How to Do a Keyword Gap Analysis to Find Profitable Terms

One of the universal laws of the world is the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is an observation from statistics that, in many cases – from population density to workplace productivity to computational optimization – 80% of the results come from 20% of the input.

• 80% of the world’s GDP comes from 20% of the countries.
• 80% of the population is generally clustered in 20% of the land.
• 80% of workplace accidents come from 20% of the hazards.

In marketing, we can see it clearly as well. 80% of your website’s traffic and conversions will come from, broadly speaking, 20% of your pages.

Many people, when striving to optimize their site, focus their energy where their traffic is. They take that 20% of their site and push to promote it, to smooth out friction points, and to implement the tenets of Conversion Rate Optimization.

Savvy marketers, though, often turn to the rest of the content:

• How can that content be fixed to help?
• Can you pick better keywords?
• Make the content better?
• Target it better?
• Or is it good enough, once you build enough SEO value to start to compete with the other content out there on the same subject?

Since keyword coverage is a critical part of this process, a hot trend in marketing right now is to perform keyword gap analyses on yourself and your competitors. So, I wanted to talk about what a keyword gap analysis is, give you a step-by-step guide on how to do it, and some advice on how to make use of the results. Let’s get started!

What is a Keyword Gap Analysis?

A gap analysis, broadly, is a review of two states and the differences between them.

Say, for example, you made a map of every location in your state where there’s a McDonalds and every location where there’s a Burger King. In many places, these locations overlap, sometimes down to being across the street from one another. Other places only have one or the other.

A comparative map of all of the locations where there’s a McDonalds, but not a Burger King, would be a gap analysis that allows McDonalds to consider new places to open competing locations. The opposite is also true for Burger King.

A keyword gap analysis is the same concept applied to keywords a site ranks for. Your site has a set of keywords you rank for, and your competitors have a set of keywords they rank for. When you map these out, you can identify all of the keywords your competitors rank for, but you don’t; the gap between you and them. That provides you with a list of opportunities.

There’s a similar concept called a content gap analysis that also gets discussed from time to time. It’s effectively the same thing but narrower. A keyword gap analysis can account for keywords on non-content pages like landing pages and service pages, while a content gap analysis is more focused on blog post topics. They’re closely related, and both valuable, but technically just different enough to be worth considering down the line.

You’ll generally want to perform several analyses, one for each near-equal competitor and at least one for the top-ranked sites in your niche. These can give you a ladder of sorts to follow up the chain.

Why Perform a Keyword Gap Analysis?

Opportunity.

Every set of keywords and topics that your competitors rank for but you don’t is an opportunity for you to try to compete. Sure, maybe they dominate the topic, but do they have to? Can you get a slice of the pie by producing competing content of your own? You might not take over their place and dominate the topic, but anything is better than nothing, and it’s a proven topic since they’re ranking for it.

On a tangible level, the gap analysis gives you ideas for content to produce. That content, if it’s good enough, becomes more traffic, which you can then convert into more subscribers or sales.

How to Perform a Keyword Gap Analysis

Now, let’s go through the step-by-step process of performing a keyword gap analysis. This is more or less how I do it, though there are some tools that can help or speed up some aspects of the process, so feel free to customize it to your resources and needs.

Pick a Competitor

The first thing you need to do is pick a competitor to analyze. Chances are pretty good you have a lot of competitors, and I generally recommend performing your analysis on all of them eventually, but picking a good one to start isn’t a bad idea.

What should you look for when making your initial choice of competitor?

• A business in the same niche, preferably a commercial competitor to you directly.
• A business around the same scale and scope as yours; if you’re a local cobbler, don’t go after Nike.
• A business that frequently comes up in research for the topics you write about, showing they have similar content focuses and goals.

If you don’t know who your competitors are, there are plenty of ways to find out, but that’s the subject for another post at another time.

Use a Gap Analysis Tool

There are two ways to perform a keyword gap analysis: the hard way or the easy way.

The hard way is to do it all manually. You need to:

• Perform a full keyword analysis on your site to know all the keywords you rank for.
• Perform the same keyword analysis on your competitor to know all of their keywords.
• Manually compare the two lists.
• Harvest all relevant data, including keyword rankings, stats for the ranking content, and stats for keywords like monthly searches and PPC value.

