How to do Competitor Gap Analysis for SEO

The SEO gap analysis is one of the most basic SEO processes or deliverables. But it is more complex than common guides or SEO tooling modules make it out to be.

At the very worst, gap analysis papers over your competitive differentiation and has your teams chasing meaningless traffic. At its best, it can be your jumping off point for competitive differentiation, and a first step into a keyword strategy which will ultimately look quite different from the headscratcher spreadsheet full of your competitors’ keyword data.

Below I will treat some of the shortcomings of gap analysis, before moving on to what I consider the ideal way to execute a gap analysis.

The problem(s) with gap analysis

Keyword research tools and articles online offer cut-and-paste solutions for gap analysis, most of which are easily enough shaped into a keyword strategy, or transposed into a busy file or dashboard.

But for the business itself, the products of this analysis seem to paper over a lot of differences, or miss nuances which are critical to what sets you apart. Below are some of the reasons for the weakness of gap analysis in general, and some of the specific weaknesses that often come through in keyword gap analysis deliverables.

Your competitors aren’t ranking on purpose

Ranking is not always or necessarily a function of SEO recommendations or onpage optimization – or even of a company’s intent to forwardly target a topic. Unless a competitor is SEO-led in their content-creation efforts, it is likely that their rankings across content types are more or less accidental. While a generous cross section of their content and rankings will likely prove highly aligned with their brand and product, it is critical to remember that their rankings don’t need to be understood as an explicit statement of intent.

There are two things to remember at high level

Google is a notorious backfiller of irrelevant content – and when a query meaning is ambiguous, it may rank pages which don’t make much sense as answers. This is true especially for higher volume queries.
Rankings may be more or less intentional. It is not a safe assumption that your competitor has all-knowing intelligence on what your customer is looking for.

Taking the backfill as canon

In some spaces like publisher or e-commerce, competition on the search results may run several pages deep. But for most industries, after the first few results, search results are usually only vaguely relevant to a search query.

Keyword research should have strict filtering to only observe competitor rankings for the top few positions. This provides a likely view onto both how deliberate they are being with their content strategy, as well as how successful they are in rankings.

Complement understanding of how your competitors fare on the search results with an understanding of what content actually ranks for given keywords.

You haven’t done proper content channel segmentation

As part of your keyword research, you should be taking channel segmentation into account for all content strategy efforts. This is important, because on search, certain pages are are best suited to serve intents at a given stage, and correspondingly to traffic search from specific keywords.

By contrast, working with competitors’ whole-of-site data runs into lots of potential issues. Chief among the issues you are likely to face (even after you have winnowed out the junk) is that you aren’t looking closely enough at which competitor content ranks for given keywords. Both your site and competitor sites may consist in any variable composition of product pages, product detail pages, industry vertical pages, category pages, manufacturer pages, blogs, glossaries, technical documentation, company pages, and more. The mere fact that a competitor ranks somewhere is not enough to provide solid intel on the “what” and the “how”, which are important factors in determining “whether” to attempt to rank.

By being aware of this and zealously filtering for specific URL paths, you are doing yourself untold favors.

Keyword gap analysis vs content gap analysis

Out of the box, a keyword gap analysis doesn’t mean much without insight into how competitors’ content succeeds or fails to secure search traffic for particular keywords.. That context can be provided by understanding a competitor’s content segmentation, a process which results in a content gap analysis.

A full-funnel SEO strategy includes content segmentation. Content segmentation means understanding the following: which web content is meant to accomplish what action for which searchers at which stages of their journey. This is critical for keyword gap analysis in two ways.

Firstly, insofar as different keywords may reflect users at different search stages of their larger customer journey.
Secondly, understanding what kind of content, delivered through which kind of channel, can be best aligned to the current search stage in the customer’s journey.

Training the lens of content segmentation onto competitor analysis can be called “content gap analysis”. This refers to the process of analyzing how competitors target customers with specific content types (templates, messaging, engagement features, filetypes).

A content gap analysis is “flat” while competitor keyword analysis is “deep”. One unfortunate mistake that can recur without content gap analysis is the following: Treating the keyword analysis as “flat”. Here keywords are not differentiated according to content (or searcher intent, or ranking potential, or business goal). At the same time, the content aspect is treated as “deep”. Instead of entering the analysis stage with a full view of how content aligns to keywords, you may encounter competitor rankings as a large and undifferentiated keyword list.

