What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
A content gap analysis is the practice of finding relevant topics you haven’t covered or could cover better to improve your search results.
It can include finding terms your competitors rank for that you don’t. Or identifying topics you need to add to your content strategy to address all stages of the customer’s journey.
Performing a content gap analysis can also mean evaluating content you’ve already published to find opportunities to improve it.
For example, you could update an existing piece to address additional customer pain points or include expert insights to provide a unique and valuable point of view.
Why Perform a Content Gap Analysis?
Doing a content gap analysis can help you improve your content’s performance.
Here’s what it can do:
- Boost visibility: Discovering new topics and improving your existing content provides you with more opportunities to rank in search results
- Acquire competitors' traffic: Covering topics better than your competitors can divert their traffic to your site
- Be more efficient: Performing a content gap analysis can be a faster way of generating ideas compared to doing keyword and topic research from scratch
- Improve business results: Creating high-quality content on topics your audience cares about can lead to more conversions
How to Do an SEO Content Gap Analysis
Learn how to do a content gap analysis by following these workflows:
1. Find Competitors’ Keywords
Performing a keyword gap analysis to find terms competitors rank for that you don’t helps you fill content gaps at the site level—meaning you can find topics you haven’t covered at all.
Use Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool to find these keywords quickly.
Add your domain and the domains of up to four competitors, then click “Compare” to run the analysis.
In some cases, the tool might return tens of thousands of potential keyword opportunities.
Applying different filters is a good way to narrow down the list.
Let’s say you want to focus only on your competitors’ top keywords that are easy to rank for. Because your domain is new and has little authority.
Select the “Position” filter, hover over “Competitors,” and click “Top 20.”
Then, go to the “KD” (keyword difficulty) filter and select “Very easy” (this will show only terms that are very easy to rank for in the top 10 results).
After applying the filters, scroll down to the keyword list and select “Missing” to see the keywords all your competitors rank for that you don’t.
Click “Untapped” to display keywords that at least one competitor ranks for but you don’t.
The next step is picking the keywords that best align with your brand, product, and audience.
2. Research What Your Audience Wants
Researching common desires and pain points helps you identify content gaps that are highly relevant to your audience.
Here are a couple of ideas for how to discover what your audience cares about:
- Use social listening to understand your audience’s interests and pain points
- Conduct an online survey on a specific topic—such as favorite product features—and share a link to it on your website
- Use traffic analytics tools to understand the webpages that are popular among specific audience segments
Once you’ve uncovered some general concepts, use Semrush’s Topic Research tool to get specific content ideas.
Open the tool, enter your topic, and click “Get content ideas.”
You’ll see numerous ideas you can use to build content around.
Click “Show more” on any subtopic card to see headlines and related questions.
This will give you a good idea of how others have covered the subtopic. And allow you to consider what may be missing from their content.
3. Find Your Underperforming Content
Finding low-performing content can help you spot existing pages with gaps you can fill.
For example, you can use Google Search Console (GSC) to find pages that used to get a lot of visits but no longer do. That poor performance indicates those pieces now contain gaps that have made them less valuable to your audience.
To start, open GSC and click “Search results” in the left-hand menu.
Click “More” > “Compare.” Then pick a period—we recommend selecting at least three months of data to rule out temporary dips in performance.
Then, scroll down to the table and click “Pages.” This will display your top pages and the changes in clicks and impressions for each over your chosen period.
Find pages with a notable decrease in clicks. Then, compare them to competitors’ top-ranking content for the same primary keywords to identify content gaps.
Another technique is to find pages that rank lower than your competitors’ pages in search results.
To find these keywords, go back to the Keyword Gap tool.
This time, we’ll look at “Weak” keywords. These are the queries where you rank lower than any of your specified competitors.
It’s a good idea to prioritize keywords where your site ranks on the second or third page (positions 11-30.) Because filling content gaps of those pages could give you the best chance of ranking on the first page of search results.
4. Analyze SERPs
Analyzing the search engine results pages (SERPs) for all the keywords you’re targeting (or plan to target) helps you fill content gaps both on your website and on individual pages.
In other words, you should do a SERP analysis for topics your website hasn’t covered at all. As well as topics you’ve covered but not well enough to drive positive results.
Let’s say you want to create a blog post about “healthy vegan breakfast ideas” to fill a content gap on your website.
So, you search for that keyword to see what's currently ranking:
Next, study the content to understand the search intent (the reason users search a given query).
This will give you a sense of what users are likely to find most useful. And help you identify gaps in what’s currently ranking as well as gaps in your own content.
Some common gaps you might see include:
- Recency: Content that's no longer accurate or relevant is a significant gap. If the publish date is more than two years old, it’s likely to be outdated.
- Readability: Content should be engaging and easy to read. Clear, well-structured, and easily digestible content is better for users and search engines.
- Expertise: Expertise is a part of Google’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) framework for content quality. Audiences value when experts create or inform content. So, consider how you can incorporate expert perspective in your content
- Experience: Google’s E-E-A-T framework also mentions the importance of incorporating first-hand experience. For example, if you have a review site, you should actually try the products you're reviewing.
- Thoroughness: Content that isn’t thorough misses essential subtopics or doesn’t provide enough information about them. Filling these gaps can set your content apart as a helpful resource.
For example, the current top results in the above SERP have 30-33 ideas. Maybe you could share 50 ideas, offer more detail, or share expert advice from a nutritionist.
If you need to analyze many keywords at once, use Semrush’s Keyword Overview tool to analyze them in bulk. A paid plan lets you analyze up to 100 queries at once.
The report will give you a high-level overview of metrics such as search volume and KD.
Then, you can click on each term to go to a more detailed report. And see what ranks at the top of the SERP by scrolling down to the “SERP Analysis”section.
Fill Content Gaps and Track the Results
The goal of every content gap analysis is to improve your site’s performance.
Organic search rankings are a great way to keep tabs on performance, so make sure to track rankings for every page you create and improve.
Use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool to monitor your daily rankings.
You’ll see any significant visibility drops on your dashboard, so you can investigate the issues immediately.
For even more insights, add your competitors to the report and monitor their rankings alongside yours.
This post was updated in 2025. Excerpts from the original article by Marilyn Wilkinson may remain.