Content Gap Analysis Template

What is a Content Gap Analysis Template?

Content gap analysis refers to the process of reviewing content on certain topics to determine if there are opportunities to cover them in a better way than what’s already out there.

A content gap analysis template helps you track and compare data that you’ll then use to achieve this goal.

This could be for all types of content, including website content, blog posts, social media posts, and more.

It helps you identify unique content marketing angles to create content, drive traffic, and provide more value to your audience. This includes performing keyword analysis, identifying customer needs, and analyzing existing content on SERPS.

With a content gap analysis template,  you’ll have a clear pathway to follow as it outlines the different items you need to track.

This way, you can import data and make comparisons, making it easy to identify the gaps in your content and your competitor’s content.

Our content gap analysis template is a powerful content writing tool that helps you identify gaps such as:

• Outdated content: Content that has not been updated for two years or more presents an opportunity to improve accuracy and relevance.
• Thin content: This could be a content gap that you can fill by providing more information and making your content more resourceful.
• Expert point of view: One way to fill this content gap would be by adding expert contributions to content to give it more credibility.
• Content readability: Another content gap could be when your posts are not engaging enough, easy to read, or well-structured.
• Keywords: With a quick competitor analysis you can identify keywords that others are ranking for but you haven’t covered.

Types of Content Gaps

Different businesses deal with different content gaps. For instance, your website may be performing great for top-of-the-funnel content and gaining lots of traction, yet this may not translate into viable leads.

Some businesses struggle to find the right keywords to target while others lack enough content ideas for different stages of their customers’ buying journey.

To determine the content you need to create, you’ll need to understand the type of content gaps that you’re dealing with. Here are a few key ones.

Keywords

This is one of the most common gaps that most businesses focus on in a content gap analysis. Great keyword research is essential for high rankings on SERPs, so you’ll need to find out what your competitors are ranking for.

If your rankings have stagnated over time, yet you seem to be targeting all the right keywords, you may want to incorporate long-tail keywords. Our content gap analysis template helps you track and compare such keywords.

Topic

This includes having subjects that provide value to your audience. Your content topics must be relevant and easy to find on your website. So when your website does not cover all the relevant topics, you may have a topic content gap.

You can identify fresh topics based on your customer buying journey. This helps you break your content down and find ways to provide value to your audience. Topic gaps offer an excellent way to add fresh and exciting content to your website.

Media

Adding media to content makes it more engaging and could be the reason you attract more organic traffic. These include videos, images, infographics, and more. Consider filling this gap to add value to your website content.

You will find a media gap in your content at some point. Sometimes it’s in the form of videos or images you need to add or outdated ones you need to replace, just like with content.

Why is a Content Gap Analysis Template Important?

Here’s why it’s important to have a content gap analysis template:

• It helps you refine your SEO and keyword strategy, so you can easily provide more value for your audience.
• It helps you conduct a brief SEO audit of your website to help you improve your content and boost your website ranking.
• Helps you find weaknesses in your competitors’ content and keyword targeting so you can outrank them on Google.
• Helps you research your customers’ purchasing journey and identify where you need to fulfill their needs better.
• A content gap analysis template also helps you gain visibility in similar places as your competitors.

You can easily download our free content gap analysis template.

Content Gap Analysis Vs. Keyword Analysis

Though easy to mistake for the same thing, content gap analysis is different from keyword analysis. Content gap analysis examines your competitor's content as a whole, to find out what you can do better and provide unique value.

These include items such as keywords, content format, images, tone, etc. It’s broader overall compared to keyword analysis.

Keyword analysis is a bit more specialized, as it focuses on one aspect of your content: your keywords. It helps you analyze what your competitors are ranking for as well as the gaps in your own content that you may have missed.

As such, keyword analysis is a part of the content gap analysis process. You can use this free content gap analysis template to conduct both your keyword and content gap analysis

How to Conduct a Content Gap Analysis

Here's a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a content gap analysis effectively.

Map Out Your Audience’s Buying Journey

This includes creating a buyer's journey for your key demographic and identifying their key performance indicators. Your content goals will help you determine these key performance indicators.

For instance, whether you want to increase traffic, generate more leads, etc. You can use CRM or analytics tools to gather more data about your persona. Then you can map out their customer journey on your content gap analysis template.

The customer buyer’s stage in the content mapping process includes:

• Awareness stage: At this stage, your buyer has a problem they’re looking to solve and is seeking information about it. So you’ll need to produce content that shows your customers how to solve their problems and introduce your product as a solution.
• Consideration stage: Here, the prospective buyer already understands their problem and is starting to evaluate their solutions. They’re not ready to buy yet but need help understanding their options. Your content should be geared towards filling this gap.
• Decision stage: This is the final stage in your content mapping process. Here your prospects are more ready to buy and your content is geared towards showing them why they should choose your product over your competitors. So you’ll need to find content gaps that align with this need.

Audit Your Existing Content

The next step in conducting a content gap analysis is to go through your existing content and assess its quality, timeliness, and relevance. This is because it’s easier to rank for content that’s already online compared to fresh content.

A content audit helps you find what’s missing on your web pages and improve the underperforming content. You’ll also be able to check outdated content to make it more timely and up-to-date.

Here are a few ways to audit your existing content:

• Define your content goals: Some of the top goals for content include improving your SEO rankings, increasing your traffic and engagement, and improving your conversion rates. You can then try to match these goals to your key metrics to make them easy to track.
• Collect your URLs: Here, you’ll need to collect all your web page URLs in one spreadsheet, like the one provided in our content gap analysis template. You can then sort them into different groups, depending on your goals. This way you’ll easily identify issues with the sites and fix them.
• Collect and analyze data: Here you’ll collect data from multiple sources and compare them on a spreadsheet. Our content gap analysis template will provide a framework for this. You can use analytics tools such as Google Analytics to collect data on engagement or a backlink analysis tool to fix broken links etc.

