Understanding Content Gap Analysis For Small Businesses

Improve SEO and User Experience Across Your Website to Bolster Sales and Enquiries

Having an online presence is one thing but making the most of it is quite another. No matter what industry you’re in, chances are your website could be doing more for you, but where do you start when it comes to determining what’s missing?

This is where content gap analysis comes in and mastering it can be transformative. By identifying the shortcomings in your existing content, a content gap analysis not only helps with your SEO performance but also improves user experience to make your site more attractive to potential customers and search engines alike. This strategic method involves conducting a website content audit, analysing competitors and performing thorough keyword research, all of which are vital steps in creating content that aligns with your audience’s interests and their needs.

Equipped with the right methods and, ideally, SEO tools along with a clear content strategy, small businesses can pinpoint content gaps and address them more effectively to produce valuable content that resonates with their target market. This guide will explore the step-by-step process of executing a content gap analysis, offering actionable insights to elevate your digital marketing efforts and maximise site traffic.

Understanding Content Gap Analysis

Simplifying the complexities of content marketing begins with understanding content gap analysis. This methodology uncovers opportunities to fill gaps in your website’s content, making it more comprehensive and user-focused. Finding those elusive content gaps involves analysing existing content to uncover areas where it may be lacking or misaligned with strategic goals. And if you don’t know what those goals are, you’ll want to tackle this first. Take a look at our post on SME business development for some recommendations around objective setting before delving into what content gap analysis involves and why it is especially advantageous for small businesses.

What Is Content Gap Analysis?

In short, content gap analysis is the process of identifying missing or underdeveloped content on your website. By assessing existing resources and comparing them to competitor offerings, businesses can discover opportunities to enhance and expand their digital presence. It’s about scrutinising your current content, evaluating what competitors are doing and spotting the gaps that need to be filled.

Review Existing Content: Begin by auditing your current content to identify what’s working and what isn’t. Data from Google Analytics and Search Console will help here.
Evaluate Competitor Content: Examine what successful competitors are offering that you are not. This can be done manually or partially automated with the right tools (more on this below).
Identify Content Gaps: Determine where your content falls short in addressing user needs or search engine criteria. A great place to start is measuring your content against Google’s own guidelines.

A well-conducted content gap analysis ensures your site covers all the relevant topics it should be addressing, thereby boosting search rankings and improving user satisfaction, because the two go hand in hand. Happy search users are Google’s ultimate goal (after harvesting their ~~organs~~ data) so if you help them on their mission to serve searchers well, your site can reap the rewards.

This can be a pivotal tool for small businesses, offering a competitive edge in what is a constantly evolving digital landscape. Additionally, your analysis can help in generating fresh content ideas to keep your audience engaged and drive that valuable traffic.

Why is Content Gap Analysis Important?

When it comes to driving the traffic you want from your website, i.e. the users that are going to have a genuine interest in what you do, a content gap analysis is the content marketing shortcut to take you from hit and hope to nail on head, every time. By meticulously analysing your current content and identifying gaps to plug, you should be able to uncover hidden opportunities to enhance your business’ digital presence. This process not only helps in outmanoeuvring the competition but also in overcoming writer’s block by providing a clear direction for content creation, whether that falls on you, a member of your wider team or external resource like a freelance copywriter (though hopefully not an AI).

Conducting a content gap analysis allows businesses to create relevant content that resonates with their target audience. By understanding what the audience is searching for and addressing those needs, businesses can produce content that ranks high in search engines. This strategic approach ensures that the content is not only comprehensive but also aligned with the audience’s interests and search intent, ultimately driving more traffic and engagement. So you find the gaps and then you fill them.

Benefits for Small Businesses

SMEs can substantially enhance their online strategy by leveraging content gap analysis. Identifying content gaps through auditing content performance and understanding engagement levels is crucial for uncovering areas where present content may be lacking or failing to hit the mark.

Improved SEO Rankings: By addressing content gaps, businesses can improve visibility across search engine results pages, making it easier for potential customers to discover them.
Better User Experience: Comprehensive content ensures users find the information they’re seeking, increasing dwell time and decreasing bounce rates.
Competitive Advantage: Understanding what competitors lack allows you to offer something unique to your audience.

The ability to strategically align content with the customer journey is core to maximising the benefits of an effective audit and gap analysis, ensuring potential and existing customers find value at every interaction. Not only can you explore ways to do better with the content you have, but you can leverage the process to optimises future content creation efforts too.

