How to Do an Effective Content Gap Analysis for SEO

In this video, we’re going to fill in thegaps in your content marketing strategy with a seriously cool content gap analysis.

Stay tuned.

[Intro Music] What’s up guys, it's Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitorsand dominate your niche.

And today I’m going to show you how to doa little bit of incognito work on your competitors.

More specifically, you’ll learn 3 hyper-effectivecontent gap strategies that should give your content marketing and bloggingefforts a friendly boost in traffic.

So let’s jump right in.

The first content gap analysis we’re goingto do is to find keywords that your competitors rank for, but your website isn’t rankingin the top 100 Google search results.

So I’ll go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tooland here, you can enter in a URL or domain.

So, in our case, since we’re looking fornew blogging topics, I’m going to do a prefix search on Ahrefs blog.

Next, I’ll click on the Content Gaptool in the left sidebar.

Now, when you’re looking for new keywordsto target, this top section here is where you’ll need to enter in the domains or URLsof your competitors in organic search.

So here, I’ll put in moz.

com/blog/, yoast.

com, and backlinko.

com.

If you’re not sure who your competitorsare, then you can use the competing domains report right here within Site Explorer tofind websites that are ranking for similar keywords as your site.

Now, for Moz’s blog, we’ll have to makesure that the mode is set to prefix, since we only want to find keyword topics from their blog.

And you’ll see right here that their blogposts all have URLs prefixed with /blog/.

Now, as for Yoast and Backlinko, we can leave itas a domain search since their blog post URLs are just domain.

com slash slug.

And for our own blog, we’ll have to makesure it’s also set to “prefix” since our posts are all under the /blog/ subfolder.

Now, before we hit the “show keywords”button, let me add a little bit of context as to what we’re searching for here.

In the first part, we’re asking ContentGap to show us keywords that any of these websites rank for, where at least one of thethese sites ranks in the top 10 of Google’s search results.

And the final condition is that this site, which is our blog, doesn’t rank at all in the top 100 Google search results for that keyword.

But I want to make our results even more relevant, so I’m going to change the “show keywords” filter from “any” to “all” of the below targets.

So we’ll only see keywords where all 3 ofour competitors have pages ranking somewhere in the top 100, but our own site is not seen there.

And in almost all cases, I recommend leavingthe “top 10 ranking” checkbox checked.

Now, I’ll run the search.

So you can see here that we have 492 keywordswhere every single one of these sites are ranking in the top 100 Google search resultsand at least one of them ranks in the top 10 for a target keyword.

Now, the ones that immediately stand out arethe keywords “seo copywriting” and “video seo.

” You can see that all 3 of our competitorsare ranking decently high, which tells me that they have made some kind of intentionaleffort to target these topics, and probably for good reason.

These would both be perfectly relevant forour business too, so I’ll make a mental note to create content around these topics.

And from here, I can click on the SERP dropdownto see the top 10 ranking results and even click here to see the top 100 results! Also, there’s are a couple really valuableshortcuts that will help your workflow.

If you click on the caret beside any of these numbers, you can get some quick stats on the page plus shortcut links to your favorite reports like the backlinks report or organic keywords report.

And you can also click on any of these numbers to open the respective page.

Now, if you find that there are too many keywordsin here, you can narrow down your results even further by clicking the plusbutton and adding more competitors.

And you can add up to 10 competitors here, but I’ll just add one more and run the search again.

And you can see that the results sethas shrunk to 423 keyword ideas.

Now, if you’re on the other end, and you’renot getting enough keyword ideas, you can change this filter from “all of the belowtargets” to something like “at least 2 or 3 of the below targets” or “any ofthe below targets.

” So I’ll set this to at least 2 of the belowtargets and run the search again.

And now we’re exponentially higherat over 8, 000 keyword results! And if that isn’t enough for you, then youcould also uncheck the top 10 Google ranking requirement.

Then you’ll see we’re at just under 48, 000results, which is just bananas! But you’ll also find phrases that you probablyhave no interest in targeting.

So I recommend starting narrow andthen broadening your search from there.

Pretty cool, right? If all of your competitors are going afterthese keywords, then why wouldn’t you target them when all of the data is right in front of you? Alright, the next way you can use the ContentGap analysis tool is for a content refresh.

And by content refresh, I’m referring to updatingyour old articles to a new and current version.

So, we’ve seen significant boosts in organictraffic when we update old content on the Ahrefs blog.

So this is definitely a bloggingstrategy that I highly recommend.

So the way this strategy works is to searchfor other relevant pages that are ranking high in Google’s search results for yourtarget keyword and then to find sub topics that you can include in your new and up to date post.

So, for example, in our organic keywords report, I’ve filtered down the results for keyword terms between positions 5-10.

And you can see that we rank in position 7for the keyword phrase “link building.

” If I click through to our article, you cansee that this was published in 2016, so it’s probably due for an update.

So from here, I can click on the SERP dropdownhere and copy and paste a few of these URLs in the top section of the Content Gap tool.

Finally, I’ll paste our link building guidein the bottom section where it says “But the following target doesn’t rank for.

” And again, I’ll start with the “all ofthe below targets rank for” filter and broaden my search from there, if needed.

And boom! There are about 30 keywords here which tellsme that there are actually quite a few things we might be missing in our guide.

And from the looks of this report, I can seethat if and when we update this post, we may make note of “SEO links”, “link buildingcampaigns”, and possibly have a short section on explaining what backlinks are.

How awesome is that? From what I’ve seen, this feature is uniqueto Ahrefs where you can do a content gap analysis on exact URLs and prefix searches.

Now, you don’t need to limityourself to only old content.

You can do this exact same thing with oneminor tweak that will basically have content gap write an entire outline fora new post you want to create.

Just leave this bottom section blank and boom! You now have a list of 83 keywords that arehighly relevant to this topic.

And we know this because all of the top rankingpages for the parent term, “link building” are also ranking for these other relevant keywords.

Alright, so the last use case I want to share withyou today is one regarding consolidating content.

Now, there’s a good chance that you’vewritten about the same topic on more than one occasion.

So rather than battling with your own pagesin Google search, you can compare two or more of your articles, see which one is rankingbest, and then merge the posts together.

So I’ve already put two URLs in ContentGap from our blog.

The first one is about growing website trafficand the other is about increasing website traffic.

So basically the same thing.

By leaving this setting to “any of the belowtargets” and searching for only keywords where either of these pages rank in the top10 search results, you can see that the first article is performing much better in Google search.

So from here, we would analyze the secondarticle and see if any points from here could be integrated into the more dominant piece.

Then, we would redirect the less dominantarticle to the one that seems to be better serving the searcher’s intent.

Now, I’m sure you can see how this simplelittle tool can provide powerful insights for your content strategy.

So give content gap a shot and find new topicsyou probably should be targeting.

Use content gap to update some of your old content.

And use content gap to create new blog postswith this data-driven strategy to maximize your organic keyword rankings.

And that wraps up this video on data-driven blog topics.

Make sure to subscribe for more actionableSEO and marketing tutorials.

And don’t be a stranger.

If you have any questions related to the contentgap analysis or you just want to say hey, then leave a comment and I’ll be sure to get back to you.

Sam Oh, signing out.

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