When it comes to content creation, gaps are inevitable. Despite being a top-notch writer, it is inevitable that the environment around us is continuously changing. Information becomes outdated. Keywords fluctuate over time. Customers shift interests. It’s not your fault. It is your duty to discover and resolve any material shortages that appear if you want to remain at the top.
Why are content gaps a big deal?
Content gaps are basically missed opportunities. When visitors to your page cannot find what they want, it is likely they will move to your rivals. Figuring out what topics and information are missing, as well as understanding what to do once gaps are identified, are key to success.
Understanding the content gap epidemic
Developing content marketing and brand messaging is similar to predicting the future. We as marketers should try to foresee what our audience is likely to do next. But whatever we’re doing, chances are it’s not working.
In the most recent study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, very few marketers, just 10%, strongly agreed that their company was successfully providing the appropriate content to the appropriate audiences when needed.
The introduction and spreading of new, creative technology created to help manage content in a more humane manner has failed to slow the trend. In the same poll, a great majority of individuals (84%) indicated that their business was not capitalizing on the benefits of technology.
We must now restore within ourselves the fundamentals of effective gap analysis.
This piece is not meant to address all difficulties or respond to all queries related to content gap studies, but we hope you will come away from this 15-minute pause confident to tackle a content gap analysis yourself.
What Are Content Gaps?
Areas of interest that the people in your target demographic are searching for that are not currently included on your website.
Your listeners are constantly searching for fresh information. It is rather baffling that businesses do not pay more regard to the fact that content holes are so universal. A study conducted in 2021 indicated that almost half of the businesses that have failed with content marketing do not evaluate the content they post after it has been published.
Your industry could have many different topics that your intended group of spectators is attempting to find that you haven’t discussed yet. For example, suppose you are an SEO organization that has various blog entries regarding superior SEO systems. You can observe that people are navigating away from your pages extremely quickly.
You might wonder if your content is engaging enough.
A rapid assessment of content can give insight into the issue. It is possible that your intended audience is searching for elementary SEO approaches, however, the details you have provided are superior and may be too complicated for them to comprehend.
To keep readers interested, it is essential to give them up-to-date information that is useful for them.
Why Is It Important to Identify Content Gaps?
Performing a content gap analysis can be quite time-consuming, but the beneficial outcome makes it a worthwhile endeavor.
- Improved SEO: Eliminate content gaps to improve your site rank on search engines. Your placement on the search engine results pages (SERPs) matters because 88 percent of searchers only visit links on page 1 of search engines like Google.
- Better connect with your target readers: Fixing content gaps can give your readers exactly what they’re looking for, thus establishing a connection with your site. It’s important and possible to build a relationship with your audience— in a survey of 1,000 American participants, over 65 percent say they felt an emotional connection to a particular brand.
- An optimized buyer journey: Content gap
sanalysis reduces bounce rates and increases on-site time, which in turn will improve your conversion rate, resulting in more sales.
What Are the Different Kinds of Content Gaps?
To do a content gaps analysis, you must figure out how to detect them. Gaps in a publication’s material can generally be categorized in one of three ways: focusing on particular words, concentrating on individual subjects, and concentrating on media.
Keyword Gaps
Not all keywords are created equal.
One example is that the CTR (click-through rate) of the most visible spot in Google when you search with only one word is 32.5 percent, which is greater than the CTR for keyphrases with more than one word. Beginning in position two, long-tail keywords have a higher click-through rate than single-word inquiries.
Long-tail keywords are advantageous because they connect with customers that are further along in the buying cycle. Searching with one keyword can be utilized to obtain details related to a certain topic, while searches involving four or more keywords, referred to as long-tailed keywords, are helpful when people are attempting to uncover a specific product or service to purchase.
Take into consideration incorporating long strings of keywords into your content if you’re utilizing all your marketing resources on short and common keywords.
The best part? While simplistic keyword searches can be difficult to come out on top of and have low success rates, exploiting long-term keyword options commonly leads to better results due to less competition. It is probable that your website will have a higher ranking than websites that solely tailor their content to generic, heavily utilized target words. There is less rivalry with other keywords, meaning that your material stands out in search engine results pages, leading to an increase in visits to your site.
Topic Gaps
When people think about what might be missing from their content, the initial thought that pops into their head more often than not is what topics to include. Each time you run a content gap analysis on your topics, ask yourself the following questions:
- Does my site cover every topic readers are interested in?
- Does my site have comprehensive content for readers at all levels?
- Are the topics relevant to readers’ current interests?
If you were not able to answer “yes” to all of the questions, congratulations! You have identified an area of content lacking from your knowledge.
There are possibilities of including some new material to your website that have yet to be explored. No matter if you are looking at a more in-depth part of an overarching topic that you have already looked at or are tackling new predicaments that appeared in your profession, coming up with material related to holes in the information is a prompt manner of supplying novel, desirable content to those who could be interested.
Media Gaps
A shortage of video material on your website is referred to as a media gap. It is not unusual for people to struggle to find sufficient time to produce video content. However, you are in a swiftly shrinking demographic.
