As you scroll through the SERP, you realize that a bunch of your competitors are outranking you. You notice that you’ve been overtaken by newer websites and that your website is no longer on the front page of the SERP. You've probably put a huge amount of time and effort into optimizing your website but why isn’t it paying off?
We might have just the answer and solution for you. What you’re seeing is a keyword gap between you and your competitors.
Now, what is a keyword gap?
The keyword gap is represented by the keyword opportunities that your competitors are capitalizing on that you are missing out on. Having a keyword gap means that they are using keywords that are bringing traffic to their websites that you aren’t. You’re basically missing out on the keywords that are benefiting your competitor’s websites.
How do you bridge this keyword gap?
That’s an easy question. You just need to do something called a keyword gap analysis (or competitor keyword analysis). This is the process of identifying the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and discovering the keywords that your target audience is actually searching for.
Now, before you go thinking about how troublesome this is going to be or how you aren’t confident that this will yield sufficient benefits, let me tell you how exactly can conducting a keyword gap analysis benefit you.
1) You gain more ideas for content
Think about it, maybe you’ve been running your website for a really long time and you’ve exhausted yourself just churning out content. You might’ve hit writer’s block or just can’t think of any more ideas.
Well, as you browse through all the keywords that your competitors are using, maybe you’ll get some inspiration for fresh new content.
2) Boost your search visibility
As you discover the profitable keywords that are benefiting your competitors, you can also start thinking of how you can incorporate those very keywords into your own website. So when potential visitors search those keywords, your website will show up and you’ll gain more traffic and climb up the rankings.
3) Optimize your content
If you see that you and your competitor are ranking for the same keywords but they’re ranking above you, you can check out their content surrounding that keyword to see what can be learned from it. You might want to note what kind of content they do, the length of it, the structure, and so on.
4) Understand your audience better
As you discover more related keywords that you’ve never used, you can actually understand more about what your target audience is searching for. You get to uncover more opportunities to provide more in-depth content and answer more questions that your audience might have.
Conduct a keyword gap analysis using RankingGap
Tools like RankingGap are made specifically for keyword gap analysis. These kinds of tools are crafted specifically to conduct keyword gap analysis and provide just the right type of features to make it easy to do and understand.
Here are some keyword gap analysis strategies to help you get started with suggestions on how RankingGap can help you with them.
#1 Keywords that you rank for but your competitors don’t
You should first find out what keywords you’re already ranking for. A very basic way for doing that is to just manually key in the keywords in Google search and go through the SERP to get your data. But this isn’t exactly effective or time-saving.
If you hop on RankingGap however, you can just type in your domain’s URL, click search and you’ll get a full report! It literally just takes a couple of seconds. You’ll want to focus on the “Unique” keyword view.
You can also compare your and your competitor’s keywords so you can find out which keywords are the ones that only you rank for.
You ought to invest most of your time and effort in these keywords to make sure that your rankings for them stay on top. Keep track of them and note down whenever they’re increasing or dropping so you are always ready to do something.
#2 Keywords that competitors rank for but you don’t
It’s hard to find every valuable and relevant keyword to rank. It takes time and effort to do it so why not cut the hard work out and just check on your competitors to “steal” their keywords instead.
Using RankingGap, get a list of your competitor’s keywords that are ranking in the Top 10 positions on the SERP and compare them with your own keywords.
Then, start thinking about why you aren’t ranking for those keywords. Maybe your content doesn’t really cover that niche, maybe the keyword only became a thing recently so your content isn’t optimized for it yet, or maybe you used related keywords instead.
There are two things you can do to utilize these keyword opportunities and they are:
a) Reoptimize old content
We know how important it is to keep content fresh and accurate. You can do that by regularly reoptimizing it.
All you need to do is basically go through your old content, revamp it by adding some new sections, keywords, updated information, and boom, your content has been reoptimized. You can now enjoy the higher rankings and traffic.
b) Produce new content
When you look through your competitor’s unique keywords, you’ll soon form an idea of what kind of content you haven’t covered yet.
This is how you can come up with new content ideas that you’re confident will produce good results. Then, you just need to create the content so you can reach more people and make your website more authoritative.
Do note that a good strategy when creating content with target keywords in mind is to merge related ones in the same article. You get to save time and energy by doing this and it gives you the same results anyway.
#3 Keywords that you and most of your competitors don’t rank for
These kinds of keywords are actually really valuable because it’s like a whole new untapped market. If you can utilize these keywords quick enough, you just might be able to gain a new audience and extreme growth.
The issue is, these kinds of keywords are extremely hard to find.
But when there is a will, there is a way. Here are some steps you can add to your strategy:
First, come up with a list of competitors. You’ll want at least 5 to 10 competitors. Go on RankingGap and compare your domain’s URL against up to 4 of those competitors and repeat.
Then, compare their keywords and find ones where only one or two competitors rank for it. The fewer the better. You can then group similar unique keywords just so you’re more organized.
#4 Keywords that both you and your competitors rank for
It’s likely that you will come across competitors that share many ranked keywords with you and that they may be outranking you at almost every single one. This is annoying so how can you fix it?
The first thing you should do is to compile a list of common keywords so you want to know what keywords that both of you are ranking for, especially the ones where you’re just slightly behind on. These kinds of keywords are what I would call “low-hanging fruit”. You’re already doing decent by ranking for them, you just need to push a little more to actually outrank your competitors and come out on top.
Just go on RankingGap and look for the “Common” keyword view.
Then, you’ll want to find the articles created by your competitors that have the keyword. If your competitor has 100 articles that contain that keyword while you only have one, it’s a really obvious reason why they would outrank you.
After that, you want to compare the articles. You want to read through your competitor’s articles and note down what it is they’re doing that makes their articles better. There are quite a few things that you can take note of. For example, you can compare their keyword density to yours. Are they inserting the keyword in every 100 or 500 words? Is their word count much higher than yours? You can also check the header tags to see what audience they’re targeting.
Other than that, you want to filter the keywords by search volume. Keywords with high search volumes have higher potential gains. Let’s say that you found a keyword with a search volume of 10,000 that both you and your competitor are ranking for. However, your competitor is at rank #3 for it while you’re at rank #10. This is a great opportunity to catch up and outrank your competitor.
Conclusion
That’s about it! It was a bit of a lengthy article but I’m sure that you’ve gotten a whole lot of good from it.
Just for a quick recap, you’ve probably learned that the keyword gap represents the keyword opportunities that you’re missing out on and that you should bridge this gap in order to enjoy benefits such as getting better search visibility, getting more content ideas, or expanding your audience. Remember that you can conduct a keyword gap analysis by using RankingGap so go on and go forth with your newfound knowledge!