How To Do A Content Gap Analysis For SEO

Amy Smith
5 min readApr 9, 2021

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Table of Contents:

  • What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
  • Mapping Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey
  • 4 Steps to Conducting a Content Gap Analysis
  • Conclusion

What Is a Content Gap Analysis?

A content gap analysis is a process of finding ‘gaps’ in your existing content. This includes identifying pieces of missing content that may be relevant to different stages of your target audience’s buyer journey.

Analyzing your existing content offerings allows you to see where you are losing valuable assets that could lead readers to buy. Learn how to analyze and improve your content through SEO services company san diego.

A content gap analysis often involves a survey of your:

  • Web pages
  • Blog articles
  • Social media content
  • Landing pages
  • Ebooks and downloadables

It’s important to analyze the content gap to find gaps in your content so that you can fill them and make it easier for users to find your website and buy from you.

Source: Alexa.com

Mapping Your Content to the Buyer’s Journey

Your goal is to create content for each stage of the buyer’s journey, whether they are “problem-aware,” “solution-aware,” or at the final decision stage of your shopping journey.

But it does create gaps where those who are still considering different options can crack.

By analyzing the gap in your content, you may want to indicate if you have content for the stages of awareness, consideration, decision, and success.

  • Awareness: Awareness pages target keywords related to a problem facing the audience. This content addresses this issue and offers valuable information but does not immediately convert readers into customers.
  • Consideration: At this point, people are comparing different solutions to their problems. They can read comparison guides, reviews, or “excellent” posts.
  • Decision: The decision stage is where you will find the most “money” pages. These are your sales pages, service pages, etc. which act as a final checkpoint before the user buys or contacts you. These pages will be more branded than content related to your awareness and consideration.
  • Success: Ultimately, the content of success assures users that they will achieve the desired results.

4 Steps to Conducting a Content Gap Analysis

It’s a simple, step-by-step process to find clear gaps in your content and fill in the gaps in your content strategy.

1) Map Out Your Buyer’s Journey:

80% of marketers consider personalization to be more effective. For that, you need to understand your ideal buyer’s journey.

Besides, understanding your buyer’s journey will help you generate demand for your product. The companies that we can capture our potential customers at an early stage are in the best position because:

  • They tend to create more efficient content marketing funnels that help them capture leads that are ready to work.
  • They don’t have to spend their advertising budget on brand awareness, as they have already done so through content marketing.
  • The high value of their content helps them build authority, reputation, and ultimately the market leader.

2) Conduct Market Research:

The next step is analyzing the difference in your content market research. Interview potential clients, current clients, and industry experts directly or by sending a survey for feedback.

Try to reach people at every stage of the buyer’s journey by sending market research surveys to different segments of your audience.

Ask the hardest questions to get the most out of your survey, such as:

  • Can you state your main goals?
  • What are the key points you are trying to address?
  • Where do you find solutions to your problems?
  • What solutions have you already tried? Why didn’t they work?
  • What information are you looking for in reaching your goals or solving your problems?
  • What questions or concerns do you have about this topic?
  • What made you choose A product/service over B product/service?
  • What are the top three things you can look for in a solution?

Once you start getting feedback, you will better understand how people search for your product/service online, why they are looking in the first place, and how you can better address their concerns.

3) Analyze the Content on Your Website:

Conduct an observational audit of where your content is performing best and where it is performing. Try to test your accessories with the same lenses that you use for competitors.

Start with your website. From here, you take people on a journey from awareness to decision making and brand loyalty. If your journey makes a gap, you will lose the business of the future.

Compile a list of all the URLs on your website. Then, label each page with the same stage of the buyer’s journey. It’s also a good idea to “rank” each page according to its performance. Include things like average search engine results page (SERP) position, monthly traffic and leads, and click-through rate (CTR).

Depending on how well each piece is performing, categorize it into one of three buckets:

  • Keep: This category includes high-performance content that will not require additional attention at this time. Consider adding it to future campaigns to drive more traffic to your website.
  • Update/Correct: If you have good content that isn’t performing well, you’ll need to update, revise, or improve it.
  • Remove: Remove low-quality or outdated content from your website if it will be too much work to update SEO or will not help you.

You can also use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush Content Audio to make this process easier.

4) Analyze Your Competitor’s Content:

Determining what is missing from your site often involves a bit of an “elimination process,” but looking at what your competitors are doing and comparing your site’s actions with some additional drawbacks is a great way to find out.

If your competitor’s funnel is less or more the same as yours, see what content they have created to move users from one place to another.

Conclusion

Be prepared to identify and fill content gaps. Recommend to make the most of your content difference analysis and start with the buyer’s journey and then move on to keyword research and content analysis.

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Amy Smith
Amy Smith

Written by Amy Smith

Amy is the content manager at PROS — Internet Marketing & Technology Company in San Diego https://www.internetsearchinc.com/

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