When I meet business owners who don’t blog for their business, one of the most common excuses I hear is, “I don’t know what to write about.”
The same goes for people who used to blog for their business, but have since let their blog go dormant because they have run out of ideas. It happens to all of us, especially if we’ve been blogging for a while, but the good news is there are ways to reignite your inspiration, and one of the best ways to do that is by conducting a content gap analysis.
Table of Contents
- What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
- Ask About Content Gaps
- Conduct Keyword Research to Identify Content Gaps
- Make Sure People Find Your Content at the Right Time
- Analyze Your Competitors’ Content
- Conclusion
1) What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
A content gap analysis identifies a gap between the information your target audience is looking for and the information that’s already out there.
For example, I was recently looking for recommendations on how to grind aniseed for a recipe, and all I could find was recommendations for how to crush star anise. I checked, and they are not the same thing.
My search fell into a content gap – I was looking for something specific and the recipe blogs and websites out there did not have the content that answered my question, so I had to revert to figuring it out on my own. This must be how our foremothers made their way through recipes in the days before recipe blogs and YouTube.
In this day and age, someone with an answer to the specific question I was asking had an opportunity to add me as a member of their audience. Since I couldn’t find anyone with the answer to the right question, I remain adrift in this digital world.
OK, not really, but I certainly have not been added to any email lists or social media followings.
This is why it’s so important to identify and target content gaps in your industry. But that’s easier said than done, so I’m going to give you some actionable tips you can use to identify and take advantage of content gaps that are specific to your audience.
2) Ask About Content Gaps
Sometimes the simplest solution can also be one of the most effective: just ask.
Ask your loyal clients about their pain points. Ask if there’s anything you could provide that would help them out that you’re not already providing.
If you’re talking to a prospect and having trouble convincing them to sign on the dotted line, ask what you could provide that would convince them to sign up.
You should also ask experts in your industry and related industries if they’ve identified any content gaps you could fill for your target audience.
Not only is this a great way to discover any products/services you could offer your clients that you aren’t already providing, but it’s a great way to find out if there’s something you do provide that people are not finding because you’re not presenting it in the way and/or in the places they want it.
You can reach out to your clients and prospects individually, either in person, on the phone, or via email, and ask their opinion, or you can use a tool like Typeform to create and send out a survey.
The survey format might make it faster and easier to send out and analyze data, but they also have notoriously low response rates. If you do decide to go with a survey, I recommend making it short (and letting them know it’s short), and offering a reward, such as an Amazon gift card, to entice them to fill out the survey.
3) Conduct Keyword Research to Identify Content Gaps
You can create demand for a topic that does not yet exist and then get ahead of the competition by filling that demand, but it’s much faster and easier to fill a demand that already exists.
The best way to do this is to identify keywords with a fairly high search volume and a low SEO competition rate.
The search volume refers to the average number of searches that term gets on a monthly basis. The SEO competition rate refers to the amount of content already online with that keyword. It’s a score from 1-100, 1 being no competition, and 100 being the internet is already flooded with content using that search term. The lower the SEO competition rate, the better, but I generally recommend keeping the keywords you use to an SEO competition rate of 25 or less.
If you can find a keyword with a fairly high search volume and a low SEO competition score, you’ve identified a content gap.
While you want to make sure some people are searching for your keyword, I wouldn’t get too hung up on the search volume. Although it can be tempting to use the keywords with thousands of searches per month, many of those keywords also have an impossibly high SEO competition rate. There’s value in targeting a sub-niche that’s so small that few, if any, other brands are bothering to try to rank for it, which makes it easy for your to dominate that niche.
My favorite keyword research tool is Serpstat, although SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs are all great options as well.
I also like to use Answer the Public to see what search terms people are using around a particular topic. For example, to come up with the topic for this blog post, I entered the keyword “content gap” and found that “how to make a content gap analysis” is a common question that gets entered into Google’s search bar. Then I checked Serpstat to make sure “content gap” is a relevant keyword and found that “content gap analysis” was actually an even more valuable keyword (higher search volume without a higher SEO competition rate), and here we are!
Another thing you can do when conducting your keyword research is to check the related keywords section that appears below the stats of the keyword you entered. You might find some keywords that are similar to the one you were searching, but have an even higher search volume and/or lower SEO competition score.
Yes, this can turn into a black hole of keyword research that can lead you somewhere you never intended to go. The good news is you can never have too many keywords, because the ones that don’t end up in the title can go in subheadings and sprinkled throughout your blog post.
4) Make Sure People Find Your Content at the Right Time
I mentioned above the importance of, not only making sure you’re selling what people want to buy, but that you’re positioning it in the right places. This means that, in addition to making sure you’re hanging out where your target audience is hanging out (not only online, but on their preferred social media platforms), you put the right keywords in the right types of content. In order to make sure you know exactly what people are looking for when they use each keyword, you’ll want to analyze the search intent of each keyword.
5) Analyze Your Competitors’ Content
I never recommend copying anyone else’s content (not only is it rude, but it can backfire on you if Google finds out), but if your competitors are writing about a certain topic, there’s probably a reason. Either they’ve identified a content gap, or they found something else in the course of their topic generation process that alerted them to the fact that it might be a topic their target audience (and therefore your target audience) would be likely to find valuable.
You can cover the same topics as your competitors as long as you make sure your content is entirely in your own words, or you can present a counterargument to whatever position they asserted on their blog.
For example, a while back an SEO expert published a post on her blog claiming backlinks are no longer important for SEO. Shortly after that, another SEO expert published a post on his own blog arguing that, yes, backlinks are still as important as ever.
Going against the grain and publishing unpopular opinions can be a great way to get the attention of your reader, as long as you can back up your claims and you’re not just being contrary for the sake of being contrary.
If you see a competitor asserting a position you disagree with, you can always link back to their blog post in your own rebuttal, as long as you’re respectful. You don’t win any points with anyone by being mean or dismissive.
6) Conclusion
The blogging landscape has grown exponentially more competitive in just the past few years, and it’s only going to get more competitive as more and more businesses see the value in content marketing and invest in it. It’s an uphill battle for anyone just starting out and still struggling to grow their audience, but it’s not a hopeless battle. Instead of working harder (trying to create and publish tons of content), the answer is to work smarter by identifying content gaps – the questions your target audience is already asking that no one else has answered yet.
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If you want to write your own blog posts, but need help identifying the topics that are most relevant to your target audience, we can help with that.
