Content Gap Analysis – Closing the SEO Gap Between You and Your Customers

There are a few different types of “content gaps” that most people mean when they use the term. Content gap analysis sometimes means comparing your content alongside your competitors and seeing how you rank against how they rank. But there is a different approach to content gap analysis that takes a comprehensive glance at what you have to offer. The other type of content gap analysis involves filling gaps in your content that potential customers may be falling through. In this article, we’ll be focusing on the latter type.

• Different content gap analysis strategies
• Going back to basics with customer personas
• Are you customers finding your content?
• Tuning up low-performing content

The idea being, if you can fill those content gaps with supportive material that helps your customer along the “buying journey” you will encourage more organic conversions or sales.

Different Content Gap Analysis Strategies

There are a lot of content gap analytics strategies you can find on the web. This article attempts to remove some of the jargon. Below you will find helpful tips that you can implement with any set of tools and go at your own pace.

Going Back to Basics With Customer Personas

It might seem trivial, but you’d be surprised by how much you can learn about your ideal customer by drawing up persona charts. You can do this with any spreadsheet or word processor, or really any tool of choice.

Create 2-3 customer profiles with fictitious information like:

• Name
• Demographic
• Career
• Income
• Likes vs. dislikes
• Favorite apps

You can customize the profile to reflect attitudes or patterns that specifically relate to your product or service. Don’t be shy. This is a chance to get creative.

For some people it can be difficult to to free associate creative ideas without judgment. It can help to set aside twenty or thirty minutes to jot down all the ideas you have as fast as possible without stopping to judge them. Go until the timer runs out. Afterward, when you’ve generated a significant amount of ideas, you can start to pick, choose, and edit.

If you’re still having trouble getting started you can always search the web for example customer personas. Seeing a few examples can help you realize the format and picture how you can structure your own customer personas.

Are Customers Finding Your Content?

The first thing you’ll want to check is whether or not potential customers are finding your content. This is the first “gap” you’ll want cover.

Remember that there are different ways for customers to find you, such as:

• Word of mouth
• Advertising
• Direct traffic (typing in your domain name)
• Email traffic (are they subscribed to your newsletter or email marketing campaigns?)
• Organic search (finding you on a search engine)

Just about everyone is focused on organic search; which makes sense, because most companies are found through search these days.

To make sure your search game is on point, you’ll have to go back to your initial keyword planning; that is, if you ever did keyword planning at the beginning of your SEO strategy.

Keyword planning helps you identify key search queries that potential customers might use to find you.

If necessary, go back and see how you are performing on these keywords and how your competitors are doing. It’s possible your results might be getting buried in the search pages. Beefing up this content will go a long way to helping you rank better and filling those content gaps.

Practical step: Make a list of your main keywords and align them with their complimentary content. Use your preferred analytics tools to analyze these articles according to key performance indicators.

Tuning Up Low Performing Content

Once you have isolated page content that can be improved, the next question is how and in what form.

There are many ways to improve content that range from easy to highly labor-intensive; but there are few guide posts from which you can make serious strides.

Content Depth

How deep does your content go into the chosen topic? In general, our content marketing team has found that longer form content is more frequently ranking in higher positions across search engines.

But this must not be a license to fill a piece of content with pure volume. Rather, you are best advised to take a deep dive into your topic and cover as many aspects of it as are relevant to your customer.

Content Richness

Content richness, in the form of multimedia images and/or video, has been demonstrated to influence search performance. It’s no magic bullet, but if you can provide some visual aid or supporting material of a visual nature to your written content you may find it performs better and sticks longer in the readers’ memory.

If your content can remain vibrant in your readers’ memory after they have been exposed to your content, it’s more likely they will remember you when it comes time to make a buying decision. Increased content richness helps to build those neural pathways.

Think of your content as a guide in helping your ideal customer find your product. If someone is searching for something they need, and your service answers the need, try to make it as easy as possible for that searcher to find you. Giving your site a content gap analysis is a great way to do that.

But before you go, make sure to bookmark our page on SEO and why it matters for your business. That one will always come in handy when making modifications to your site.