With COVID-19 closing down a majority of businesses across the globe, building a solid online presence for your business has quickly become one of the only options left to keep your business afloat. Luckily, there is more information available to be able to successfully transition your business online now than ever before.
Search engine optimization (SEO) has quickly become one of the most valued aspects of digital marketing and the business world altogether. A few tweaks to your company’s SEO may prove to be just what you need to thrive in today’s economy. But what exactly can you do to improve your SEO specifically? A content gap analysis is a fantastic first step and this article is going to teach you how to do one!
What is a Content Gap Analysis?
Before we dive into what exactly a content gap analysis is, let’s first discuss why it is so valuable. One of the most important aspects of improving your search engine optimization is producing quality content for your website as often as possible. This is because search engine algorithms, such as Google, value the content of your website over almost anything else when determining its rankings. If you are a company with a website, you want the highest possible ranking you can get. Ranking highly amongst Google’s search results is much easier said than done, but it is definitely something that you can improve upon by enhancing the quality of your content. The first step in being able to do this is through a content gap analysis.
An SEO content gap analysis is essentially the process of finding holes in your existing content. As a company, you should be constantly identifying the missing content pieces within your website that could potentially lead more people to come across your brand or product. To do this, you have to take a good look at the content that you do have on your website. Then, you’ll want to really think about what else you could add to guide potential customers to a point of purchase. Audit your webpages, blog articles, social media pages, landing pages, ebooks, and any other assets that you may offer. Then, do anything in your power to create as much relevant and quality content as possible.
Think about it like this: if you offer a particular product or service, think about what your target audience might search on Google to actually come across whatever your product or service tries to solve for them. Anything that may relate to your product or service is fair game for content.
What are the Steps to a Successful Content Gap Analysis?
Now that you know what a content gap analysis is, how do you actually go about doing one? Allow us to break it down for you with a few steps.
Truly Understand Your Target Audience
As we touched on a little bit before, thinking about how your target audience may end up coming across your page is extremely important. Sit down and literally think as if you are in the shoes of one of your customers. Think about the primary questions your audience may have, the options that they might consider, the needs that they are looking to fulfill with your particular product or service. You’ll also want to think about what eventually convinces them to purchase your product or service over your competitors’. Here, we will lay out an example.
Target Audience Example
First, say you are a small, urban clothing store that had to close its doors. You don’t want to go out of business, but the bills continue to add up and you know that you have to act quickly to save yourself. Your first thought is to begin digitally marketing your products across different social media platforms, but you don’t know how to go about doing this.
You look up on Google “how to digitally market your products on social media” and an article with the title “How to Market Your Business’ Products on Every Social Media Platform” shows up. In that article, TikTok was mentioned as the premier social media platform for digital marketing in 2021. Because of that, you look up how to get more followers on TikTok.
Doing so leads you to a page that has a variety of tips on getting more followers on TikTok. As you are reading through it, an advertisement for a social media management tool comes up. You click on the ad and it guarantees that you will improve your social media following and overall management or your money back. You decide to sign up for a monthly trial. In that month, all your new social media pages begin to grow significantly.
Although this was a relatively drawn-out example, the point is that it is crucial to be able to really analyze your target audience and understand the journey they embark on before arriving at your particular product or service. You as a company want to be able to fill these content gaps and effectively cut out these middle-man websites. This way, all the information that your customers could possibly want or think about are in one destination. Doing so allows you to streamline your customer’s journey to the ultimate destination of purchasing your product or service.
Survey Your Customers
As highlighted in the last point, understanding your target audience is everything in successfully conducting a content gap analysis. Yet, actually knowing what is on the minds of your target audience is way easier said than done. The solution to this problem is conducting market research. Survey your customers regarding their buying experience, their needs, goals, questions, and concerns. This can help you get a better understanding of their purchasing journey.
Using a Google Form should be sufficient for most businesses to get this feedback. Some questions that can prove to be extremely helpful in improving your understanding of your target audience are:
- What are you looking for in your product or service?
- What problems do you hope to solve with your particular product or service?
- Where do you go to search for solutions to these problems?
Analyze Your Current Content’s Keywords
Another large factor that plays into Google’s algorithm for deciding its website rankings are content keywords. Google’s algorithm values keywords heavily when forging its rankings. Therefore, you must take advantage of them. Odds are, your content’s keywords are already being ranked on Google. Finding out which keywords are being ranked helps you decide what is working and what isn’t.
How do you go about finding out which keywords are being ranked? SEO Design Chicago offers a variety of different tools to help your company find these successful keywords. Once these successful keywords are identified, filling the gaps within your content can be as easy as coming up with different related keywords that you may not already be targeting. Then you can create new content as they pertain to these new, related keywords. Doing so will help vastly improve the overall traffic to your page.
Examine Your Competition’s Content
A majority of the value that a content gap analysis provides comes from analyzing your existing content. Still, taking a look at your competitor’s site may help you fill in some of the other gaps that you might not think of. Examine if their articles direct readers immediately to a call to action or if they lead into other content that further convinces readers of their product or service. Analyzing the strategy of your competition is important in improving upon your own strategy. The business world is truly a dog-eat-dog world. Therefore, it is imperative to constantly try to one-up your competitors at every opportunity. After all, the odds are that they are trying to do the same thing to you.
A Content Gap Analysis is Key to Improving Your Existing Content Strategy
As the market transitions to the internet, quality, relevant content has become one of the most important parts of marketing for any company. Thus, you must be able to take a step back and truly analyze your existing content. Filling in the gaps in this content is imperative in improving the buying process of your target audience.
Ultimately, you want to drive as much traffic to your particular website as possible. Then once you do, you want to provide as much quality content as you can to guide your audience towards a point of purchase. Whether you are a company that is struggling to stay afloat in our current economy or are simply looking to improve your content strategy and drive more traffic to your site, a content gap analysis might be just what you need.
FAQs about How to Do an SEO Content Gap Analysis:
- What is the first step of a content gap analysis?
- How is a content analysis related to SEO?
- Why is my content important?
- What content should I be producing?
- What is a content gap?
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