With the content gap analysis undertaken, you are able to align competitor content types to specific keywords. Here you get a more global view onto a competitor’s content marketing and web strategy, and how they are leveraging that in support of SEO.

Misunderstanding search intent

Competitor gap analysis requires the same understanding of search intent as any type of keyword research. If you are setting out to understand competitor strengths, you need to understand more deeply how they are serving customer intent. Devise a strategy for labeling keywords according to search intent which is specific to your customers and your space.

One of the main ways that this goes sour is using labels drawn from popular keyword taxonomies to sort keywords, or to confirm their relevance. In fact, especially for higher volume keywords, the intent behind a query is much harder to estimate. Recall that shorthead keywords are subject to high degrees of query reformulation, or click entropy: these keywords are very often reflective of users at the earliest stages of their journeys, and their real interests may not lie in the space that you share with your competitor, despite the high volume keyword your competitor is currently ranking for.

Conflating search intent with SERP features or vertical search

SERP features like video or knowledge panels are shown or recorded by keyword research tools for many queries for which it may not be not relevant to you. In addition to understanding the intent of a given search, understanding the relevance of SERP features can determine both the suitability of a given keyword for targeting by your brand, as well as the priority of specific features or content within your content (i.e. schema, Q&As, or videos) to ranking.

You don’t have the juice

There are plenty of metrics which give you a sense for the difficulty of ranking for a term on the evidence of the “domain authority”. or”page authority” of ranking pages. But search is generally more complicated and subtler than that. Google defines E-EAT along with other factors to describe how the demonstrated expertise of a given site factors in to rankings.

You simply may not be as successful trying to rank for topics that you don’t have. a demonstrated strength in. Ask yourself a simpler question: do we have any business writing about this?

Resist the anti-pattern

The pejorative phrase “SEO content” is the hateful product of building strategies based on currently ranking results and repeating what competitors do (to a degree, with the help of SEO content writing assistants).

Aside from clogging up the internet, the great anti-pattern of SEO content has a distinct, unsalutary effect for a brand’s content: it removes the ability to differentiate, in two senses:

Writing the same content (or targeting the same keywords)

Companies in a given space need to engage in differentiation along some of the following lines:

Distinct product offerings with distinct use cases
Distinct focuses on (or relationships in) distinct industries
Distinct USPs which are present throughout marketing strategies and materials
Customer profiles which are distinct from competitors

These distinctions may be highly visible, and yet remain static with respect to possible keyword strategies, as long as keyword strategy is always indexed to competitors. Precisely because your company is distinct from your competitors, it is necessary to break away from competitors in order to address your customers’ needs.

How to do that? I recommend beginning by not only presupposing that there is a funnel at play which brings users increasingly closer to becoming customers (as search volume goes down and word count of keywords increase). Instead, find new domains for keyword exploration by working backwards from points of differentiation: what your customers (rather than your near competitor’s customers) may be thinking about, their problems, potential solutions, and your distinct solution.

Writing content the same way

Content should contain unique perspectives and material, (and where helpful and possible, feature uniquely helpful features or tools which drive engagement). Differentiation can be a part of both what and how you write.

Ultimately, SEO is a business proposition like anything else: moving customers from early awareness stages further down the funnel requires some form of motivation which speaks to their interests and pain points. If your content is hollow, and pursued for the sake of volume alone, the unit economics will look more like abandoned real estate developments than a few well-built multifamily units.

Compare Competitive analysis for product and in SEO

Product managers and analysts may look at the competitive landscape and evaluate gaps in product features, usability, ability to satisfy pain points, and so on. A competitive analysis based on these findings may amount to findings which can sway the direction of product development.

Without asking such critical and context-aware questions, an SEO gap analysis is basically a passive collection of “what is x ranking for?”

How to find content gaps?

Content segmentation: understanding your goals in terms of templates and content purposes

Before you begin exporting data from a tool, you need to take account of your page types and purposes (current or planned). For a blog, that might mean something like the following:

evergreen: campaign: how to execute a process
evergreen: how to do/implement/create
evergreen: best tools, product, shows, etc.
time-bound: specific event, release, thing
product marketing: product-specific detail
thought leadership: general/branding
thought leadership: product marketing/industry specific

There may be no neat way to draw out all of this information at scale in your gap analysis, but it is worth doing nonetheless. I recommend you set these to the side for now, as they are more helpful for understanding competitor content strategy once you have done your keyword research.

