As a business owner, you already know that solid content is essential to your online marketing strategy. After all, awesome content helps your business grow sales and increase brand awareness, positioning you for greater success. But achieving the perfect blend of content is critical when trying to build your online reputation over time.

What Exactly IS a Content Gap?

 
This simply refers to a situation where your competitor is able to meet a customer need that you can not. If you remember one thing about content gaps, remember this: they represent lost opportunities to earn customer attention online, says TextBroker. One example is when a competitor has earned high search engine rankings for a keyword that your organization hasn’t ranked for. This is why it’s critical to identify content gaps through both keyword analysis and qualitative research to figure out where your content marketing efforts are coming up short.

The Need for Analysis

 
If you’re already seeing decent results from your online marketing efforts, content gap analysis may not be at the top of your to-do list. Perhaps you think it will take too much time for very little ROI, or maybe you don’t think you have the resources to do it. Whatever you may be thinking, just remember that content gap analysis is imperative regardless of your organization’s current position in the SERPs.

If you lose out on traffic for a major keyword or fail to align your strategies with the customer journey, you may not realize the negatives right now, but surely over time you will notice some pretty serious shortcomings.

Analyzing your content now will:

• Help you obtain a realistic snapshot of how you’re doing compared with your top competitors.
• Help you uncover potential for new customer traffic with improved keyword strategies.
• Increase the overall relevancy of your website.
• Improve relationships with potential customers.

While content gap analysis sounds time consuming and complicated, it really isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the easiest and fastest ways to evaluate the success of your SEO and content strategies. You’ll have to go beyond the basics of keyword analysis, site traffic and search engine rankings, and focus on how well your content is meeting customer education needs. The risks of not conducting a content gap analysis can snowball very quickly. According to Search Engine Journal, performing a content gap analysis not only helps you find the right keywords and use them in the right context, but it also helps prevent potential buyers from going to your competitor for help.

Essentially, content gap analysis is a two-part process: reviewing both your content and your competitor’s content.

Review Your Own Content

• Figure out how well your content measures up against consumer and SEO needs.
• Set goals for your analysis.
• Consider your target audience.
• Create a customer journey map, which will help you understand the process that potential customers go through as they evaluate your offerings.
• Complete a content audit, gathering information about page traffic, unique page visits, bounce time and more.

Review Your Competitor’s Content

This step will give you a glimpse at what your competition is publishing, helping you discover relevant topics and keywords you may have missed. As you close any revealed content gaps, you will be in a better position to seize a portion of your competitor’s website traffic.

Ask these questions:

• Which keywords are my competitors ranking for on page one?
• Which URLs get them the most traffic?
• Which of their articles are getting the most shares on social media?
• Which articles are getting the most backlinks?

The last step is to compare the results of your own content analysis to your competitor’s, which will give you a good idea of where you can improve, where you are missing out on topics or keywords, and therefore what kinds of new content you should create.

Contact Content Runner

To craft that new content, rely on a niche writer from Content Runner. We have many local writers that are experts in turning your keywords and content ideas into ranking-worthy articles and blogs.