Understanding Your Competition, SEO & Attracting New Business
68% of all online activity starts with a search engine. SEO competition is tough with billions of results each day and businesses must take action.
One way to do this is with a content gap analysis. This analysis will help you understand your competitors and your audience better so you can improve traffic to your site.
Let’s start with some definitions.
What Is Content Gap Analysis?
A content gap analysis is a process usually done by an SEO specialist that helps you identify gaps in your content that you have not yet addressed and areas where your SEO competitors are outperforming you. The raw data will show you holes in your content strategy that you may have not yet written a piece of content for.
It also highlights areas for improvement in organic search that are more aligned with what your audience wants. When you write content that addresses the “gaps” you can improve search results and best your competitor at their own game.
This can also help you identify opportunities for new products and services, as well as opportunities to increase revenue by improving customer experience.
Why Is Content Gap Analysis Important For SEO?
It’s important because it helps businesses identify what they need to do to improve their content marketing strategy. By identifying gaps in the market that you should be focusing on, you can improve your overall SEO, increase sales and grow your business.
How to Do Content Gap Analysis
There are different ways to complete the content gap analysis and they all work. However, most often the process involves a few specific steps.
- Identify your company’s current content. How is it performing for SEO? What is the goal of that content and is it achieving that goal?
- Who is beating you at your SEO goals? What does their content look like? What are they doing better, differently, or in a stronger way than you are?
- How does your competitor’s SEO compare to your own?
Before getting to worried about what you see, remember that your SEO competitor analysis must be reviewed through a very practical lens. That’s the only way you can make rational decisions about what to do with the gap you have discovered.
Follow These Best-Practices In Your Gap Analysis
The importance of following best practices is that it will help you to understand how your audience perceives your content. This helps you to further develop your content strategy. It also improves the way you generate ideas for new blog posts, articles, or other types of content. Other key best practices include:
Analyze Google’s First Page
Google’s first page of results is the most important place to start when conducting a content gap analysis. It gives you an idea of what your target audience is looking for and what interests them.
Google’s first page of results can give you an idea of what your competitors are doing and the keywords they are targeting. The more information you have about your competitors, the better off you will be in planning your strategy for the future.
Research Keywords
When conducting a content gap analysis, it is important to understand the keywords that your audience is using. If you do not know what keywords your audience is using, you will be at a loss when trying to create content that appeals to them.
Keywords are important because they help with creating content that people want and need. They also help with branding and SEO which helps grow the business.
Use SEO Tools
SEO tools provide you with the opportunity to analyze your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. You cannot find the data you need for free; paid tools are required to find the most up-to-date keyword research, competitive analysis and traffic numbers. If you have a tool that’s doing this work for you for free, please share it with me!
That said, if you are interested in improving your SEO, then SEO tools are an important part of the process. These tools provide an insight into how users interact with your site. They help guide you through the process of not only keyword research, but also creating new content and refurbishing or optimizing existing content.
Now That You Have A Handle On Competitive Gap Analysis, Consider These 5 Areas Before Taking Any Further Action
#1 Your objectives
The first step after completing a content gap analysis is to determine the goals of the campaign. Your goals will help you determine what type of content you should consider adding to your schedule. Any new content needs to align with your audience. By taking a few minutes to understand how they consume content and what their needs are you will know if the competitive keywords you’re considering will actually have any measurable impact on your bottom line.
#2 Analyze your existing content to see what’s working well and what’s under performing
The second step is to analyze the current content on your website so you can explore gaps a bit deeper. Does your website offer a few articles on a topic that you want to be seen as an expert in? Are there areas of your expertise that you barely touch?
It is important to understand your existing website content so you can identify gaps and prioritize areas that you need to address.
Content gap analysis is an essential part of any website’s SEO strategy. It provides insights into how well your current content is performing, what’s missing and what you can do to improve it. You may identify improvements in performance in terms of traffic, conversions, and engagement.
#3 Analyze your competitor’s content to see what’s working well for them
The third step is to figure out what your competitors are doing on the topics you want to be on the first page of search for. What kind of articles are they writing? What are they doing on social media? What topics appear to be “core” to their business? How often are they covering those topics?
The SEO competitive analysis is an essential part of a content gap analysis because it helps you understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. And that gives you insight into what you can add or change in your strategy.
#4 Identify what your customers want
The fourth step is to survey your audiences. To create content that is relevant to your customers, you must understand what they want. This is a simple, yet critical step that puts everything else in context.
Understanding customer needs will help you create better and more relevant content for your audience. This will ultimately lead to higher engagement rates.
#5 Create your content strategy
The fifth step is to decide on the topics you want to cover. Make a plan for the content you want to write and who will produce it. Often when doing a content gap analysis what’s discovered are holes in the content creation process. Once you understand what’s challenging about creating content, you have the opportunity to fix it so you can reach your content goals.
Now That Your Approach & Your Content Gap Analysis Is Complete, Here’s What Should Come Next For Your Business
With the knowledge gained from your content gap analysis, you’re on the path to improving the user experience on your website. This is the most important goal for your site because a site without a positive user experience will not retain visitors. This puts you in an unfavorable position of trying harder than necessary to attract and sustain traffic.
A stronger website, with frequent regular blogs carries a host of benefits with it, but perhaps one of the most important is that it should bring you closer to your consumers.
Enhance the Customer Journey
In the digital era, customer experience is becoming more important. Many companies struggle to provide an engaging and personalized experience to their customers. A content gap analysis can help them come up with ways to improve their customer experience.
The benefits of enhancing your customer experience through a content gap analysis include:
- Increased revenue
- Increased brand loyalty
- Increased sales
- Improved SEO rankings
- Improved customer satisfaction scores
Another benefit of enhancing the customer experience is that it helps small businesses figure out what they are doing well, an area often overlooked by busy small business owners. You will also find opportunities for growth or improvement as you explore gaps in the customer experience. The findings will help draw you closer to your clients as you work to improve the experience on your website.
Attract New Customers
For any business, it is important to have a good customer retention rate. The more customers you attract, the more revenue you make. With the help of a content gap analysis, companies can identify their weaknesses in content.
This helps you to figure out what content they need to produce and how they can attract new customers. The benefits of attracting new customers due to a content gap analysis include an increase in revenue and brand awareness. It can also improve customer loyalty.
Rank Better for SEO
Obviously, this is the big goal for most SEO projects. For a business with an eye on their competition, growing in SEO for the right keywords is the finish line you’re reaching for. With a better user experience, better performing content and a stronger understanding of what your customers want, your profile on Google (and other search engines) will change. Over time and with the right focus, your keyword profile should grow in the direction of the high impact keywords you want to rank highly for so you attract customers who want and need your brand, services and products.
Scale the Process With SEO Services
Now that you have a stronger understand of what content gap analysis is and why your company needs one, we hope you have a better understanding of how important understanding competitors and your audience is for success.
Related Reading:
How To Create Smart Local Content For Your Business
How Often Should You Write New Blogs?
How To Rebrand If You’re Shifting Directions In Your Business
At Crownsville Media, we have the SEO expertise you need to increase your SEO ranking. If you want to drive more traffic to your site and create valuable content, we can help! Are you interested in learning more? Schedule a call today to discuss how we can help your business grow online.
