There Are Gaps In Your Search Engine Footprints
In essence, a content moat provides you extra protection between your business and the unknown. When you have topical authority, it also means a shorter time to rank (TTR). Google trusts your website and will reward you quickly because it wants to show the best results. In a world ruled by algorithms, SEJ brings timely, relevant information for SEOs, marketers, and entrepreneurs to optimize and grow their businesses -- and careers. Many marketers and business owners make the mistake of focusing on “money” pages in order to push the sale, or informative blog articles to draw in readers. If your competitor’s funnel is more or less the same as yours, see what content they’ve created to lead users from one stage to another.
Tuff can help you with every step of the process, from performing a keyword gap analysis and determining the best course of action to creating content that outranks the competition. Conducting a content gap analysis is key to finding holes in your existing content strategy so you can be sure to create new content assets that generate traffic and funnel users to the point of purchase. When consulting with businesses, we have found that many have a poor target keyword list which is either not detailed enough or poorly structured. This spreadsheet will show you how to create a comprehensive target keyword report and review your performance to help you identify new SEO and content marketing strategies. At Smart Insights, we use this spreadsheet as part of our SEO strategy and it helps us deliver over 80% of the half a million unique visits we get per month to our website, generated through organic search. To do a more advanced content gap analysis using these free methods you can use excel or google sheets and input relevant data you’ve gathered.
This will give you an idea of just how much new content is needed moving forward. It’s also crucial that you use a content audit template because it will allow you to identify gaps in your current strategy. First, it helps you make sure you aren’t missing any gaps when it comes to content. Second, it allows for optimal organization of your newly found information (including topics and keywords). You must cater to important viewer questions, and draw out various options you may be considering.
You’ll also be allowed to identify new keywords based on what your competitors are targeting (or not targeting). MEDIUM SEO TELEGRAM COMMUNITY reveals areas of opportunity where you can create new content or improve existing content to increase rankings and traffic. They both are powerful keyword analysis tools that can provide valuable insights into the performance of your website and help you identify any content gaps in the process. Both platforms also provide detailed data on top competitors in your industry, enabling you to compare their performance against yours.
Take advantage of these opportunities to maximize your traffic and solidify your content funnel. Then, you can determine whether you are missing content that bridges the gap between one stage and another. Use Google Forms to create a simple, anonymous survey to send to your target audience. But this creates gaps where people who are still considering various options may fall through the cracks.
After all, tools like Afrefs and SEMRush simply automate a process that you can perform manually using these programs. While many brands set out to employ some of the latest SEO strategies to capture this traffic, they neglect a key part of the puzzle. You cannot just try your best to optimize your material without also taking into account what others do in their own online strategies. To really succeed online, you must be able to outsmart competitors and uncover new opportunities to improve rankings. You can use competitive analysis and competitor intelligence to find new aspects of a strong digital strategy that you might have otherwise overlooked.
Updating your article to include these not-so-much discussed topics will provide a massive boost to that article’s traffic and conversions. The first three steps in that sequence can involve a single button click. If you’re in eCommerce, it’s especially important to explore how your competitors are managing their faceted navigation. Analyze your PageSeed Insights scores for mobile and desktop to get an easy idea of how much your competitors are investing in web performance optimization (WPO) on their key pages. Analyze how many links your competitors had 6 or 12 months ago and calculate the percentage of growth.
Content Gap Analysis Is Important
This will show unique keywords that one competing site ranks for but the others don’t. It’s how you can find real unique (and often enough easy) opportunities for you to improve your content. In my opinion, Ahrefs’ content gap tools are far superior to SEMRush’s and you’ll see why quite soon. Remember, once you’ve identified your gaps you’ll want to implement a scalable content strategy to pull in all the potential wins you spot. It’s also very insightful to see your current organic competitors based on the keywords you rank for. SEO GROUP LINK might give you an idea of what Google thinks your page is all about.
How Do You Incorporate Your Findings Into Your Digital Marketing Strategy?
