By definition, gap analysis compares the present content being offered to the desired content by the audience and seeks to find what is required to fulfil the gap between the two.
A good real-life gap analysis example can be the time when you probably spent many restless nights as a content marketer just thinking about what to write. While SEO keyword research aids in the discovery of suitable content for your site, you can't help but question if there’s anything you might have missed that brings in traffic.
This term is often referred to as Content Gap Analysis by various SEOs and marketers. Content gap analysis helps in the development of content marketing strategies that boost traffic, conversions, and value for customers and site users.
The general conception about content gap analysis is that it is the discrepancy between what people search for and what they find online.
According to this hypothesis, the gap symbolises a topic about which people want to learn more, but there isn't enough content to meet the existing demand.
Thus, to make it clearer, we have shared a detailed guide on what is gap analysis and how to fix the content gap in content marketing.
What is Content Gap?
A content gap is a link between your current content performance and the desired results/goals of your content strategies. It is the material you will need to create next in order to meet your content objectives.
The process of reviewing and identifying the material required to bridge the "gap" between the current and future content is known as content gap analysis.
It is essentially a gap in the market that needs to be filled in order to fulfil search intent.
You can assess whether a piece of content has to be brief and basic, long-form, as pillar material, and so on by looking at the search intent of each piece of information. You may simply establish which gaps need to be filled by quantifying the type of material.
Why is it Important to Fill Content Gap?
A content gap in SEO or content marketing is important for two reasons:
#1. Communicating effectively with potential customers through their customer journey.
What many people fail to understand is that the content gap is the gap between a company and your customers, rather than the gap between a company and your competitors.
This gap indicates how well your content strategy fulfils your customers' needs at each stage of their journey. Any content strategy aims to generate the go-to material for prospects and customers.
The content gap analysis also assists you in determining whether your content is appropriate to convert leads into customers.
It is critical that your material responds to the questions of your prospective clients as they go from the awareness stage to the decision-making stage.
Even well-timed social media updates and email sequences can assist you in this regard.
#2. Creating SEO Opportunity
Content gap analysis can help a company by creating some SEO opportunities. This process involves identifying and quantifying strategic gaps in the content strategy of your target audience.
This is why you must ensure that your content ranks higher than your competitors for specific keywords. You must conduct a content gap analysis to uncover high-value content and subject opportunities to boost your search visibility, particularly for topics for which you do not already rank.
The content gap analysis gives you an idea of what words other people are using to describe a product or service in their marketing copy.
It helps SEO in two ways:
- To begin, you are aware of the keywords for which you are performing well while your opponent is not. You can take advantage of this situation to gain an advantage over them.
- Second, you learn about the keywords for which you are not ranking. This will assist you in developing the appropriate content marketing tactics to fill the void and rank for those keywords as well.
What is Gap Analysis?
Content gap analysis is a systematic, quantitative process to identify and quantify gaps in the content marketing strategy of an organisation.
It has been used by many companies like The New York Times, LinkedIn Group Inc., IBM Global Communities or Microsoft Corporation to identify opportunities for improvement in their SEO efforts.
By looking at the competitors' content and identifying their marketing strategies, content gap analysis can help grow organic traffic and improve the buyer's journey.
A content gap analysis may be done for various types of content:
- Webpages.
- Blog posts and articles.
- Social media content.
- Landing pages.
- Ebooks and downloadables.
How to do a Competitor Gap Analysis?
Content gap research entails more than merely reading through your blog entries to check if any content ideas are missing.
Here, we have shared the step-by-step procedure for identifying obvious gaps in your content and filling the gaps in your content strategy.
#1. Identify the goals that you need to achieve.
Knowing what you want to accomplish is important before starting the gap analysis. That will help make sure you get it right when doing the gap analysis later on.
Identify the content you want to create and identify what your competitors are doing.
The first step in identifying gaps or opportunities for improvement is to find out what your competitors have done and how they did it!
Determine your goals and ask the questions:
- What is it?
- Is your content not bringing up enough leads?
- How do you solve the pain point of your customers?
- Is it not ranking good on the search engine results pages?
- Is it bringing random traffic to your website?
#2. Know your target audience
When doing a content gap analysis, the next thing you should do is find out who your target audiences are. What are their objectives and preferences?
In the process of doing a competitor gap analysis, you will be able to find out what kind of content your competitors are publishing on their websites. You can start by looking at the pages that rank first in Google and see how they compare to yours.
