How do you find keywords to target? One of the best ways to find highly relevant keywords is to find the gap between you and your competitors. A keyword gap analysis tool is what can support you with this work.

You will learn:

• The reason why you need to do keyword gap analysis.
• What you need to do before and after do competitor keyword analysis.
• How to use RankingGap to do keyword gap analysis.

Identifying high-performing keywords is difficult, particularly if you are in a tremendously competitive industry. Initial research is vital, and what better research to conduct than competitor analysis. 

Evaluating what your competitors are doing can help you discover missed opportunities that you are not aware of. So when you do further planning and investigation, it can help drive traffic and revenue. 

This technique is literally the holy grail of finding new keywords. In this guide, we will teach you about keyword gap analysis and the best practices. With keyword gap analysis tool like RankingGap, you can reduce hours of SEO work and concentrate on other areas of your business..

What is Keyword Gap Analysis?

Keyword gap analysis identifies keywords that send traffic to your competitor’s site instead of your website. 

Keyword gap analysis helps you find out valuable keyword opportunities that you may be overlooking. Using this information, 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.
• Determine keywords that are working for popular sites.
• Figure out valuable and high volume keywords quickly.
• Identify topics that your audience is interested in.

The key of competitor keyword analysis is to pick 1-2 competitor or top websites in your niche. Once you’ve picked them, keyword gap analysis tools can help you find those keywords that are driving traffic to them.

Why do you need to do keyword gap analysis?

As of 26 January 2022, Google processes over 3.5 billion searches every day, or 1.2 trillion searches per year. With this competitive reality, you cannot rank higher on the SERPS, if you cannot find the relevant keywords for your business. 

Keyword gap analysis can help you identify competitor’s content gaps. This uncovers many more content opportunities that you may have overlooked previously. It is the perfect way of ranking for the right terms related to your products and target audience. After all, it would be useless to rank for keywords your customers are not searching for. 

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 an even more exhaustive analysis and comprehensive evaluation of what keywords are better to rank for and which are not.

Conducting a competitive analysis can pinpoint opportunity 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. Besides short-tail keywords, keyword gap analysis can also help you find long-tail keywords. Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate 3% to 5% higher than generic searches.

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

With a competitor keyword gap analysis tool, you can save a lot of time. RankingGap is one of the best and most beneficial tools to discover your keyword gap.

The first step: competitor keyword analysis

Before finding your keyword gaps, you need a list of domains that are competing with your domain in SERP. 

Your competitors may vary according to your business objectives, time framework, and resources. Instead of trying to outrank them all at once – which you’ll soon discover is not feasible – you should focus on one competitor at a time. 

One simple way to discover who your competitors are is by entering your seed keywords one by one into Google search and see who appears on the first page. Then, check every competitive website that ranks on the first page. However, this will not give you much data about their performance.

We suggest you use RankingGap for this first step. You can again find your competitor using the RankingGap “Discover Competitor” feature. .

Then, turn your efforts towards outranking the competitor that’s right above you in the SERP for your target keyword. 

The best keyword gap analysis tool

You can find a lot of keyword gap analysis tools in the industry. But to save your time, we will introduce 4 of the best tools here. The one that we love is RankingGap. You can see the information about the tool and 4 use cases below.

According to your need and budget, you can then shortlist the tool that is suitable for you.

RankingGap

With only RankingGap, you can do a lot of things to discover your missing keywords. You can know the keywords they rank for, but you don’t. 

You can also identify the high volume, valuable keywords that your competitors are ranking on the SERP, steal them, and employ them in your content. RankingGap helps you analyze valuable keywords your competitors use for your content ideas/strategy as well as re-optimizing existing content.

How to use RankingGap:

You can use RankingGap to discover a lot of thing about yours and competitors’ keywords:

Missing: Keywords that all competitors rank, but you don’t. 

Gap: Keywords that some of competitors rank, but you don’t. 

Unique: Keywords you are ranking for, but your competitors don’t.

Common: Overlapping keywords that you and your competitors are ranking for.  

Case 1: How to find common keywords that you and your competitors ranked.

Starting with the most straightforward way of performing keyword research with RankingGap, you want to know what keywords both you and your competitors share.

