It’s 2021, and content is still the king when it comes to SEO. Unless you create engaging content and optimize it for the search engines, it will be difficult for you to rank the web pages and improve the search visibility. The golden rule of creating engaging content is to conduct a content gap analysis in the existing content.
This will help you formulate strategic content ideas to generate more inbound traffic, convert visitors into customers, and provide value to the target audience. We have provided a step-by-step guide to perform an effective content gap analysis and boost your SEO endeavors.
Let’s first understand what a content gap analysis is anyway.
What is a Content Gap Analysis?
A content gap analysis involves analyzing the existing content and finding potential room for improvement. The method involves identifying the existing content pieces that must align with the various stages of the target audience’s buyer’s journey.
Analyzing the existing content will enable you to understand where you need to improve and how you could effectively guide the readers to drive profitable customer actions.
A thorough content gap analysis would include an audit of the following –
- Webpages.
- Blogs.
- Social media posts.
- Landing pages.
- Ebooks.
- And other content assets that you might have.
There’s no denying the importance of a content gap analysis to find loopholes in the existing content strategy. This will help you take adequate measures to fill them and drive more inbound traffic.
Mapping the Content to the Buyer’s Journey
Needless to mention that not every visitor would make a transaction. It may so happen that they looked for some information, compared other options, or just checked out the price. So, you must create content for every part of the buyer’s journey.
It has been found that most brands create informative contents (like blog posts and case studies to attract audiences) and money pages to convert those visitors into buyers. But as a matter of fact, this creates content gaps, as it will fail to lure potential customers who are still in the consideration stage. A thorough content gap analysis will help you identify whether you have content for all four stages of the funnel, that is awareness, consideration, decision, and success.
Awareness pages must target keywords related to any problem that your customers might be facing. The content should address this problem and offer valuable information. At the consideration stage, people compare various solutions to their problems. They might prefer to read comparison guides and reviews.
The decision stage is the money pages, that is the sales and the services pages. These pages are the final checkpoints before any user decides to make a purchase. Finally, the success page content assures the customers that the products will meet their expectations. This can be a ThankYou page or just an email asking them to leave a review.
A content gap analysis will help you identify whether you have content at every stage of the buyer’s journey on your website.
4 Steps to Perform a Content Gap Analysis
Here’s a step-by-step process to find gaps in your content and fill those with an effective content strategy.
- Map Your Buyer’s Journey
The first thing you need to do is analyze the steps that your target audience needs to take from stage 1 of the funnel to the final stage. Take some time to understand your audience’s questions, the options that they might consider, what they would prefer to buy, and the CTAs that would likely compel them to contact you.
- Conduct a Thorough Market Research
A proven strategy to develop exciting content ideas that align with what your audience wants is to ask them directly. You can try conducting a market research survey to understand what your customers are looking for. This feedback will help you formulate your website content strategy. You can use Google Forms to create a survey and send your target audience.
- Analyze the Existing Content on Your Websites
It’s essential for you to publish content on your website that perfectly aligns with the buyer’s journey of your target customers and doesn’t have gaps for your potential customers to fall through. Crawl your website and determine how they are aligning with each stage. Then, you can determine whether there are any content opportunities that can help bridge the gap between one stage and another.
Another effective strategy to find content gaps in your site is to use SEO tools and analyze what keywords your site is already ranking, and related keywords that you may not be targeting with the existing content. You can take advantage of these opportunities for maximising the traffic and solidifying the content funnel.
- Analyse Your Competition’s Content
Analyzing what the competitors are doing and comparing it with the existing content of your site is a very good strategy to find content gaps. If your competitor’s funnel is similar to yours, try to understand the content they have created to direct visitors from one stage to another.
Ultimately, try to understand where you might have cracks so that you can create more exciting content than what your customers have already written. You can use SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to see what keywords your competitors are ranking for and how you can align these with the existing new content ideas.
A content gap analysis primarily involves carrying out a detailed analysis of what you have and then formulating a content strategy that meets users’ multiple touchpoints. This way, you will have all the content you need to convert even a cold lead into a paying customer.
So, that’s how you can conduct a content gap analysis for SEO. Please share your thoughts on it and let us know if you think we have missed out on discussing any. Till then, best of luck with your content strategy!
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