Search engine optimisation can be very competitive. For each query that a user enters into a search engine, there are usually thousands if not millions of results. This means that usually there are other businesses offering a similar product or service to you. In order to beat the competition, you've got to engage in competitive analysis. In this blog, we explore how you can find the missing pieces of your content strategy i.e. competitors' SEO keywords that you don't rank for. The easiest way to find and fill your content gaps!
When done properly, a Keyword Gap Analysis is a no-brainer competitive research tool to identify new keyword opportunities. It gives loads of insights into a competitors strengths and weaknesses that can you learn from or take advantage of.
How to conduct a Keyword Gap Analysis
- Let us know what your website URL is and any competitor website URLs
- If you're not sure about your competitors, we can find some for you
You might know some big names in your industry, but they might not be your direct competitors. Take for example SEO in general, there are agencies selling SEO services, businesses selling SEO software, blogs writing about SEO, and publishers with a particular focus on SEO. So there's a lot of cross over from different industries around one particular term.
To best find your competitors, you want to think about your industry and the potential methods your competitors might use in their marketing strategy. How are they targeting keywords on their blogs or social media posts, for example.
We can help find your competitors using our SEO tools. We provide any business with a list of competitors by gathering information on the top 30 domains around a set of keywords you provide us. We can then aggregate a list of competitors in order of most competitive, allowing us to compare their rankings with yours and get real-time updates on their performance vs yours. This helps to establish a baseline for which future improvements can be measured.
- Choose to find unique or common keyword opportunities
This step segregates seed keywords (super common keywords that are usually massively high volume, very competitive, and the base keyword for a lot of searches. For example, "Mercedes Benz" is a seed keyword. Then there are long-tail keywords that are typically more niche, unique and highly relevant to the business, for example, "Mercedes Benz truck dealership in Kent".
All businesses, no matter how big or small you are, will need a keyword list for targeting. Seed keywords are often useful for identifying some strong competition and identifying juicy keywords new keywords to compete for.
Once we've narrowed down a list of competitors, it usually good practice to not only conduct the Keyword Gap Analysis, but also analyse your competitor following a basic SWOT technique by answering these questions:
- Who are they?
- What marketing techniques are they using?
- Do they have weaknesses that you can exploit?
- Where are there strengths and is there something we can learn from to replicate their success?
- Is there marketing team substantially larger than yours?
We're certainly able to help answer many of these questions, certainly from an SEO perspective. So if you require an analysis of your competitors SEO, get in touch and we'll get you the insight you need to take your website to the next level.
- Filter by ranking type, for example by keyword difficult or if the keyword is a seed keyword or unique keyword.
- Exclude negative keywords
Get a list of new keyword opportunities for any website in any niche (with search volumes, PPC costs and SEO difficulty analysed at once).
Further keyword research
Other powerful keyword research tools that you can use that when used together, these sources will give you thousands of keywords you wouldn't have found elsewhere.
- Keyword gap analysis
- Google Ads keyword planner
- Misspelled keywords
- Bing related searches
- TF-IDF (term frequency inverse document frequency) content analysis
- Word Mixer
- YouTube autosuggest
- Yandex WordStat
- People also ask
- Google related search
- Questions autocomplete
- Word combination
- Ask related search
- Google Autocomplete
- Amazon suggestions
- Yahoo search assist
- Bing search suggestions
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Yandex search suggestions
- Google Ads target page
Crucial competitive intelligence
Never miss what your SEO competitors are up to. We have all the features you need to keep a close eye on your SEO rivals. Discover exact keywords any site is ranking for right now. We can identify keywords simply by selecting the region you want to target, using any domain and choosing between desktop and mobile searches.
We inspect competitors' landing pages that rank highly for keywords important to your business, and by analysing their content we can come up with some new ideas for your own content strategy.
We track your competitors' rankings and how your ranking compares to theirs over time, following the SEO project you'll see where you've succeeded and it will also identify areas where we can improve.
New to the market?
Discover all you SEO competitors using our SEO tools. We're able to find suggested competitors for specific keywords in Google or any other major search engine.
In summary
Well, I hope this guide on Keyword Gap Analysis and general competitive intelligence will give you some insight into the science behind SEO and keyword research. Remember, proper SEO is a long term commitment. It usually needs regular upkeep to monitor effectiveness and most importantly keep an eye on the competition.
If you do undertake a Keyword Gap Analysis, you will definitely find areas of improvement that will help your business achieve an edge in your market.
Want to work out what keywords you should be optimising for? Launch a keyword gap analysis with BarkWeb today.