5 Step-Approach To Find Content Gaps And Fix Them

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Do you spend much time curating your content but not getting traction? Where have you gone wrong?

Content curation can give you sleepless nights if not done strategically!

Whether you’re starting or have been there for a long time, the urge to improve your content will remain forever. But how do you know if you’re missing out on something?

Here comes content gap analysis into the picture. Content gap analysis helps you identify whether your content needs improvement. It gauges whether you’re on the right track or if there is room for much improvement.

Irrespective of the niche, content gap analysis can help you thrive in your business. Content gap analysis can help you with the following:

Garnering steady flow of traffic.
It allows you to analyze where you stand among the competitors.
It helps to analyze the keywords you need to look out for.
It increases engagement.
Boost your sales.
It improves brand awareness.
It helps SEO efforts.
Augment user experience.

As the market is getting competitive for all niches, the need for identifying content gaps is becoming inevitable. This article will dig deep into the core of content gap analysis.

So without further ado, let’s get started.

Table Of Content

What Are Content Gaps?

Content Gaps are the loopholes in your existing content. It is the bridge between what your content offers and what the reader is expecting from you.

It helps you identify whether your content needs to be updated, more clarity, or understood user intent. In addition, it gives a clear picture of your shortcomings as a content creator.

Content Gap Analysis

Content gap analysis is the process of identifying content gaps. Therefore, running a content gap analysis is pivotal to figuring out your loopholes.

Content gap analysis is the process of analyzing your: Blog content, website copies, video content, social content, downloadable, and many more.

The main goals of running a content gap analysis are:

Auditing whether your content meets the user intent. It tells the missing content that your competitors are looking for.
Analyzing if you’re content is outdated.
It helps to analyze whether your content is complex or hard to understand.
Figuring out how you can stand out among your competitors.

5 Ways To Find and Fix Content Gaps

Before running any sort of Content Gap Analysis, you must consider two key factors:

The goal of your content gap analysis. Some of the common goals are traffic, revenue, rankings, etc.
Whom are you targeting? You must be clear about the target audience.

Now that you’ve got an idea about the factors behind content gap analysis, let’s understand how to do a content gap analysis:

1. Buyers Journey Analysis

The buyer journey is the process or the path through which people come across your product and finally purchase a product. The buyer’s journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and evaluation.

Let’s understand how you can execute content gap analysis for all the stages:

Awareness: It is the first step of the buyer’s journey, where you introduce your product to them. Choose keywords that can address the pain areas of the buyer. Your content should meet the keyword intent.

Consideration: People compare competitors based on reviews, price, testimonials, case studies, social presence, etc. Based on their analysis, they consider the best solution to their problem. While doing content gap analysis, figure out if your content meets this stage’s requirements. Here you can go with promotional content analyzing your solution concerning your competitors.

Evaluation: This is the final stage where people take action. Sales pages are the best example of the evaluation stage. Again, try to add thought-provoking content that allures them to take action.

2. Competitor Analysis

Once you complete the buyer journey analysis, it is time to do a competitor analysis. Competitor analysis is a crucial part of market research.

Content gap analysis comes with two types of gaps:

Company Gaps: These refer to areas, topics, or keywords your business has yet to target. Identifying company gaps can help you in finding popular and lucrative dimensions of your business. Find the prominent dimensions you still need to cover, but your competitors have. Brainstorm a content strategy that can meet the same.

Industry Gaps: Industry Gaps are the untapped dimensions of your industry; not even top competitors have covered these. It would be best if you underwent extensive research to find industry gaps. Once you find one, bring something new to the table and make your competitors’ content outdated.

Analyzing these gaps aids you in outperforming your competitors.

3. Gap Analysis Methods

Given the buyer journey and competitors analysis strategy you have, now it’s time to decide how to proceed further. There are two methods to count upon:

Qualitative Method: It helps you to understand the key factors of your Gap analysis procedure. Multiple tools can help you out with this. Once you go through the process, you will identify the types of landing pages, keywords, and topics of your competitors.

Quantitative Method: Here, you look for detailed insights into the Search Engine Result Page. Here we will depend more on data-driven results to gauge the content of your competitors as well as your own (Example: SEO-friendliness, UX, etc.)

It might take some time to execute the two methods. But if you’re applying both scenarios, the results are evident.

4. Keyword Gap

You need to review the keywords before opting for them. Not all keywords perform the same way. Many people do not get results because they use irrelevant keywords.

Keyword gap analysis helps you in finding the popular keywords that your competitors are using, but you’re not.

Different types of search queries are as follows:

Informational: ‘how to’ , ‘5 ways to’, ‘why….’
Commercial: ‘brand name vs competitor’ review top.
Purchase: ‘buy shoes online’ , ‘order’, ‘discount’.
Navigational Keyword: intended for a specific website or page. Example: ‘Cafes near me’.

For doing the keyword gap analysis you need to have a basic idea about the following:

Keyword Research: The practice of finding the most relevant and popular phrases/search terms people use while looking for a product.

Search Terms: exact phrases that people search for.

Search Intent: It tells you the purpose behind any search query.

Traffic: Number of users driving to your website.

Keyword Difficulty: It aids you to know how difficult to rank for a specific keyword.

CPC (Cost Per Click): When you divide the total cost of clicks by the total number of clicks, you get CPC.

Keyword Volume: Average monthly searches for a specific keyword.

How to analyze keyword gaps?

Competitor analysis.
Use tools.
List up keywords.
Analyze results and look for improvement.
Page level analysis.
Finally, take action.

5. Audit Your Topic & Media

There is no point in writing content for some random topics. You must understand what content people mostly prefer, trending topics, long-form or short-form content, and much more.

There are two ways you could do this:

Analyze Google’s Search Page: It is the smartest way to streamline your content gap analysis process. Figure out the most trending topics. What is already working for others will also work for you. Many tools can serve the same purpose. Choose any of the tools and do the research. List out the most popular blogs that are ranking with your keyword. Think of how you can make those articles better and incorporate those into your content.

Audit Your Content: Once you have identified the top-performing content, it is time to analyze yours. Figure out the loopholes in your content. Keep a close watch on keyword optimization, meta tags, user intent, content quality, titles, etc. For example, suppose your content demands an infographic or any statistics; add that. If the flow of your content is inaccurate, change it. Analyze whether your content requires more information. If yes, then add the necessary information and make it problem-solving content.

Media Analysis: Media analysis is about choosing the most relevant media at par with your content. Do you know that 82% of the traffic comes from video content? Yes, video content is that powerful. This is why top businesses are showing their inclination toward video content. So if your content demands a video, go for it. For example: ‘Product feature explanations’ or ‘how to do X’ – these topics are more apt for videos.

Final Thoughts!

At this point, you understand how to analyze the gap in your content. Content gap analysis is the most crucial aspect of content marketing strategy. Without understanding the loopholes, you can’t move ahead.

Are you ready to start with your content gap analysis efforts?

Knowledge without action is nothing! Start taking action, implement the said strategies, experiment with some strategies, make mistakes, correct your mistakes, and move forward.

With practice, you can gain substantial traffic with your content gap analysis efforts.

We hope this helps you understand content gap analysis. If you have doubts, please ask us. We will be happy to help you. For further assistance, reach out to [email protected].

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