Contact us today and we can help you with a free strategy session to get you on the right track. Creating content that provides visitors with all of the information they require means a higher dwell time, lower bounce rate, and increases the likelihood of conversions on your web page. It enables websites to gain insight into how successful a marketing or SEO strategy is. Download out the top 20 SERP report in Excel, the spreadsheet should include the below columns, however, if they don’t you will need to VLOOKUP the missing data from appropriate data sources. However, if it seems like a lot of work for you to do alone, you can always get a helping hand from professionals in achieving a higher SERP ranking. Being able to generate traffic from popular websites like Pinterest, Facebook, Reddit, and major news outlets is one of the most powerful ways to supercharge your SEO.
There are obvious phrases like brands and models of shoe that all competitors will be targeting, but what about the niches? There will always be gaps in content based on questions and queries that can be exploited with some savvy planning to get your site ranking well, regardless of what you do. All you have to do is plug in different domain names and you’ll be presented with a list of keywords that each site ranks for that you do not. “Keyword Gap” and “Bulk Analysis” (as shown below) are most useful for our purposes. It does exactly what you’d imagine—allows you to see what types of backlinks your competitors are receiving that you’re not. Just like Ahrefs, SEMRush has various gap analysis tools for you to try out.
While several years ago you could post content without having to worry about too much competition in your industry, today the race to reach the top of the rankings page is more competitive than ever. Your content strategy should also involve targeting keywords by season and region. If certain terms including “Christmas” start to spike from November through to the end of December, preparing content to target related keywords could be beneficial. Brands may publish or share content on a variety of platforms, but website content must at least be in line with the buyer’s journey and keep up with potential customer gaps. You can then determine if there is missing content that fills the gap between phases.
Before you start your keyword gap analysis, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and who you are competing with. Your goals could be to increase your brand awareness, generate more leads, or boost your sales. Your competitors could be direct rivals in your niche, or indirect ones that offer similar solutions or target the same audience.
We’ve covered what a content gap analysis is, why it’s important, and, unfortunately, why most marketers struggle with it. Despite the obvious benefits of a content gap analysis, most marketers come up short in the process. By finding and filling in content gaps, you open your site to more potential buyers.
That’s why we spend as much time on keyword gap analysis as we do on topic gaps. The topic research option and keyword gap tool can make gap analysis magnitudes simpler. There are two main types of competitive intelligence that you will want to use as you build your digital strategy. It comprises uncovering your online competitor brands and looking at their keyword targets, rankings, and content strategies.
Either of the cases above may surface opportunities for new or updated content that also improves your overall SEO performance. However, they just don’t start with competitive SEO gains in mind — it becomes an additional but very welcome side benefit. A similar or related gap analysis would look at content needs vs your typical marketing/sales funnel to see where gaps may exist and need to be filled with new or updated content. This process is often used in SEO to determine what content needs to be developed in order to compete with the top-ranked competitors in the same industry or topic niche. Evaluating your website content against top competitors in organic search should be an ongoing aspect of your website or blog development.
Now, let’s review your SEO performance so that you have something to compare against your competitors later on. My favorite way to do this is using a spreadsheet, so I’ve provided an empty template of my gap analysis for anyone to use. You can also prioritize which opportunities you should focus on by filtering the keyword gap results. Go to the Positions filter, Competitors, and choose to view only the terms that they are ranking for in the top 10 or 20. If you are using Semrush, you’ll go to the left menu and use the keyword gap tool. As per the clustering data, you should be able to see clusters and keywords you’re not ranking at all for.
Take advantage of any SEO software tools that fit your needs and budget, and maximize the competitive gap analyses and insights they can provide. Of these extra Frase tools, the GSC Content Analytics feature is most directly applicable to finding content/topic gaps. Frase works with early-stage content (pre-published drafts) and also existing content that you can bring into the platform (via live URL import) for further analysis and optimization. For competitive SEO gap analysis, Semrush provides a Keyword Gap Tool.