Results from a survey released in 2022 indicated that only 14% of businesses do not engage in video marketing.
Companies have transitioned to video as it is something their public is eager for.
Research indicates that the majority of people would rather view a video than read about a service or product when it comes to learning about it.
Media should not be overlooked as an enhancement to your content. By making your written material into a video, you have the potential to raise your brand’s visibility, draw more individuals to your website, and generate more direct sales. It was reported that 81% of marketers who were questioned divulged that their direct sales volumes had been augmented by employing video material.
This is a giant reminder to all the content promoters to uncover spaces of the open doors in their substance and amend them by incorporating videos into their entries.
5 steps to a comprehensive content gap analysis
1. How to understand the competitive landscape
In order to fill a void in your content, it’s essential to comprehend the competitive environment where your content will be positioned. Let’s take a look at the basics before we discuss the tools available for this.
If your business or organization is not new, it is probable that you possess some understanding of who the other players in the market are. It’s OK if you don’t! There are a lot of small businesses that are trying to acquire a lot of leads, making it difficult to determine their exact place in the market.
What kind of content is already available in your sector that is worth thinking about? What topics seem to be covered most thoroughly? Start figuring out the questions that these works are trying to answer so that you can benefit from them. Consider how well the content you have gathered meets the requirements that you have listed.
Gain an understanding of the topics and keywords related to your industry and then review the Search Engine Results Pages that link to top searches for that same sector. Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) show us what type of material receives the highest ranking for a particular query and, thus, how good a given keyword is at pushing the user toward a purchase.
2. How to conduct a content audit that actually works
The next step in the content gap analysis process is to conduct a thorough examination of all searchable content that is present on the website. The reason for doing a content audit in regard to an analysis of the content gap is twofold.
- Map your existing content. By combing through all of your indexed URLs, you can create a map of existing content to show you how various topics and content types are distributed throughout.
- Map your existing data. Understanding the data behind your content will help increase your audience intelligence, giving you an unvarnished look at how and when visitors interact with your website.
3. Intent-based keyword research
If you are familiar with the keyword research process for several years, you will figure out that SEO is remarkably divergent from how it appeared to be four years ago.
Marketers used to be satisfied with merely selecting the most prominent keywords related to their industry and creating a large number of texts based around those terms to significantly boost their page rankings. SEO companies would make money off of manipulating the search engine algorithms by creating badly written articles that were just stuffed full of keywords but satisfied the minimal criteria Google set for being classified as “optimized”. These articles had very little value to readers compared to actual useful content.
Those approaches have become outdated now that Google’s search engine has become more intelligent than a student at the top of their class and is now better able to assess the value of a web page based on dozens of factors that take into account user experience, domain expertise, and contextual queries.
It is essential that we look at the purpose of a search query just as closely as the words being used when we conduct our keyword research.
At the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in 2015, scientists suggested that there are three kinds of prior search contexts that can be used to determine a person’s search objective.
These factors include:
- Browsing Events (Previously Searched Webpages)
- Search Events (Previous Search Queries)
- Location Data
They gathered 6,000 sets of search-browsing activities from the 1.8 million sets and concluded, based on the effects of each search and browsing event on one another, that “the context from before a search is beneficial in predicting what a person is looking to do with the search.”
Kutlwano Ramaboa, a researcher at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, uncovered in 2018 that a user’s request length and arrangement accurately reflect how firm their comprehension is of their buying goals, that is, where the user is in their acquisition expedition.
4. Finally, it’s time to talk about content gap analysis.
Once you’ve gone through the difficult process of recognizing your opponents, outlining content, studying data, constructing templates for customers, and investigating intent-based keyword research, we can finally move on to the enjoyable parts.
By studying our rivals’ resources and search engine results pages, we can be sure which topics and content forms (for instance, long-form, short-form, videos, infographics, etc.) are effective at meeting our content production goals.
5. Implementation: fill your content gaps with confidence.
When you’re developing content and have applied all the appropriate steps for identifying content gaps, gaining confidence in the process is a logical expectation.
Start composing, assigning, or altering content with complete assurance and accuracy right away. When your content is finished and ready, distribute it on the platform that will be the most appropriate for the goal you’re trying to achieve. One can only hope that all your content is part of a well-thought-out plan, allowing you to get the most out of the effort your team has put in.
Making sure the same material is used in various outlets guarantees a consistent narrative across different marketing initiatives and raises the likelihood that the right people will perceive and hear your message. Utilizing different marketing strategies together, such as email blasts and PPC ads, can bolster the effectiveness of a campaign. Using targeted paid advertising on social media helps you distribute content to specific, high-quality audiences.
Conclusion
At the start of this article, we questioned ourselves on the methods and reasons behind carrying out content gap analyses. It is to be hoped that the significance of the content gap analysis for your content and SEO plans is now unmistakable. It is almost impossible to come up with a good plan relating to something without having done an assessment to find out what exists and what is missing.
