor and Adjust

Finally, see how your new content performs and make the necessary tweaks to have it stay on the right course. Use analytics to follow the most essential things and optimize your strategy.

Monitoring Tools:

• Google Analytics: Track traffic, bounce rate, and other engagement behaviors.
• Ahrefs/SEMrush: Monitor keyword rankings and.
• Feedback: Engage with your audience to determine what works and what doesn't.

Conclusion

A comprehensive content gap analysis is a powerful way to boost your site's topical authority while making sure you're fulfilling your audience's needs. This process takes place with a systematic identification and filling of content gaps so that one can always be ahead of their competition, presenting valuable and relevant information for traffic and engagement.

Read more about establishing the topical authority of a site and how to optimize your content strategy with our Ultimate Guide to Topical Authority in SEO.

With this kind of comprehensive guide, one can identify and fill the content gaps that exist in your website to make it remain useful for the target audience and, therefore, competitive.