Keyword Gap Analysis – Strategy + Tools

• What is Keyword Gap Analysis?
• How does finding Keyword Gap help your business?
• How to perform Keyword Gap Analysis?
• What are the best Keyword Gap analysis tools?

When it comes to keyword research, we have a plethora of Keyword research tools to help us. However, what matters is the technique you are using for researching the perfect keyword for your business.

Keyword gap analysis is one such technique that is useful for:

1. Bloggers and E-commerce store owners
2. Marketing, Ecommerce and Digital marketing managers
3. Agencies and SEO consultants

This technique is literally the holy grail of finding new keywords. In this guide, I will teach you everything about Keyword Gap analysis and best practices.

Here we go…

What is Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword gap analysis is the strategy of comparing two or more competing domains to identify those keywords that competition is ranking for, but you are not.

The key here is to pick 1-2 competitor or top websites in your niche, use any of the below-mentioned competitor keyword gap analysis tools, and find those keywords that are driving traffic to your competitor websites.

Thanks to modern keyword gap analysis tools that made this process simple, and with a few hours of exercise you could possibly find new opportunities to create content for your’s or client website.

There are many benefits of Competitor Keyword gap analysis, such as:

1. The fastest way to find new opportunities
2. Find questions that readers ask
3. Discover keywords that are working for an existing website
4. Find valuable, and high volume keywords in a minute

How to perform Competition Keyword gap analysis?

To get started with the process, you need the following stuff:

1. A tool for performing competitive keyword gap analysis (Mentioned @ top and below)
2. A list of your competitors
3. 1-2 hour of focused time
4. An excel sheet or a way to organize your Keywords

Best Tools for Keyword gap analysis

These days, all popular Keyword research tools offer Keyword gap analysis features. Some of the most popular Keyword gap analysis tools these days are:

1. SEMrush
2. Serpstat
3. Ahrefs

Most of these tools function similarly, and it is just a matter of your choice. I personally use SEMRush as it offers a lot more features than others.

How to find List of the competitive domain for Gap analysis

Now, you need a list of domains that are competing with your domain in SERP. You can again find this using any of the tools listed above.

Here is how you can do it on SEMrush:

• Login to SEMrush dashboard
• Type your domain name and click on organic research

Look for “Main Organic Competitors” on the page, and here you will find the list of the organic competitors for the provided domain.

You can click on view all to see the entire list of competitors. You can make a list of 3-4 domains that are relevant to your business. These domains will work as a seed domain for performing the analysis.

It is a good idea to note down these domains on an excel sheet, so that in the future, you don’t have to repeat the process of finding competitive domains.

For new websites:

If you are starting a new blog or a website, you can pick the top websites in your niche, and use that for competitive gap analysis.

Moving on…

How to perform Keyword Gap analysis

After identifying the domains for competitive keyword analysis, now, let’s jump to the fun part.

The idea here is to, compare your domain with other domain names, and see which keywords they are ranking for, but you are not.

I usually repeat this process by comparing

1. My domain with a single competitive domain name
2. My domain with multiple competitive domain name

Both the steps are equally important, and the more time you spent at this stage, will help you to identify profitable high-value keyword opportunities.

For the sake of this tutorial, we will compare one domain with multiple domain names.

Click on the Keyword gap tool and enter your domain name and competitor domain name.

Now, here you need to click on intersection type to compare your domain with other target domains:

SEMrush offers 4 different options for intersection type:

• All keywords – view every keyword that the entered domains are ranking for in Google’s top 100.
• Keywords Unique to the first domain – see the keywords that the first domain ranks for but the second does not.
• Common keywords – view all the keywords that both domains have rankings for in Google’s top 100 results.
• Unique keywords – view the keywords that are unique to each domain and not shared by any of the other sites.

You can also, use the filters to further refine the keywords. For example, find keywords with volume > 100

From here, you can create a list of keywords that make sense for your business. You can also export them using the SEMrush export feature (Top right) and then import it to your keyword management tool.

Tip: Filtering at this stage is essential, and you should also check for search intent to ensure if that keyword is valuable or not in today’s time.

Keyword Gap Analysis on Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another popular SEO tool, and they offer beginner-friendly keyword gap analysis. One of my SEO friends, Robbie Richard, has created this video showing how you can use Ahrefs Keyword gap analysis tool:

Ahrefs interface is beginners friendly, and easier to use for even novice.

Content gap analysis 🤔

Often a lot of SEO’s and tools interchangeably keyword gap analysis and content gap analysis.

I believe in the days to come, the content gap analysis should mean only to compare two pieces of content, and finding the gap between them.

Most of the On-page optimizer tools like Frase, SEMrush Writing Assistant, POP are an example of content gap analysis. However, this is just a matter of understanding, and with time we will have a uniform nomenclature.

Until then, enjoy this tutorial on keyword gap analysis. Feel free to ask any questions if you have.