What is Keyword Gap Analysis? Your Go to Strategy for Discovering More Ranking Opportunities

Do you want to drive more organic traffic to your site by filling gaps in your keyword strategy? That’s only possible if you can discover the terms and phrases your target customers use.

Selecting the right keywords to target is essential for search engine optimization (SEO) and your overall online success. You can lose a lot if you attempt to rank for terms that aren’t related to your products and your target audience. Likewise, it is useless to rank for keywords that users don’t type in the search bar at all. If you are looking for a tool to explore, find new keywords and what people are looking for then PPCexpo Keyword Planner is the best choice to explore the monthly search volume and cost of those keywords.

So, what is a keyword gap analysis, and how do you discover new keywords? Several factors determine what keywords you should choose and what you should omit. In this article, we’ll discuss keyword gap analysis techniques to help you improve your SEO and create unique content for your website.

 

What is Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword gap analysis identifies keywords that send traffic to your competitor’s site instead of your website. Simply put, keyword gap analysis helps you find out valuable keyword opportunities that you may be overlooking. Using this info, you can create a list of keywords that your competitors are targeting and tweak your strategy accordingly.

Keyword gap analysis allows you to:

• Quickly find new keyword opportunities.
• Identify questions that your audience is asking.
• Determine keywords that are working for a present site.
• Figure out valuable and high volume keywords quickly.

What’s the Objective of Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword gap analysis can help you identify competitor’s content gaps. This uncovers many more content opportunities that you may have overlooked previously. By evaluating your competitors, you can create a long list of keywords and terms that they are targeting, as well as other techniques and how they are using these terms to get better outcomes online.

In most cases, your list of keywords will help you carry out even more exhaustive analysis and comprehensively evaluate what keywords are better to rank for and which are not.

 

Why Should You Use Keyword Gap Analysis?

The following are some of the reasons why you should use keyword gap analysis:

Discover New Keywords

When you start discovering new keywords to rank for, you have to think about your target audience. Your keywords must describe their issues and present meaningful solutions. You must determine what your users are looking for and produce content related to those topics. When you comprehend what your users want, you’ll be better prepared to explore new keywords and gaps to target.

How to choose the best keywords? There are lots of things you have to consider while choosing keyword but make sure you cannot ignore the following these two:

• Keywords Focused on Products and Services – Your keywords must be relevant to your products and services. They must talk about your offer, improving the features of your products and services.
• Long-tail Keywords – These are phrases consisting of three or four words that are specific to your product, service, location, and brand. You have better chances of ranking for particular multi-word phrases than general single-word or double-word terms.

Determine Questions That Users Are Asking

Your best keywords will come from your target users themselves. You have to find what users are asking for relevant to your industry. This will help you discover new keywords that you can use to create unique content. With keyword gap analysis, you can check which keywords your competitors are mostly using to answer their users’ queries.

Carry Out Competitive Keyword Research

Competitive keyword research is what helps you identify the keyword gaps first. It provides you with a way to tap into these gaps. To carry out competitive research, start with making a list of your competitors. Some of these competitors will have much higher domain authority. Consider filtering out the ones that have authority similar to your site. Your competitors are likely to have already conducted their keyword research for the terms that they’re ranking for.

Compare Competitive Keywords

To get the best list of competitive keywords, consider comparing your website with your competition. Ask yourself questions like:

• What do competitors target that my business is not targeting?
• What do I target that my competitors don’t?
• How do they target differently than my brand?
• How many keywords do they target per page?
• What type of content do they produce around those keywords?

Categorize Your Keywords

Keyword gap analysis can also help you categorize your keywords. The first step is to identify your topmost competitors. You’ll observe the common words that you and your competitors rank for and every unique phrase that they rank for. You must filter your keywords list to the point where you’ll see keywords that don’t belong in any specific category. Those are the keywords that are either your main opportunity to rank for or are the least relevant to your business.

