Content Gap Analysis: A Step-by-Step Guide for Better SEO

by Ree

Are you creating content, but still feel like you’re falling behind your competition? You publish blog posts, update your site, but it seems like everyone else is getting more traffic and ranking higher on Google.

Do you know exactly what your audience is searching for, that you haven’t covered in your content? A content gap analysis is a powerful way to find those hidden opportunities as a clear roadmap to attract more visitors with your content.

Let’s go over a 4-step process to find these gaps, fill them with valuable content, and grow your audience.

Contents

What Is a Content Gap Analysis?

It’s a great question, and the answer is simpler than you might think. A content gap analysis is a powerful way to find opportunities for your business.

A content gap analysis finds topics and keywords important to your audience that your business doesn’t cover. It usually involves looking at the keywords your competitors rank for in search results that you don’t.

The goal is simple: identify holes in your content that your audience needs you to fill. Creating useful resources builds trust and authority with potential customers.

Think of it like a grocery store owner checking a rival’s aisles. If they see customers constantly buying a popular brand of organic granola that they don’t stock, they’re missing out on sales. That’s called a “product gap.”

You’re doing the same thing, but with information. You’re looking for information your audience wants, but they can’t find on your site.

Content strategies must be hyper-focused on customer needs to be effective. A content gap analysis is the most direct way to align your strategy with your audience’s needs.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s look at how this can help your search engine optimization (SEO) and make your content work harder for you.

How Content Gap Analysis Affects Your SEO

Conducting a content gap analysis is a core part of a smart SEO and content strategy that delivers real results. It helps you stop creating content based on guesses and start making data-driven decisions that directly impact your growth. Here’s why it’s so important.

Find new keyword opportunities

Think you know all the important keywords for your industry? There’s always more to discover.

A content gap analysis uncovers valuable keywords your competitors are using to attract visitors—visitors that could be yours. These are often long-tail keywords or specific questions that show a user is further along in their buying journey.

Long-tail keywords (phrases of 3+ words) make up a significant portion of all Google searches. These less-competitive phrases often have higher conversion rates because the user’s search intent is much more specific. By finding gaps, you’ll also find these high-intent long-tail keywords.

Different types of content gaps

There are four types of content gaps you can address to be sure that your content strategy is thorough and promotes conversions:

1. Keywords: Searches your competitors rank for, but you don’t.
2. Topics: Categories and subtopics relevant to your audience that you’ve not addressed.
3. Audiences: Segments of your target market whom you’ve neglected.
4. Formats: Content types like videos, blogs, case studies and podcasts your audience likes, but you don’t have.

Understand your audience

What questions are your potential customers asking? What are their biggest problems? A content gap analysis helps you get a clearer picture of what your audience needs at every stage of their journey. By seeing what topics are popular on competitor sites, you get direct insight into the conversations happening in your industry. This allows you to create content that truly resonates and helps people.

Let’s say for example that you’re a B2B software company, and you see your main competitor has an entire section of their blog dedicated to “integrations with other software.” If you have no content on this topic, you could address this gap by creating a series of articles on how their product works with other popular tools, and get an increase in qualified leads from your blog within a few months.

Outperform competitors

To get ahead, you have to be better than your competitors and cover the topics they’ve missed.

You can systematically cover topics your competition already ranks for, but you can create more comprehensive, up-to-date, and helpful content to win the top spot on Google. You can also find the “gaps within the gaps”—topics that none of your competitors are adequately covering. This analysis gives you a strategic advantage.

Competitor analysis is an important piece of your marketing and content strategy. It’s the foundation for identifying opportunities to gain a competitive edge in search rankings.

Improve the customer journey

The customer journey isn’t a straight line. People move from being aware they have a problem, to considering different solutions, to making a final decision. You need content that supports them at every stage.

A content gap analysis helps you see if you’re missing content for a critical stage. For example, you might have great blog posts for the “awareness” stage, but no comparison guides for the “consideration” stage.

Ensuring a seamless customer journey with helpful information at each touchpoint can significantly increase customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Customers who receive helpful content throughout their journey are more likely to become loyal brand advocates. Filling your content gaps can help you do that.

4 Steps to Content Gap Analysis

Now that you understand why it’s so important, let’s get into the how. Here’s a four-step process to find and fill the gaps in your own content strategy.

Step 1: Analyze Your Competitor’s Content

What’s already working for others in your space? Let’s find out, using SEO tools to get a data-backed look at your competitors’ content performance.

First, identify your SEO competitors. These are websites that consistently show up on the first page of Google for the keywords you want to rank for.