Determine how you will focus on competitors

As you prepare your own site and competitor data, focus in on content types at a high level. A neat way of exploring competitor data is making sure to segment their keywords according to the content they produced. In other words, rather than analyzing your competitors’ successes domain-wide, analyze them according to what they are actually doing in terms of their content strategy.

Ask who your competitors are

Your competitors will change depending on the content type as well as content purpose. Being stuck to one unwavering concept of exactly who your competitors are in a domain-wide sense risks falling prey to all of the weaknesses of content gap analysis mentioned above. Instead, making space to understand who your competitor is in which situation can be a rich way to structure your insights.

For different content types, topics, or industry verticals, the competition may not align well to one version of who your competitors are. When it comes to more product-focused content, your customers may not always be making an explicit choices between you and competitors, but potentially deciding among an array of different but overlapping solutions. One solution you offer may compete with one competitor; another solution may compete with another.

For non-product focused content, understanding your “competition” can be extremely tricky. Depending on your space, there are a lot of potential profiles for competitors, ranging from news or reviews sites to occasionally produced content regions of companies with widely different product focus. If you choose to drill down deeply to analyze content gaps for more diverse themes, I suggest being very intentional about who you choose to include. Niche industry publications, highly relevant review or affiliate sites, or companies with overlapping product use cases may be appropriate candidates for respective themes.

How to approach competitor keyword research

Don’t use gap analysis modules

Keyword research tools offer competitor gap analysis modules, where you can see neat overviews of how a site stacks against competitor sites.

Screenshot of competitor gap analysis module in Semrush

For getting a quick overview of a site’s current competitors on the search results, such modules are reliable. However, I don’t find that these tools are useful for the process of actually doing keyword research. The reason for that lies in the way that this data is presented in all gap analysis modules that I have used, and especially in the filters available:

closeup screenshot of keyword differences in Semrush's competitor gap module

All of the filters try to force an analysis to conform to one of two basic, strict conditions.

Your site ranks in such a way for a keyword
All of your competitors rank in such a way for a keyword

There is an inherent weakness to this format, and especially the second condition, which is that it forces you to compare a domain (or selected pages) against all competitor domains. There is no way to filter in these views to include keywords for which one competitor out of five named competitors may be ranking in the top three positions, and then to do so multiple times under different conditions in order to actually produce a report which is an actionable point for jumping off.

Here you can see the anti-pattern being created in real time. Instead of acknowledging that four different competitors may have distinct strengths and weaknesses in distinct areas – the real world, and the real SERP landscape – it treats them all as an indistinct group, creating an artificial concept of a competitive space on search. In other words, it forces alignment where alignment should not be sought.

Focus competitor research on top-ranking keywords

If you are moving away from the anti-pattern of gap analysis, it stands to reason: you can probably pull back on averaging competitor rankings as a critical datapoint. In fact, acknowledging the diversity of competitors (diversity = there is more than one of them) means acknowledging that different competitors will be particularly strong in certain areas. And I find that being guided by insights drawn from competitor strengths is much more actionable than averaging competitor rankings (again, for all of the reasons stated above).

In practical terms, I recommend the following in preparing your data.

In your keyword research tool, access the keyword data for all competitors, with the following conditions:

Selecting for site region you want to investigate (not available in all keyword tools)
Position 1-2
non-brand traffic only

Screenshot closeup from Semrush's Organic Research module

How to segment keywords in your gap analysis

To give some meaning to your keyword data, segmenting keywords according to theme, modifiers, and brand interest are all ways of converging on the search intent behind them. Here are a few examples of labels you can produce to better segment your competitor content data, and understand strengths and weaknesses across your industry.

The ranking content (or ranking template) itself

Understanding which content types or templates are ranking (especially when there is a higher density of existing content for a query) is itself a critical datapoint.

