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4 Step Guide to Perform Keyword Gap Analysis (+additional tips)

by | Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Keyword gap analysis assists in recognizing valuable keyword opportunities that your website might be overlooking. We have learned that identifying keyword gaps is like discovering the winning moves that can significantly boost a website’s ranking.

Based on our experience we have compiled practical tips and techniques in this article. These strategies will guide you to uncover keyword gaps and sharpen keyword tactics for a stronger website presence.

What is a Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword gap analysis is an SEO strategy that helps in understanding which search terms or keywords your competitor’s sites are ranking for. It is an excellent method for assessing your competition as well as boosting your website traffic.

what is keyword gap analysis

How Does Keyword Gap Analysis Elevate Your SEO Campaign?

Keyword Gap Analysis is an effective SEO strategy that significantly influences your brand’s marketing moves and helps you boost website traffic.

Let’s take a look at how Keyword Gap Analysis helps elevate your SEO game:

Improved Visibility & Ranking

Keyword gap analysis helps in outperforming the competitors and brings improvement in online visibility and search result ranking.

Broader Audience Reach

It helps in bridging the gap between your current keyword strategy and what potential customers are searching for online, ultimately broadening the audience reach.

More Relevant Content

Keyword gap analysis helps create content that closely aligns with the target audience’s needs, interests, and expectations.

Improved Content Strategy

You can use the insights from keyword gap analysis to create targeted content, automatically improving your brand’s content strategy.

Competitive Advantage

Gaining information about the competitors helps you learn about the missing pieces in your marketing strategy, providing you with a competitive edge over your rivals.

Higher Conversion Rates

Utilizing the exact phrases used by customers increases the chances of sales for a brand. Thus, with keyword gap analysis, there is a high scope for growth and conversion rates.

Our Advice on How to Conduct Keyword Gap Analysis

Being in the industry for over a decade, we have worked with various clients ranging from startups to established brands. During this journey, we have learned invaluable lessons and developed strategies that have helped our clients shoot up their search engine rankings.

Based on our expertise, we are sharing some proven strategies to help you fill the gaps in your keyword strategy.

Identify your Competitors

Our years in the field have highlighted the significance of identifying competitors and learning about their strategies. If you want to identify your competitors manually, you can put the “target keyword” in the search engine and note down the sites that appear first.

Another method is to use SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs (that’s what we personally do for our clients, as it saves us a lot of time). Simply put your keywords or domain into these tools to identify competing domains ranking for similar terms.

One important tip that we would like to share is –filter out websites with very high domain authority. “Your focus should only be on websites with domain authority comparable to your site.”

Once you have this list, you can figure out how and why your competitors are outranking you. While making the list, we suggest you choose between two to five of your competitor firms and consider the following points while doing so:

  • Verify the size of the competitor company.
  • Compare the target audience of the competitor company.
  • Ensure that your competitor is from the same industry as yours.

Run Keyword Gap Analysis Using Tools

Once you have a list of your competitors, the next step is to compare and analyze the keywords they rank for. This comparison can be made by using SEO tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. These tools help determine keyword metrics of identified competitor sites.

We personally use SEMrush’s Keyword Gap Tool for conducting keyword gap analysis for our clients. All you have to do is enter your domain or sub-domain and further add up to 4 competitors.

To give you an idea, this is what carrying out a keyword gap analysis in SEMrush looks like:

semrush keyword gap analysisSEMrush’s keyword gap analysis tool showcasing keyword gaps through “top opportunities” list and “Venn diagram”

Compare, Categorize, and Make a List

After gathering all the information, compare and categorize your competitor’s keywords with your own. You can filter the keywords on the basis of search volume, ranking position, keyword difficulty, or intent to select the desired ones.

Our personal strategy is to use Google Sheets or Excel Sheets to sort and list the keywords as it helps analyze the data in a better way.

Identify the Gaps and Opportunities

Based on the comparison and categorization, identify the gaps and opportunities in your keyword strategy. What we do is: We systematically divide the keywords in the following manner:

  • Shared keywords: These are the keywords that both your site and the competitor sites are using.
  • Weak keywords: These are the keywords for which your website ranks but the ranking is lower than your competitors. 
  • Missed keywords: These are the keywords that your competitors use and rank for but your website doesn’t.

So, this way, you can identify valuable keywords and incorporate them into your content strategy to outrank your competitors and enhance your online presence.

Additional Tips to Inculcate in Your Keyword Gap Analysis Strategy

Use Keyword Clusters: Identify keyword clusters that your competitors are targeting in order to build website traffic. For example, here’s a keyword cluster that we targeted for our biggest client – “ourselves” that helped us shoot up the search engine rankings.

keyword clusterExample of a keyword cluster

Optimize Your Content: Create high-quality and relevant content that matches the keyword search intent of users. We suggest our readers to intelligently inculcate the search terms in the title, headings, meta tags, URLs, images, and body text.

Monitor and Measure Results: Track the traffic, ranking, conversions, and other metrics for target keywords and compare them with the previous data to measure the results. This can help you better understand the effectiveness of your strategies. We never skip this step as it helps us better understand the effectiveness of our keyword gap analysis and keyword research strategies.

How Does Keyword Gap Analysis Benefit Your Website?

If you are still not convinced, here’s a compelling list of reasons that will showcase the significant impact of keyword gap analysis on optimizing a website’s performance.

  • It helps you quickly find fresh and relevant keyword ideas.
  • It assists in finding out the questions that your target audience is currently searching for.
  • It helps to find out the keywords that are working perfectly for your competitor sites.
  • It helps you to figure out keywords with high search volume.
  • It helps you to improve your existing content with updated keywords.

Here’s How We Can Help You Fill Your Keyword Gaps

At SEO Experts Company India, we discover opportunities that you might be missing in your current SEO strategy. Our team puts in its best effort to identify less competitive keywords with higher search volume to boost your website traffic. 

Here are the keyword competitor analysis services you can expect if you are giving us the chance to serve you.

  • Keyword Research
  • Competitor Analysis
  • Keyword Mapping
  • Gap Identification
  • Search Volume and Difficulty Analysis
  • Content Assessment
  • Long-tail Keywords
  • Local SEO considerations

Tools We Use for Keyword Gap Analysis

Here are the tools we use to strengthen our procedure of analysis:

Understanding your competitor’s approach to keyword usage is one part of optimizing your site for search engines. SEO Experts Company India has the expertise and services to get dominance in your niche.

Explore our SEO services today to learn more about how we can drive results for your brand. Contact us to get started!

 

 

Navneet Singh Final

A young enthusiast who is passionate about SEO, Internet Marketing, and most importantly providing tremendous value to businesses every day. Connect with him on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter: @nsvisibility

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