Keyword gap analysis is a powerful tool that helps you identify the keywords your competitors rank for that you might be missing.
By finding these keyword gaps, you can enhance your SEO strategy, outperform the competition and achieve better search engine rankings.
In this article, I'll walk you through mastering keyword gap analysis in six steps.
What you will learn:
- What keyword gap analysis is, and how to do it
- Why you should perform a keyword gap analysis
- What to do once you have identified relevant keywords
- How to scale your content strategy with AI to improve rankings
What is a keyword gap analysis?
A keyword gap analysis compares the keywords your website ranks for against those of your competitors.
This analysis helps you identify keyword opportunities that your competitors rank for, but you do not, revealing gaps in your SEO strategy.
By uncovering these keyword gaps, you can enhance your content to target these missing keywords, ultimately improving your search engine rankings and driving more organic traffic.
This process is crucial for staying competitive in your niche and ensuring your content aligns with search intent.
Why perform a keyword gap analysis?
Performing a keyword gap analysis helps identify valuable keywords your competitors are ranking for that you're missing. This allows you to uncover new content opportunities, boost search visibility, and enhance your overall SEO strategy.
It’s also useful for refining your content focus. For example, a keyword gap analysis might reveal underperforming keywords on page 2 of Google. Updating these articles and optimizing for missed keywords can help improve SERPs.
This helps you prioritize content creation, i.e., what to focus on first to get the best ROI.
Also, perhaps the most underrated benefit is that it helps you better understand search and audience intent and gaps in your content.
It helps improve topic coverage so that readers get the answer they want when they click on your website—which is exactly what you and Google want!
You want each session to fulfil the search intent. When you do this consistently, you get happy readers who come back for more.
That's how you establish your site as an authority in the eyes or readers and search engines.
How to do a keyword gap analysis—6 steps to follow
Okay, now that you know what a keyword gap analysis is, let’s discuss how to do one.
Follow these six steps, and you’ll be on your way to out-competing the competition in no time.
1. Choose your competitors
You can’t perform a keyword gap analysis without competitors. A competitive analysis reveals competitors' keywords.
I suggest choosing multiple competitors, ideally 2-3, with strong organic rankings in your niche.
For example, let’s say you have a budgeting app that helps people manage their finances.
You can find the most relevant competitors by searching phrases such as:
- “Budgeting app for students”
- “Budgeting app that connects to bank”
- “Budgeting app for couples”
Google's autocomplete feature is a great way to go about this.
When analyzing the SERPs, list all relevant organic competitors that rank for core keywords. Avoid paid search results.
When choosing competitors, narrow your list to companies with similar products or shared business interests.
For example, while Forbes may have an article on how to budget, you’d be better suited to choosing a competitor budgeting app as one of your competitors.
Choosing competitors vs. large publications helps you identify unique and more valuable keywords for better ranking opportunities.
It also ensures the content gap stays relevant and does not include keywords not in your niche.
2. Identify keyword gaps
You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner to discover new keywords and identify keyword gaps.
Enter your competitor's URL and find keywords they rank for.
Keyword planner will help you discover what keywords your competitors are using and, more importantly, have success with.
While this tool is free to use and can be effective, it can be laborious and time-consuming—you will need to cross-reference keywords and topics manually.
Instead, you can use a dedicated tool such as Surfer's Topical Map to reveal competitor keywords and topics, automatically cross-referenced and categorized based on whether you have used them in your content.
By connecting the Topical Map to your Google Search Console account, you can see at a glance which topics you have covered and which topics you need to cover.
You can also look at the Map to easily visualize your keyword gaps.
3. Prioritize relevant keywords
Whether you’ve used keyword planner, Surfer Topic Explorer, or a mix of tools to identify keyword gaps, you need to filter and prioritize relevant keywords.
You can identify the most relevant keywords by prioritizing them based on the following criteria:
- Business potential—how relevant the keyword is to your business?
- Search volume—how many people are searching for a keyword a month?
- Traffic potential—what is the traffic potential for the keyword?
- Ranking and keyword difficulty—how easy it is to rank for a keyword or phrase
Ideally, you want to target keywords with traffic potential that are not too difficult to rank for and, most importantly, have business potential.
For that, you need to rely on a dedicated tool like Topical Map that shows these important keyword metrics.
4. Group keywords into clusters
Keyword clustering involves grouping relevant keywords based on search intent and SERP similarity.
This allows you to create one page instead of several. It also helps avoid content cannibalization and unnecessary keyword overlap.
Moreover, grouping relevant keywords and content helps build content relevance and can contribute to topical authority.
It’s a good idea to create a spreadsheet of your keyword research to decide the search intent and SERP similarly to make grouping them easier.
There are four main types of search intent:
- Informational—wants to learn more about a topic or product, e.g., “what is a budgeting app?”
- Navigational—a specific destination, e.g., “NerdWallet website”
- Commercial—interested in making a purchase, but more research is needed, e.g., “best budgeting apps for money management”
- Transactional—looking for a specific purchase, e.g., “buy Emma budgeting app”
Below is an example spreadsheet for keyword research on budgeting apps.