Conducting a Content Gap Analysis

So now you know you need it, where are you going to start? Conducting a successful content gap analysis involves several essential steps, even if the process isn’t necessarily black and white. This section outlines how to audit existing content, analyse competitors and keywords and map content to the customer journey for maximum impact.

Auditing Existing Content

The audit is a foundational step in identifying content gaps and involves conducting a comprehensive review of your current content inventory to pinpoint strengths, weaknesses and areas for improvement. Think of this as a SWOT analysis.

Catalogue Content: Start by compiling a list of all content, including blog posts, landing pages and other resources. You can even include social media posts if appropriate, particularly if you share lengthy thought leadership content on Linkedin for example.
Evaluate Performance: Utilise analytics tools to evaluate each piece of content’s effectiveness in terms of traffic, engagement and conversions. Data from Google Analytics is freely available to any website owner and will tell you which posts get the traffic and from where that traffic comes.
Identify Underperformers: Highlight content that is not meeting expectations and requires revision or removal. If posts are just not reaching an audience, or if those who do reach the content tend to spend little time with it, work is required.

By conducting a website content audit, you can gather insights into what your audience values and where improvements are needed. This evaluation can then form the basis for making informed decisions about future content strategies.

Competitor and Keyword Analysis

Understanding what competitors are doing can provide valuable insights into your own content strategy. A thorough competitor analysis can reveal opportunities to differentiate your offerings. Given the challenges in generating new content ideas, particularly once you’ve built up quite a library of posts and pages, conducting a content gap analysis through assessing competitors in the market can help discover fresh opportunities.

Analyse Competitor Content: Investigate the type and tone of content that competitors are producing. Are they covering topics you have overlooked? Have they gone into more detail in areas you’ve neglected?
Keyword Research: Determine which keywords competitors rank for and consider if those keywords align with your own content strategy.
Content Gaps: Look for topics that competitors have not adequately covered and that could resonate with your audience.

Depending on just how deep down this rabbit hole you want to go there are a whole host of useful tools you can utilise to support your competitor analysis efforts. Specialist SEO software such as Ahrefs and Semrush are at the top end of the scale, providing a comprehensive suite of tools that can be used to aid you. Alternatively you can read through guides and resources from the likes of Backlinko and Neil Patel to try an find more cost effective methods to dig out the data you’re after. In order to identify keyword gaps and optimise your content for better search performance you should be using data to support your own manual reviewing methods. Don’t expect the robots to do it all for you.

The right tools can be a huge help when it comes to finding opportunities to enhance SEO rankings and increase organic traffic, but you don’t necessarily need to fork out for expensive software. Sometimes a good eye and a bit of time to dig through other people’s websites is going to be more helpful than £400 of complicated analysis software, particularly if you don’t know how to use these tools effectively.

Alternatively of course you can hire external support in the form of a specialist content marketing or SEO consultant. Larger firms may prefer the support of an agency whereas smaller businesses might be better served by a dedicated freelancer. We’ve previously explored ways to find skilled freelancers if this is the path you’d like to take.

Analysing Google’s First Page

When conducting a content gap analysis, analysing Google’s first page of results is an essential starting point. You might have heard that AI chatbots pose a threat to Google’s dominance as people ask the likes of ChatGPT, Claude and Llama for answers instead of going straight to Google, but the reality is that as things stand Google search remains by far and away the most common starting point for any online search. And there’s little point digging through results from Bing or Duck Duck Go either, Google still maintains over 90% market share worldwide, and in the UK it’s even higher than that!

Thorough analysis of current search results can provide valuable insights into what your target audience is looking for and the type of content that is currently resonating with them. By examining the top-ranking pages you can identify gaps in your own content and create new content that fills those voids. Remember that the top ranking content needs to be what people are looking for or Google would be failing its audience. So for as much as we know many of the top ranked sites for popular search queries will have invested heavily to get there, they still need to be able to accurately address user queries or they won’t stay in the mix for long.

This approach helps businesses improve their search engine rankings by aligning their content with what is already performing well in search results. It’s not about copying competitors, but rather understanding what they’re doing well and then trying to do better. By understanding the type of content that ranks competitively, businesses can tailor their own content to meet similar standards, or better, thereby driving more traffic to their website and enhancing their overall online visibility.

Mapping the Customer Journey

Mapping content to the customer journey ensures that content serves user needs at each stage of interaction with your brand. It’s a great way to improve user experience and drive conversions, be they sales or enquiries. Additionally, generating fresh content ideas will really help maintain engagement throughout the customer journey.