Advantages of Keyword Gap Analysis

With the help of keyword gap analysis, you can:

• Determine the exact keywords your competitor is ranking for at present and compare them with your keyword rankings.
• Look into competitors’ landing pages (webpages) to get a better insight into their content and keyword strategy. This will help you tweak your content strategy.
• Monitor changes in competitors’ rankings and fine-tune your strategy accordingly.
• Identify new organic competitors who could pose a threat in the future.

Best Practices for Keyword Gap Analysis

Conducting a competitive analysis can pinpoint gaps between your keyword strategy and that of your competition. Plus, it can highlight areas of opportunity as well.

By assessing competitor websites, you can create a list of keywords that they are targeting and determine how they are targeting those keywords. Think of this list as a seed keyword list. You can perform a more granular analysis of the keywords to identify if you should target them.

In most cases, this opens up new avenues of thought that otherwise have never been discovered. It is beneficial for getting actionable insights and formulating new strategies.

When performing keyword gap analysis, consider the following best practices:

Identify Competitors

Choosing your competitors will perhaps depend on your present situation, business objectives, and resources. When looking for new keywords or prospects in your competitor analysis, you may want to look at competitors that are performing somewhat better than you. That’s because you don’t want to be looking at keywords you have no chance of ranking for, at least not initially.

If you have already identified your competitors, pick one and start assessing. If you aren’t sure, think about looking at the websites that are above yours in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for your target keywords.

Identify Target Keywords

To identify what keywords a particular site is targeting, check out the following elements:

• Page titles
• Meta descriptions
• Headers
• Page content
• Anchor text of internal links
• Structured data property fields
• Open graph and other social meta tags
• Alt tag text
• Images (filenames and metadata)
• Videos (filenames and metadata)

Label the Keywords

Labeling the keywords will allow you to see:

• The number of keywords per category/label.
• Words that you’re targeting, but they aren’t.
• Words that they’re targeting, but you aren’t.
• The number of pages per category/label.

Start creating lists of keywords that belong to these categories or label them accordingly for filtering and analysis later. By now, you should start seeing a much clearer picture than just an unsorted list of keywords.

Find Keywords

At this point, find out keywords, groups of keywords, patterns, and completely new avenues of thought. There’s no magic solution for this. You will have to review the info with your goals in mind to determine what keyword should be targeted and how to go about it.

Rinse and Repeat

Once you’ve completed the whole process, you can either repeat it on another competitor or apply the analysis to a broader set of competitors at the same time.

How to Use ChartExpo for Keyword Gap Analysis

ChartExpo is a PPC charts add-on for Google Sheets. It also delivers visualizations in Microsoft Excel 365 and Microsoft Excel 2013 in offline mode. You can use this tool without any programming experience, so it’s easy to grasp the insights hidden in your data.

Using visuals, you can quickly communicate your findings and obtain resources approved for implementation. ChartExpo is a beneficial tool to visualize the keyword gap analysis. With over 50 customized visualizations, the ChartExpo for Google Sheets add-on transforms your complicated keyword gap analysis into persuasive, easy to understand, visual renderings that tell the story of your data.

ChartExpo is an enterprise-ready, flexible, interactive, fast, scalable, and modern charting library that visualizes your complicated keyword gap analysis data into user-friendly visualization. Keyword gap analysis required data from the Google Search Console. You can use any third-party tool to fetch that data or you can get it manually. If you have just set-up a new website, you will not find the data in Google Search Console. PPCexpo Keyword Planner can help you to discover new keywords about your niche.

There are key metrics in Google Search Console you need to check

Impressions – How many times your site results appear against the search query.

Clicks – How many times the result against the search query was clicked.

CTR – The number of clicks advertisers receive on their website per number of impressions.

Position – Where the result appears on SERP against the search query. Don’t confuse this position metrics with Google Ads Avg. Position ( that is obsolete now and that is related to ads) this one is related to organic website results appear on SERP.

Next, you can use some third-party add-ons to fetch this data into Google Sheets for keyword gap analysis or you can add manually by copy-pasting.

Why you have to grab this data? This data completely give you an understanding of the customer journey. From the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel, you can infer results from this data. You can discover the search queries which could drive more traffic to your website. Raw data is hard to decipher, a visualization tool like ChartExpo can help to visualize the raw data into beautiful visualization and could make your data quite understandable in a glance.

