Close The Content Gap For Improved Visits And Engagement

Fresh, relevant content drives new visitors to your website and keeps prior visitors coming back. If your site is well-established, you’ve probably already built up a decent content library. Examining your most popular content can be a helpful start to any content brainstorming session. Another great place to look is at your content gaps.

Compel visitors to act with engaging and relevant content. For assistance with your content strategy, call us at (443) 475-07787 or Contact Us online.

Gap, What Gap?

Little Child Smiling Missing Front Tooth

Your site’s blog posts are probably tagged and sortable by category, and you may have already authored several posts for each topic. Still, there might be some areas you haven’t covered – a new subtopic, an industry-specific angle, or a unique opinion on a popular topic. In any case, you can’t fill the gaps unless you find them. Here are some places to look:

  • Unsuccessful searches of your site’s blog by prior visitors.
  • Content offered by competitors that your site lacks.
  • Unanswered queries that pertain to your area of expertise.

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

Probably the easiest gaps to find are hiding in your blog’s search function. Considering the immortal words of U2 – what aren’t your site visitors finding? The first step is to check how your search query is set-up.

For example, if it uses the format www.domain/?s=query, then go to Google Analytics Behavior>Site Content>All Pages and search Page Includes ?s= .

Any unanswered (and relevant) queries that you see listed there represent important content opportunities as they are essentially a request for content.

What Do They Have That We Don’t?

One way to identify potential gaps in content is to take a look at keywords your competitor ranks for that your site doesn’t. There are several tools available for this. We like SEMRush’s GAP Analysis Keyword Gap tool (the newer version of its Domain vs. Domain tool). Just enter your domain plus up to four competitors and see what keywords the sites share, and more importantly, what keywords your site is missing out on.

Next, search through the keywords your competitor ranks for under Organic Research > Positions, and see what page is associated with the keyword in question. Remember, you’re not trying to replicate your competitor’s content. Instead you want to:

  • Get a good understanding of the information the page shares.
  • Determine the question or query the page answers.
  • Look for ways to present this information more extensively or through a unique angle or perspective.

The Great Unanswered Questions

The great aspiration of content generation is to identify a relevant unanswered question and craft an answer. Start by identifying keywords you’d like your site to rank for as described above, then use a tool like Buzzsumo’s Content Analysis or its new Question Analyzer to see what content has been published about the query in question.

Take some time to really consider all the nuances of the question. If you find that the existing content is out of date or doesn’t fully address the query, then you may be taking home the top content prize.

Map It and Implement It

You’re more likely to stay on track with your content development strategy if you create a content calendar. It doesn’t need to be fancy – a simple Excel or Google Sheets file is fine. List the topic, the keyword(s) you want to rank for, and the user query that the article will address. You should also include the article title, meta title, meta description, H1, blog category, and the target publish date. Share your content calendar with coworkers to get feedback, input, and new ideas. Now, get writing!

Breath new life into your content marketing plan with gap analysis. Call periscopeUP today at (443) 475-0787 or Contact Us online.

By / Published On: December 7th, 2017 / Categories: Blog, Content Creation, Content Marketing, Marketing Strategy /

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