Or, you can use a tool that does all of this automatically, using data sources you would otherwise have to pay a lot to access. There are a bunch of tools out there, and they’ll all produce mostly similar results because most of them pull data from the same sources.

It doesn’t hurt to try more than one and see which has results you like the best:

• Moz Pro, with Keyword Gap 2.0, starting at $50 per month.
• SimilarWeb’s Keyword Gap and Overlap Analyzer, great but pricey at $200/month at minimum.
• SEO PowerSuite’s Keyword Gap Analysis Tool, initially free but works best with the $30/month plan or higher.
• Semrush’s Keyword Gap report, part of their paid plans at $140 per month or more.
• Ranking Gap’s tool, which starts at $30 per month with a credit system for data exports.

Most of these tools will give you at least a few hundred keywords in a report you can use. Some of them allow you to dig a lot deeper, depending on the size of the competitor. A lot of the difference between the tools comes down to how many keywords it will track and how many sites you can analyze at any given time. If you’re exporting the data and doing analysis yourself, that’s a little less impactful.

Record and Qualify Keyword Opportunities

Next up is taking the data the tools give you and figuring out what to do with it.

Depending on the platform you use, you’ll get a list of keywords and potentially useful data about them.

• The intent of the keyword, though this might not be easily analyzed by a tool, so I often disregard it myself.
• The ranking the site holds for the keyword.
• The monthly search volume for the keyword.
• The keyword difficulty rating.
• The cost per click for Google Ads targeting the keyword.
• The number of results in Google for the keyword in general.
• Whether or not the keyword itself is trending up or down recently.

Some also have proprietary metrics. For example, Moz shows you “Traffic lift,” which is their estimate of how much potential traffic you could earn by targeting the keyword. I find things like this to be too reliant on too many different assumptions to be valuable, but it can give you a vague idea of what keywords to prioritize.

Be cautious not to overvalue certain data points. For example, keyword difficulty isn’t always reflective of how hard it actually would be for you to rank, and CPC isn’t necessarily correlated to the monetary value of the keyword for your business. If you find the metrics to be too distracting, feel free to hide the data.

I also recommend taking a tool like Screaming Frog or Greenflare and scraping your competitor’s site. The goal is to harvest data about the content for the keywords you’re identifying. Scrape the titles, the word count, the most recent update date if available, and so on.

All of this allows you to evaluate the keywords to see if they’re something you want to target.

I often find that, for example, you’ll get a lot of branded and specific product keywords in the gap analysis. Obviously, you aren’t going to rank for your competitor’s brand name, but it’s also not really worth targeting. These are the kinds of filters you want to apply to your list.

Prioritize the Best Opportunities

Once you have your list of gap keywords and data, you can look for the high-priority keywords to target with your own content. I generally look for specific kinds of opportunities:

Transactional and high-value keywords. There are a few different kinds of intent for keywords. Some are better to target if you want traffic, while others are better if your goal is conversions. Figuring out gap keywords with a high-value intent like transactional intent can be great opportunities.

Keywords with poor competing content. This can be viewed from two perspectives:

• The content you already have on your site for that keyword is poor and could be improved.
• The content the competitor has for the keyword is poor and presents an opportunity for you.

The first means you already have something that can be repurposed or expanded to target the keyword. It’s a good opportunity primarily because a good portion of the work is already done to target it.

The second is content that may be outdated, short, or otherwise substandard and presents an opportunity for you to outdo the existing competition and steal their slice of the pie.

Keywords that can be clustered. Keyword clusters are extremely valuable for technical SEO reasons, so if you find a bunch of related keywords in the gap, you can lump them into one clustered project. Feel your keyword gap analysis results into a clustering tool for an easy view. It’s even better if some portion of your existing content can tie into a new content cluster.

Create Content to Utilize the Gap

All of the analysis above helps you figure out what to target, which leaves you with one thing: creating the content. This is also a whole project, but fortunately, having a good keyword idea and topic opportunity in hand is a big part of getting started.

Now, you just need to think about how to make the most of it!

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