A content gap analysis is an essential step to understand which content is missing or underperforming on your website or digital channels. This makes you aware of where your content strategy falls short and identifies the opportunities to optimize existing content or create new content that enhances user experience and boosts SEO performance. Conducting a Content Gap AnalysisPerforming a content gap analysis is a crucial step of any content strategy, whether the goal is to improve search rankings, offer more resources to an audience, or better align with business objectives.
Here are the steps to perform a content gap analysis:
Step 1: Define Your Goals
However, before diving into the content gap analysis, it’s important to know your goal. Want to drive more traffic? Improve lead generation? Enhance customer engagement? Having specific analysis objectives helps you stay focused on the right things at the right time.
Examples of content goals:
- Ranking on certain Keywords or topics
- Teach your community about current issues.
- Make it easier to market or advertise your goods/services.
- Improve SEO metrics such as page rank or domain authority
Step 2: Make a Content Inventory
The first actionable step you need to take to conduct a content gap is to identify what content you already have. You have to figure out what content is out there, how it’s performing and how the content aligns with your goals.
A content inventory tells you what you already have, here’s how to do one:
- Inventory all existing content: blog post, articles, landing pages, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, etc.
- Organise your contents: Segregate them by topics or themes that are relevant to your business.
- Assess performance: Analyze such metrics as traffic, engagement, bounce and conversion rates, and SEO rankings to see what’s working in the all-time, evergreen, and topical categories.
- Evaluate relevance and quality: Verify that any available content is current, accurate, and coincides with the current goals of your business.
Step 3: Review Your Competitors’ Content
Competitor analysis is required to find content gaps. They probably address subjects you haven’t or haven’t covered extensively. Use competitive research to identify areas that your competitors are good at.
How to analyze the content of your competitors:
- Find out who your competitors are: See what other businesses are in your industry and who ranks on SERPs for the keywords you are targeting.
- Conduct keyword research: Using tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Moz help you identify which keywords your competitors rank for and the content topics they write about.
- Assess the quality of their content: Review their blog posts, landing pages, and other types of content. Judge their quality, tone and presentation to see if you can create a better discussion topic around them.
- Identify gaps: Create a list of topics covered by your competitors that you don’t cover. These gaps are opportunities for you to make new content.
Step 4: Define what your audience/members want
Know what people are searching for in your niche. The objective is to ensure that content answers your audience’s most significant questions and adds value to them. You should analyze the content gaps by studying what your audience requires that you currently don’t fulfill.
How to determine fair punishment for offenders:
- Keyword research: Use keyword research tools (e.g. Google Keyword Planner, Answer the Public, Ubersuggest) to find out what search terms your audience is entering. Identify high volume, low competition keywords that you are not aiming at yet.
- Monitor social media: Keep an eye on social media channels, forums and reviews to understand the sort of questions your audience has, problems they are trying to solve and the type of content they share.
- Poll your audience: Reach out to your customers or website visitors to find out what types of content they would appreciate. You can do this by using polls, surveys, or even feedback forms.
Step 5: Identify Content Gaps
At this stage, you have data for existing content, competitors, and audience needs so it’s time to identify actual content gaps. These are topics you’re missing out on coverage or your existing content isn’t rich enough or optimized.
Types of content gaps:
- Topics/keywords you are missing: These are topics your audience is searching for but there is no content on your site.
- Underperforming content: Content that exists, but fails to produce results in the way that it should due to outdated information, shallow focus, or insufficient optimization.
- Content format gaps: Maybe your competitors create videos, infographics, or podcasts, content types that you lack. These are content formats that can be critical to engaging your audience better.
- SEO content gaps: Where your content ranks low or isn’t showing at all for relevant keywords
Step 6: Create an Action Plan
After identifying the gaps in your content you have to come up with an action plan to fill those gaps. Ensure this plan is in-line with your greater content strategy and objectives.
How to create an action plan:
- Gaps should be prioritized: Prioritize the gaps based on how much each gap will impact the success of the desired outcome. E.g., One that can induce a lot of traffic or conversions, focus on high priority gaps.
- Create new content: Plan to write new pieces to cover the gaps in your topics. It could be writing blog posts, creating landing pages, or generating video content.
- Optimize: If you have content that is underperforming, update it. Fill out the depth, update the old, tweak for SEO performance.
- Monitor performance: After filling the content gaps, keep a close watch on the performance of your new or updated content. Tweak as necessary to make sure it’s served its purpose.
Step 7: Measure Success
Once you have filled in the content gaps asses if your hard work is paying off or not. Such as monitoring relevant KPIs:
- Organic traffic
- Keyword rankings
- Bounce rate, time on page, or other engagement metrics
- conversion rates (if relevant)
Make adjustments to your strategy as necessary, iterate your content based on feedback from users, and keep doing regular content gap analyses to ensure that you are staying ahead of competitors and serving the needs of your audience.
Conclusion
Performing a content gap analysis is a key part of any solid content strategy. It allows you to uncover missed opportunities, optimize your SEO and develop content that really speaks to your audience. By systematically evaluating your content, analyzing competitors and listening to your audience’s needs, you can keep your content competitive and maximum value.
Content gap analysis should be a continuous process. A few months later, it is time to check your content strategy to make sure you are up to date with the changes, audience needs, trends and SEO algorithms.