A well-mapped customer journey identifies content needs at each stage:

Awareness: Create content that introduces your brand and educates potential customers about their problems and possible solutions.
Consideration: Develop content that positions your products or services as the most viable solutions.
Decision: Provide detailed content such as case studies and testimonials to encourage purchase decisions. Leave the user with no possible objections to buying from or working with you.

Aligning content with user intent also aids in crafting relevant and engaging content to meet audience expectations, increasing the likelihood of conversion and customer retention.

Tools and Implementation

Conducting content gap analysis can be lengthy and laborious so having the right tools and a strategic approach to addressing identified gaps will inevitably streamline the process. We’ve touched on some essential tools for analysis already but here is a little more detail on the tools that can offer guidance on prioritising and tackling those content gaps effectively.

Essential Tools for Analysis

You’ll want tools that can provide insights that are both in-depth and actionable, and bear in mind they can’t spoon feed you exactly what to do so some amount of effective data analysis is going to be required, no matter how fancy the software you pick. Some popular examples of SEO tools crucial for conducting a comprehensive analysis are:

Google Analytics: The first place to consult for tracking traffic and user behaviour on your site.
SEMrush: An expensive but feature-rich tool that offers insights into competitor keywords and content performance.
Ahrefs: The primary competitor to SEMrush. Which you pick will largely boil down to personal preference as the feature set is very similar.
BuzzSumo: Identifies popular content and social media trends within your industry.
Search Console: The little brother of Google Analytics, data from Search Console will give you more information on traffic that has specifically come from Google search engine results pages.

Using these and similar tools, like HubSpot, can help you gain a clearer picture of where your content stands and what improvements might be necessary. These insights are invaluable for adapting your content strategy to better meet audience needs and ultimately its your target audience that should always be front of mind.

Creating a Content Strategy to Fill Gaps

In order to fill identified gaps careful consideration needs to be given to resources and budget. The new content strategy should be aligned with the business’s content goals and the needs of the target audience. For businesses with limited resources, outsourcing content creation can be a viable option to ensure high-quality output. Though again, don’t think you can save money by having AI chatbots churn out new pages for you. AI generated content is too often easy to dismiss as impersonal and lacking true insight.

When planning your new comprehensive content strategy this can include various types of content, such as blog posts, specialist landing pages, FAQs, social media posts and even video content and podcasts, as appropriate. Knowing the type of content to create in order to reach your market will be key to effectively filling content gaps and driving traffic to your website. By diversifying content formats, your business can engage with its audience across different platforms and touchpoints, ensuring a broader reach and higher engagement.

Prioritising and Filling Gaps

We already know that identifying content gaps is just the first step in the process. Once gaps have been identified, the next step is to prioritise these based on potential impact and ease of execution. Strategically filling these gaps can enhance your content’s effectiveness.

Assess Impact: Determine which gaps, if filled, could drive the most traffic or conversions. You can leverage various tools to try and help measure potential impact based on keyword search volumes and search intent.
Quick Wins: Focus on content gaps that require minimal resources but offer significant returns. See if you can find terms for which your site ranks on page two of Google and then try to improve the content to better target these terms and bolster your position. It’s a lot easier to move the dial from being nearly there than it is to start from scratch covering a brand new topic.
Long-Term Projects: Plan for more resource-intensive content creation that supports long-term goals. Consider gathering data that you can use for real industry insight that will be of benefit to your audience.

By adopting the right strategies, businesses can effectively prioritise tasks and allocate resources to areas promising the greatest return on investment. After all, this activity needs to ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line.

The Role of Content Gaps in Content Marketing

Content gaps play a pivotal role in wider content marketing efforts by providing opportunities for businesses to create a competitive edge and attract high-intent traffic. Content gap analysis involves comparing current content against competitors’ offerings, understanding the audience’s search intent and identifying market trends and opportunities to then exploit/leverage them.

Businesses that can provide more value to their audience and establish themselves as thought leaders in their niche will reap the rewards. Keep monitoring, assessing and adapting and the results will come. It’s not an overnight win but put the work in now and you can build a solid pipeline to keep a continuous flow of sales and leads coming from your website, making it every bit as valuable and hard working as your sales team (and probably cheaper!)

If you’ve found this useful you might also enjoy our posts on leveraging AI tools for business growth and small business marketing.