It includes the main, seed keyword and other related terms.
In the above example, the long tail keywords “What is the best budgeting app for free” and “best free budgeting app” share commercial search intent. These can be grouped.
You also want to take into account SERP similarity, which refers to similar search results in the SERPs.
In our example, “budgeting app that connects to bank” and “Budgeting app without bank sync” do not share SERP similarity. The queries are the opposite of each other.
Mixing SERP similarity is not a good idea.
This will make it more difficult to rank for relevant keywords and may confuse your readers.
If they click an article on the best budgeting apps without bank sync, for example, and the top result includes a budgeting app that requires bank sync, the user will quickly become frustrated.
Manually clustering your keywords can be a tedious process.
However, as you've already seen by now, Surfer can automatically do that for you.
5. Create high-quality content
You can spend all the time finding the right keywords and packaging them up nicely in content clusters, but if your content falls short, you will struggle to rank.
Instead of writing content for writing content's sake, each piece of content you publish should provide value to your readers. It should be helpful.
According to Google’s Helpful Guidelines, you should:
- Focus on people-first content
- Avoid creating content only for search engines
So, while SEO is still important and should guide your articles, it’s not the be-all and end-all—you can’t cram your article with keywords to steal the featured snippet. The same applies to updating and refreshing content.
If you have content from before the August 2022 update, you may need to devote more attention to content updates and refreshes. This will help you maximize ranking potential—you can also add new keywords discovered using your gap analysis.
When updating content and when creating new content, you need to add keywords in four key pieces on the page to ensure solid on-page optimization:
- URL—the location of the web page
- Meta title and description—the title and description that appears in search results
- Headings—the sub-topics to split your article into digestible chunks
- Body content—the bulk of your article
You can use Surfer's Content Editor to streamline the process.
The content editor recommends related keywords based on your main keywords and makes suggestions on how often to include them in your content.
You can then manually add these keywords to your content, or use the Auto-Optimize feature and have Surfer do it for you.
The Content Editor will also automatically generate a fully optimized meta title and description for you.
Leverage AI to scale content
Manual content writing can be tedious and inefficient, especially if you plan on covering a large topical map to establish topical authority.
You can use AI to scale your content, allowing you to publish more high-quality content in less time.
Google does not care whether or not AI is used to create content.
Instead, what matters is that your content satisfies Google's helpful guidelines—that it is people-first and not created exclusively to manipulate search engine rankings.
How you use AI tools will determine the quality of your content.
Instead of seeing AI as a replacement writer, use it to create a first draft and edit from there. This lets you get the bulk of the information down without the extra leg work.
With Surfer AI, you can create a fully optimized article draft in less than 20 minutes.
Once you have the initial draft, you can edit, fact-check, and re-write as needed.
6. Track your content’s performance
You're not done once you publish a new piece of content with your new keywords.
You must constantly monitor and track your content’s performance for an effective content strategy.
If you don’t track performance, you don’t know what’s working and what needs updating.
Updating and refreshing content is an excellent way to increase organic traffic to your website. In most cases, content updates are also easier than writing content from scratch.
But how do you find which articles to update?
You can use the Performance Report in Google Search Console (GSC).
To do this, open GSC and click the performance tab on the left-hand sidebar. You can filter your pages using key metrics, including:
- Impressions and clicks
- Click-through rates (CTR)
- Average position in SERPs
Then, compare the performance of your content to identify traffic drops.
If you see a traffic drop, that content can benefit from an update.
Alternatively, you can use a tool such as Surfer's Content Audit.
Inside the Content Audit, you can track the performance of your pages and find the top improvement opportunities.
Once you click on Optimize, you can follow the Content Editor guidelines for improving your article and leverage Auto-Optimize to help you with it..
Key takeaways
- Using keyword gap analysis, identify new opportunities that can enhance your content strategy and improve search engine rankings.
- Utilize effective tools like Google Keyword Planner and Surfer's Topical Map to find and analyze keywords your competitors rank for efficiently.
- Prioritize and cluster keywords by organizing them based on search intent and SERP similarity, and prioritize them by search volume, traffic potential, keyword difficulty, and business relevance.
- Create and optimize content by producing high-quality content that incorporates new keywords and aligns with search intent while also updating existing content to improve rankings.
- Leverage AI for content scaling to efficiently create and optimize content, helping to drive more organic traffic to your site.
- Monitor performance consistently by tracking your content's performance using Google Search Console and tools like Surfer's Content Audit to ensure continuous improvement and traffic growth.
Identify and fill content gaps with Surfer
A keyword gap analysis helps you discover valuable keywords your competitors rank for, which your content lacks.
Then, you can strategically optimize or create content to target these keywords, ensuring alignment with search intent and enhancing your SEO strategy.
Surfer can help you identify and fill these gaps with less manual work and better accuracy.
Try Surfer today and join over 150,000 content creators who are growing their businesses.