Conduct a Competitor Keyword Analysis

Once you’ve found content gaps in your content strategy, it’s time to analyze what your competitors are ranking for. This is where competitor keyword analysis comes in. You’ll need to know which keywords are working for them.

In case you don’t have a list yet, you’ll need to outline your competitors. They can be your business competitors or your local competitors. i.e. businesses that sell the same products as you or websites ranking for the same keywords as you.

Here are actions you can take:

• Compare your list: Here, you can use an SEO tool to find the keywords your competitors are running for, not you. Then you can transfer this list into a spreadsheet, like our free content gap analysis template.  This will make it easier to compare them.
• Cross-check keywords: From your list of competitor keywords, check which ones are relevant to your audience. Cross-check the ones that you share with your competitors and eliminate the ones that aren’t relevant. This will help trim down your list.
• Organize your keywords: Here you’ll organize your keywords by importance. For instance, you can set the more competitive keywords aside as they may be harder to rank for. Focus on the keywords that have potential and would be easier to target.

What's in this Content Gap Analysis Template

Our free content gap analysis template helps make the above process easy. You can easily compare your data side by side on the Excel sheets and come up with a list of content to upgrade your website posts.

Here’s what the template contains:

Content Inventory

The content inventory section of our content gap analysis template helps you audit your web pages. The template contains the following fields that you can fill in to help you find content gaps.

• Content title and URL
• Content type
• Target audience
• Keywords targeted and more

Ideally, you want to collect as much data on your existing content as you can. Free tools like Google Analytics can help you achieve this.

Once your data is perfectly organized in your template, you'll be able to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Based on this, you'll be able to set content goals, identify your target audience, and more.

Content Goals

You'll need to define your goals for the content you're about to create. Under each goal, you can list specific objectives, your target audience, and key metrics. Our template provides these fields, allowing you to compare your goals side by side.

• What are you trying to achieve with your content gap analysis?
• How will you measure the success of your content?
• Who are you targeting with your new content?
• Are your blog posts sufficient, or do you need to bolster them with social media posts?

One of your content goals should be to cater to your audience's needs better.  This section of our content gap analysis template will help you keep track of what your content goals are.

This will make it easy to conduct your competitor analysis and keyword research. This is also the part where you'll analyze your key content types.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor research is a big part of content gap analysis. You want to find out what your competitor is sharing with their audience, the keywords they're ranking for, and what is getting them the most traffic.

• Competitor website URLs
• Content strengths
• Content weaknesses
• Key content gaps

Finding out what your competitors excel at will help you identify what you're missing. Similarly, you'll be able to pinpoint what they don't excel at, which could make for great content gaps.

Lots of SEO tools, such as Semrush and Moz, can help you with competitor analysis. Then, using our free competitor gap analysis template, you can compare your data.

Keyword Research

Another important element in our content gap analysis template is your keyword gap research spreadsheet. With this section, you can compare your keyword research data for your content and that of your competitors. The sheet contains:

• A list of primary keywords
• Search volume
• Keyword density
• Search intent

This sheet makes it easy to analyze your keyword data. The search volume section will help you see how competitive your keywords are so you can gauge their relevance.

You can then decide the keyword density for each content idea. This refers to how many keywords you’ll have on a page compared to your word count. You can use a keyword research tool to generate all this data.

Content Gap Analysis

After you’ve come up with your primary and secondary keywords, you’ll then list your content gaps by priority. Then, compare them side by side on your content gap analysis template. Here’s what that looks like on the template.

• Content gap
• Priority i.e. high, medium, low
• Content ideas

For users that do not have enough experience with SEO tools, there are simpler ways to identify content gaps. For instance, by analyzing your search engine results pages.

Content gap analysis doesn’t stop at identifying potential content ideas. You’ll need to keep monitoring and reviewing the performance of your content. The final section of the template helps you track review dates, for instance, weekly or monthly, etc.

FAQ

Q1. What is a content gap analysis template?

A. A content gap analysis template is a management template that helps you track all the items in your content gap analysis process and areas that need improvement. It includes every area of focus and resources you need.

You can import data into this template and fill in information about your competitor analysis, keyword research results, and more.

Q2. What are the fundamental components of a content gap analysis template?

A. The main components of a content gap analysis template include:

• Content inventory to help you audit the content on your site
• Content goals to help you identify content gaps
• Competitor analysis to know what your competitors are doing that you’re not
• Keyword research sheet to map out your keyword analysis g
• Content gap analysis sheet to list your findings by priority
• Monitoring and review sheet to help you track your content gap analysis progress

Q3. How do you structure a content gap analysis?

A. When conducting your content gap analysis, here is what you'll need to do:

• Map out your audience’s buying journey
• Audit your existing content
• Conduct a competitor content and keyword analysis

Q4. How do you do a content gap analysis?

A. Here’s how to conduct a content gap analysis and identify which opportunities to fill:

• Check your search engine results pages to analyze who is ranking
• Identify keyword opportunities from what’s missing in your content and what’s missing on your competitor sites
• Research your customer needs and determine if you’re producing content for every stage of their customer journey
• Audit your existing content to try and improve on underperforming content

Q5. Does Excel have a content gap analysis template?

A. You can create a content gap analysis template on Excel, or download our free resource. With an Excel template, you can import data from other tools such as Google Analytics or other SEO tools, and analyze this data side by side to help you identify content gaps.

Ready to Elevate Your Content and Boost Your Rankings?

Our FREE content gap analysis template will help you track your steps as you identify content gaps, improve your website, and drive more traffic to your brand.