If you don’t have the ChartExpo Add-on, you need to install it first. You should install it from the G Suit market place at the following link (https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/chartexpo/643809879384) Once installed, click on the add-ons menu in Google Sheets environment and in the submenu click on the ChartExpo>>Open menu. It will be opened in the right panel of Google Sheets, which you can frequently use.

ChartExpo library holds plenty of charts to visualize your data. From the library choose the chart of your choice and use it for keyword gap analysis

The most simple and quickly understandable chart in the library is “Bar Chart Vertical”. Let’s explore how we can use this chart to quickly identify the gap in the keywords

Before you start building visualization for keyword gap analysis, go back, and review your research objectives. For brand awareness, you might have to choose different metrics as compared to the middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel metrics. Let’s take a head start from the top of the funnel Keyword gap analysis. To measure the success of your brand awareness campaign, an impression is the best metric to evaluate so, for the top of the funnel keyword gap analysis you should use the “Impressions” metric.

You will get the following visualization from which you can see which search query has the maximum number of impressions which has the least impression. You can pick the best one for you. If you are looking for brand awareness and you found the search query with high impressions, you got the fruit from this visualization.

Now, the next step comes for the analysis of the middle of the funnel. You know that your customer already have an idea about you, they will more interested in engaging with your links or ads then its time to analyze those search terms which have high clicks. this time you can select dimension as “Search Query” column and select measure “Clicks” column then click on the “Create Chart” button

Here you got the visualization against your search query and clicks. You found all keyword opportunities which are having high clicks and these are more handy and helpful.

Next is to check the gap of the search query vs. impressions and clicks. For this purpose select the “Stacked Grid Chart” from the library. The visualization will give you an idea of how many impressions are getting reasonable clicks. You can see in the chart, more the impressions, more chances to get clicks, but it doesn’t always true that more impressions queries will always have more clicks, the intent and relevancy of the search query matters a lot. So you can shortlist your search queries accordingly.

In the chart below, you will get a comparison between impressions and clicks. As all search queries are showing on the left side and impressions are showing on the top of the charts in the form of columns. Whereas clicks against each search query are being displayed under each column of its impressions. This chart is showing that your search query. “Search Query 1” has the highest number of impressions and clicks, so it is very easy to filter out the best ones and others which can help you in refining your keyword list for your campaigns.

So far you have analyzed your search queries with respect to impressions and clicks, but don’t forget its position and click-through rate are also important. For this purpose, you can analyze these two metrics side by side by using the “Dual Axis line Chart”. For this chart, you have to rearrange the data so that chart can be drawn properly. You can keep the search queries in the Search Query column, but you can further create another column and name it “Category”, in this column you will put the CTR and Position as a text for each search query. Now against these categories, you will put values in the new column “Value”. Once you are ready with this data you can select this chart from the library and select the dimensions “Search Query” and “Category” and your metrics will be “Value”, click on draw chart, and good to go.

You will get the following visualization that tells you about the search query, its position, and CTR in one place.

Above visualization brings more interesting facts on the surface, lower the position more chances of getting interactions, you can see that when the position goes poor, CTR is decreasing.

You can quickly filter out your target search queries from this visualization and build your content strategy around these search queries. More content you write on these search queries, there would be better chances of engagement as a whole.

In this way, you can have several chart options to choose from the ChartExpo library. ChartExpo shows you if there are any immediate benefits. It also shows you how your business is performing for keywords in general. It is a powerful tool for keyword gap analysis, providing you with quick wins and suggesting easy ways to improve your SEO.

 

Wrap Up

Keyword gap analysis helps you identify terms that your competitors are targeting, but you are not. However, identifying high-performing keywords is difficult, particularly if you are in a tremendously competitive industry. With tools like ChartExpo, you can reduce hours of SEO work while concentrating on developing your brand.

When you obtain a list of your best keywords after performing competitive gap analysis, it’s not sufficient to create content around those topics. You must establish an angle that’s exclusive for your target audience and fulfills their requirements while focusing the keywords on your business objectives.