Next, use an SEO tool to do the heavy lifting. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz have specific “gap analysis” features built for this exact purpose. These competitive analysis tools are essential for your digital marketing strategy, saving you hundreds of hours of manual research.

Here’s a typical workflow using Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool:

1. Enter the domains: Input your own website’s domain and the domains of up to four of your top SEO competitors.
2. Run the analysis: The tool will compare the keyword profiles of all the websites.
3. Find the gaps: Filter the results to show keywords where your competitors rank (e.g., in the top 10 results), but your site does not. Semrush has a “Missing” filter perfect for this.

This process will give you a spreadsheet full of valuable keywords and topic ideas that are already proven to attract visitors in your industry. This data-driven approach removes guesswork and gives you a clear starting point.

Step 2: Map the Customer Journey

A content gap can also exist within your own site. You might be missing content for crucial stages of the customer journey, leaving potential customers stuck.

Think about the journey in three simple stages:

• Awareness Stage: The person knows they have a problem but doesn’t know the solution yet. They are looking for educational, top-level information.
  Examples: “Why is my skin so dry in the winter?” “How to improve team productivity.”
• Consideration Stage: The person now understands their problem and is researching different solutions or methods to solve it. Examples: “Hyaluronic acid vs. glycerin for dry skin.” “Asana vs. Trello for project management.”
• Decision Stage: The person has decided on a type of solution and is now comparing specific products or services to make a purchase. Examples: “CeraVe Moisturizing Cream review.” “Best price on Asana business plan.”

Now audit your existing content. To do a content audit, create a simple spreadsheet and categorize your current articles, guides, and landing pages into these three stages. You’ll quickly see where the gaps are. Do you have dozens of “awareness” blog posts but no “consideration” comparison guides? That’s a huge content gap you need to fill to guide users toward a purchase.

Step 3: Use Keyword Research to Find Questions

Sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in the specific questions people are asking. These questions are a goldmine for content ideas because they tell you exactly what’s on your audience’s mind.

There are several free and easy ways to find these questions:

• Google’s “People Also Ask” (PAA) Box: When you search for a keyword, Google often shows a box with related questions. This is a direct look into what other users are searching for. Click on a question, and more will appear.
• AnswerThePublic: This free tool takes your keyword and generates a visualization of hundreds of questions related to it, broken down by who, what, where, when, why, and how.
• Forums: Search for your topic on these sites like Reddit and Quora and look at the discussions. What are people confused about? What problems are they trying to solve? The language is natural, giving you raw insight into your audience’s pain points.

For example, if your main topic is “email marketing,” you might discover from the PAA box that people are asking, “How often should a small business send emails?” or “What are the best free email marketing tools?” These are perfect topics for new articles that address a very specific need.

Step 4: Organize and Prioritize Your Ideas

By now, you should have a long list of potential content ideas from your competitor analysis, customer journey mapping, and question research. The final step is to organize these ideas and decide what to work on first.

Create a master spreadsheet for your content ideas. For each idea, include these columns:

Topic Idea	Target/Focus Keyword	Stage of Customer Journey	Monthly Search Volume	Keyword Difficulty	Business Relevance (1 to 5)
How to Choose Project Management Software	choose project management software	Consideration	800	Medium	5
Asana vs. Trello	asana vs trello	Consideration	2,500	High	4
Best Free Email Marketing Tools	free email marketing tools	Decision	5,000	High	3

Use this data to prioritize. A good approach is to look for topics with a sweet spot of:

• High business relevance
• Decent search volume (100 to 1,000 searches per month minimum)
• Manageable keyword difficulty (KD)

Then group related topics into topic clusters to build authority on a subject and improve your internal linking structure. This ensures you’re creating content that will not only attract traffic but attract the right leads who are likely to be interested in your products or services.

Once you’re done, you’re actually not done. Measure the success of your new or updated content by tracking keyword rankings, organic traffic, conversions, and other important metrics.

Wrap Up

A content gap analysis takes the guesswork out of your content strategy. Instead of wondering what to write next, you’ll have a clear roadmap based on real data about your audience and competitors. Do a content gap analysis regularly to fill the holes in your content, meet your audience’s needs, and steadily grow your organic traffic.

References

Ahrefs. (2023). Ahrefs Keyword Explorer Data. Ahrefs Pte. Ltd. Retrieved from [https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer.

AirOps (2024). Content Gap Analysis: Types, Examples & Step-by-Step Guide. Retrieved from https://www.airops.com/blog/content-gap-analysis-examples

du Plessis, C. (2022). A Scoping Review of the Effect of Content Marketing on Online Consumer Behavior. SAGE Open, 12(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221093042

Search Engine Journal. (2025). The State of SEO: A 2025 Report. Retrieved from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/state-of-seo/

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