Adapt this formula to label the competitor pages which are ranking:

=IF(REGEXMATCH(D2,"blog|articles"), "blog", IF(REGEXMATCH(D2,"reviews"), "reviews",IF(REGEXMATCH(D2,"category"), "category page",IF(REGEXMATCH(D2,"help."), "documentation",IF(REGEXMATCH(D2,"resources"), "resources","other")))))

If you know specific competitors can more or less be used as stand-ins for a content type in a given domain, you can include them into the formula, or split off to label by brand:

=IF(REGEXMATCH(D2,"tomsguide|techradar|cnet|engadget"), "reviews",IF(REGEXMATCH(D2,"docs.flutter.dev"), "Flutter documentation", "other"))

If you can patch specific paths on competitor sites to a given content type, it may be helpful to include those as well, insofar as it brings value to your process.

What sort of information a searcher wants about a theme

The search journey is extremely complicated. On a given customer’s journey towards an eventual purchase, there are many points at which they enter, reformulate, and expand their queries in order to better satisfy their needs. Paying attention to keyword modifiers is one way of planning for the different doors they may need to pass through on the way to a purchase, and planning to demonstrate your expertise and make the case for your brand (according to the respective goals for the customer at this stage) at each step.

You can follow this formula:

Note that all of these possible strings are domain-specific. Terms as basic as “how to” can reflect different intents, according to your industry and customers. An audit of keywords, ranking templates, and an understand of customers can all be useful in fine-tuning your labeling for your domain.

The searcher’s thematic interest

Keywords are themselves guides to certain themes. Use your product line and associated thinking, concepts, and problems (which in many industries correspond to longform contents in blog posts or white papers) as labels in themselves.

As with all these label recommendations, gaining or possessing research or domain knowledge makes a big difference. The deeper you get in your keyword research and understanding of your industry, the more you will be able to spot thematic areas which are identical, or which “refer to” without actually containing a specific keyword.

Adapt this formula to label thematic interests according to the content of the keyword:

Add in actual product names (or generic product names) or other important terms and phrases as appropriate. The goal here in these examples is really just to provide a methodology: quality work will depend on your domain knowledge and familiarity with the space.

Label keywords according to degree of product awareness

Product awareness can be a good way to work backwards from your ultimate goals. A helpful framework was provided by the advertising guru Eugene Schwartz.

Unaware
Problem Aware
Solution Aware
Product Aware
Most Aware

The challenge for any SEO, including in gap analysis, is to understand what keywords map to stages one through three, as well as being able to advise on what sort of content can “funnel” a prospective customer who is “product-unaware” through to product awareness, all while making the case (seen or unseen) for their company’s product.

There’s no straightforward way to label a keyword according to product awareness using labeling. But by this point, you have already collected a series of datapoints that can support this process, including: search volume (and other keyword metrics), ranking competitor template, thematic interest, and informational type. These can all be used to classify a keyword’s function in the motion that leads a customer towards a purchase (in other words, progressively converting a searcher into a customer).

To do this, you should have your full keyword data set, including labels for templates and search intent, and laid out in a single worksheet. Use a QUERY function to pull the keywords, datapoints you care about, and your labels into another sheet. From there, proceed to manually label keywords according to stages of product awareness.

Knowing how your content responds to searchers at particular stages of their search journey can better support you in creating keyword strategies that evolve along with your customer. Especially in B2B, focusing on “product awareness” instead of funnel stages can actually better align you to the “funnel” through which real customers will move on the way to your product – a funnel which is comprised of increasing degrees of engagement as customers “enter” the space, seek to tackle a problem, discover possible solutions, and begin to explore a specific solution (yours!). This helps to separate the signal from the noise iteratively and at each stage of the customer journey.

What to do with your gap analysis?

The power in completing a thorough gap analysis is in knowing both where the gap is between you and your competition, and in understanding what steps you need to take to fill that gap. Measuring the gap can be done through mindful, directed exploration of competitor strengths. Keyword segmentation and keyword taxonomies are helpful for measuring the gap. If you have any sort of rank tracker with tagging enabled, you can convert the labels you produced into tags, in order to monitor your gap on an ongoing basis.

The methods for a competitor gap analysis shouldn’t be that distinct from keyword research in general. And like keyword research, gap analysis should drive towards the outline of a content strategy. Understanding the keywords, search intents, and websites in your space are all major parts of building towards your desired keyword profile in a single motion.