To do that, first, create a project by inserting your domain and your competitors’. 

Don’t forget to pick your location and language setting.

After that, you can generate your project. When the results are in, you will see the default go to the “Common” keyword view. From that point on, you’ll see a list of keywords with your competitors’ ranking positions as compared to yours.

Here are the keywords that you, including all your competitors, have. However, that doesn’t mean everyone shares the same ranking. It gives you the idea of who you are competing with for these keywords’ ranking.  

You need to filter and look at each competitor to find which keywords they are in top positions for. This will identify their strongest pages and content. 

If your ranking is lower than your competitors, you need to do some optimization.

Case 2: How to discover the gaps in your competitor’s strategies.

The second way is how to use the keyword views in RankingGap to identify your competitors’ keyword strategies’ gap.

To begin, you may think that the “Missing” keyword view only shows you what you are lacking, or running behind in your website’s keyword strategy. It also shows the list of keywords that are the weakness of your competitors.

It says a lot. For example, how low a domain A  is ranking for a certain keyword as compared to domain B and C. Why is domain A ranking lower? Is it because of the content?

Secondly, the “Gap” keyword view lets you tap into the keywords you and some of your competitors are missing. 

Here, you’re seeing a hole that you and other competing websites need to patch up. 

Case 3: How to find keywords that are worth your time to track.

One of the keyword researching best practices is to track your keywords every day. One of the SEO tools that updates your keyword rankings daily is BiQ Rank Tracking.

If you are comparing big-name websites, you are going to expect thousands of keywords generated out. Obviously, you won’t be going through each and every one of them.

Having a keyword gap analysis tool helps you immensely in identifying what is worth your time to track. Beside rank positions, RankingGap also shows you the rank movements as well.

There are several ways to simplify the number of keywords you want;

• Sort your keywords according to search volume: Keywords with higher search volume are valuable keywords that can drive in a lot of traffic. You definitely want to keep an eye on them. 
• Track the keywords that are also ranking for different SERP features: When you’re ranking for SERP features, it can definitely attract more clicks apart from having a more prominent spot on the SERP.
• Sort your ranking keywords according to the competition: If you are ranking for a keyword with low competition but high search volume, you want to make sure to keep that keyword. 

SEMRush

Semrush shares a ton of keyword data so you can dig into the details, like search engine results page (SERP) features and super specific analysis of current results. Semrush’s keyword research tools can span from the standard traffic and search volume data to content-driven keyword research and competitive keyword gap analysis.

Moz

Moz’s SEO platform offers several different tools created for keyword research. Although Moz doesn’t include as many data points as some of the other full-featured SEO tools, this makes for a straightforward user experience for those who are amateurs search marketers.

Go to Moz Keyword Explorer, then simply enter your domain and your top competitor’s domain.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a full-suite SEO tool. In other words, it offers everything you need to conduct keyword research and SEO analysis for your own website or that of your clients. 

You have a few options for filtering results in Ahrefs like the keywords that any of your competitors rank for, the keywords that at least x of your competitors rank for, and the keywords that all your competitors rank for.

Put your keywords into action:

You need to choose the right words to highlight in your metadata and content. Consequently, your traffic levels could skyrocket. The more traffic you draw to your website, the more likely it is that you’ll end up with more conversions too.

When using competitor keyword analysis tools, you can spot unique keyword opportunities. The next work is to choose a range of “head” or seed keywords that you can use to build content pillars from. Then, you can put keywords to your content: title, meta description, image’s alt, etc.

To determine your plan of action, analyze the top content that is already ranking for that keyword and look for things like:

• Content type (video, blog, gallery, etc.)
• Content length and organization
• Headers and keywords used

Do you have content that already fulfills these criteria? You can update it to use the new keywords. If you don’t, you’ll want to create something new. 

You can quickly filter out your target search queries from the tool’s 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.

TL;DR

Competitor keyword analysis is just one component of a comprehensive and ongoing SEO strategy. This method can take place in any stage of strategy building, competitor performance, quick win analysis. By combining your own keyword strategies with the insights that you gain from the competition, you can give yourself a crucial advantage. 

For the keyword gap analysis tool, it’s recommended to use a tool like RankingGap.