If you already have your buyer personas created, great; move on to the next step. Begin with consumer segmentation if you haven't already.
This data is available in Google Analytics' audience section. You can create customer personas using data from your audience.
The analysis will assist you in learning more about your clients to better address their demands with your product and content. This is also where you may learn more about your consumers' pain points so that you can generate content to help them overcome some or all of them.
#3. Map out buyer's journey
The customer journey is the steps a user takes through your website from when they first discovered it to their first transaction.
A customer journey should comprise all interactions with your company, such as a website visit, Twitter/Facebook engagement, or a trial sign up. From this point of view, the content gap is the touchpoints between your customer and your brand for which you don't have information.
Your motive is to create a plan for your own business based on the many services and/or goods you provide.
#4. Conduct Deeper market research
A market research survey will assist you in identifying your audience's most pressing problems, worries, pain points, requirements, and ambitions.
This feedback will subsequently be used to drive your website content strategy.
Create a basic, anonymous survey with Google Forms to distribute to your target group. You can ask various questions in your survey, such as:
- What are your concerns regarding [topic]?
- What is the most difficult aspect of [subject] for you?
- What previous solutions have you tried?
- Why did these strategies fail to work for you?
- What are the top three qualities you seek in a [service/product]?
#5. Perform a content audit
While your company is likely to post or distribute material across several platforms, you'll want to ensure that the information on your website corresponds with the buyer's journey and does not leave gaps for potential buyers to fall through.
The best way to get a complete picture of where your content strategy is, the current performance of content produced, and how to improve underperforming content is by conducting quantitative research.
You should set out some goals here before performing a content audit.
For this, you need to create a template for your content audit. A content audit template may be offered by SEMRush, Hubspot, Lucid graph and other providers as well.
Crawl your website for all URLs and see how (or if) they correspond to each level. Then you can assess whether you are lacking content that connects one stage to the next.
Here are the quick steps to perform a content audit for the business:
- Setting up the business goals like improving your SEO results, audience engagement, or conversion rate.
- Collect your content's URLs and catalogue them by buyer's journey phases, content kind, author, and other categories that are significant to you.
- Use various metrics to assess content performance.
- Draw the action plan for your content and business goals.
#6. Analyse competitor content
Keep in mind that researching your competitors' content for a content gap analysis isn't about doing a keyword gap analysis so you can target them as well. Rather, the goal is to identify more pain points/problems, worries, or areas of interest to your clients that they are not getting from your competitor's site.
The best way to start is by performing keyword research and analysing what keywords your competitors are ranking for. You can use SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to find your competitor's ranking keywords.
By using these keyword opportunities methods, you may uncover opportunities, analyse the amount of effort required to rank for specific keywords, and receive perspective on your existing keyword performance.
#7. Analyze the first page of Google
The main reason for examining content gaps is to help your content do better. The majority of businesses publish content intending to rank on the first page of the search engine.
So looking at what's already ranking on Google's first page is the greatest way to locate content with gaps.
You can either look for the competitor's content and subheadings manually by using the search engine or the Scalenut SEO Assistant. Head to the Scalenut SEO Assistant and enter your main keyword. Choose the location and hit enter. Scalenut report will give the following metrics for the top 20 ranking pages of your main keyword:
- Total word count
- Number of headings
- Number of images
- Content Grade
If you want to analyse these headings separately, switch to the editor tab and look for all the pages individually in the 'Competition' tab.
In the Competition tab, you can see all the pages with word count, content grade, and readability. Click on 'Expand All' to check all the relevant subheadings.
The content gap includes:
- The freshness of material: When was the content published or updated?
- Thoroughness: Does the content provide you with all of the pertinent information?
- Usability: Can you read and understand what's on the page easily?
- Is this content worth sharing because of its wow factor?
Use all the relevant NLP terms that the Scalenut Assistant tool recommends to improve your content's relevancy.
You can sort these NLP terms based on unused, important, and the terms to be used in headings.
Conclusion
Conducting a content gap analysis is critical for identifying gaps in your current content strategy so that you may build new content assets that drive traffic and funnel consumers to the point of purchase.
It also allows you to discover fresh keyword opportunities depending on what your competitors are (or are not) targeting.
The content gap analysis helps you get more customers. You can then improve your conversion rates. This is because the success of digital marketing relies on attracting the right customers to the right content at the right time in order to increase conversions.
In this article, we discussed about what is gap analysis and how to overcome the content gaps. If any further doubts or questions pop in your mind, feel free to reach out to us.
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