When it comes to keyword gap research, there are numerous keyword research tools to assist us. Choosing the right competitor keyword analysis tool can help you save a lot of time.

You will learn:

• What keyword gap and keyword gap analysis is.
• What kind of keywords you should pay more attention to when researching.
• 4 steps to finding keyword gaps with RankingGap.

Selecting the right keywords to target is essential for search engine optimization (SEO) and your overall content marketing success. You can lose a lot if you attempt to rank for terms that aren’t related to your products and your target audience. Likewise, it is useless to rank for keywords that users don’t type in the search bar at all.

No matter what industry you’re operating in, there’s always a gap between you and your competitors. And they might have the time, money, and resources to do extensive keyword research and target the perfect phrases that attract the most customers.

That is the solution for you: Find your keyword gap to know the most relevant keywords. And of course, you don’t have to do this manually. A keyword gap analysis tool like RankingGap can help you with this SEO part.

What are keyword gap and keyword gap analysis?

Simple keyword research can have mixed effectiveness. That’s especially if you’re a beginner at SEO and don’t know how to properly use the terms you find. Or, maybe you target the wrong keywords and go after ones that don’t have enough search volume or very little potential for growth.

A keyword gap is a keyword that is bringing traffic to your competitors but not to your website. In other words, it’s the keywords you’re not taking advantage of. 

Keyword gap research can also be called competitor keyword analysis. Keyword gap analysis is the process of identifying keywords that a site’s competitors are ranking well for. You’re analyzing the sources of competing websites’ traffic and using them to address holes in your own content. 

This sounds obvious, but there are likely dozens of smaller, niche keywords for which competitors rank better. The cumulative traffic of all of these low-search-high-intent keywords could be the thing that gives the competition the edge.

Why do you need to know your keyword gap?

In fact, keywords are the second most important factor for an SEO-friendly website. Thus, when choosing the keyword to target, keyword relevance is the most important factor. You can’t waste your time optimizing the keywords that do not relate to your business. 

The thing about your competitors’ keywords is, they’ve already proven to be effective. You can see that they’re in high use and generating plenty of traffic for them. So identifying your keyword gap is also a great and fast way to get your relevant keywords.

In general, knowing your keyword gap can help you:

• Capture the right audience at the right time.
• Figure out where you should be spending your time and budget.
• Introduce you to opportunity gaps in your niche.

The ultimate goal of any holistic SEO content strategy is to drive traffic to your site. But you don’t want just any traffic. You want high-value, high-intent website visitors whose problems you can solve. That’s just what you get when you use a keyword gap analysis to reveal areas of opportunity where you either don’t have content or where you can improve existing content. 

More importantly, a comprehensive strategy for competitor keyword research will also introduce you to opportunity gaps in your niche. This means that you can see which keywords have high intent levels but haven’t yet been captured by your competition.

Keyword gap analysis is vital to creating quality content that will capture the right audience at the right time.

If you can understand the competitive landscape for your keywords, then you’ll be able to see how difficult it is to rank for certain terms and figure out where you should spend your time and budget.

Overall, a competitor keyword analysis is incredibly helpful in helping you to fine-tune your marketing plans, make the most out of your budget, and create more effective SEO campaigns.

What kind of keywords should you pay attention to?

There are a lot of keyword types, but generally, you can look more at these 3 below keywords.

Keywords Focused on Products and Services 

Your keywords must be relevant to your products and services. They must talk about your offer, improving the features of your products and services.

You can also use product keywords to build interest around a product. These keywords are great with landing pages to gain new customers at scale. In the SEO industry, we say these keywords have high commercial intent. This is because customers who do a search with these phrases have a higher intention to buy a product.

Long-tail Keywords

It’s a keyword with a more specific search phrase. Long-tail keywords are phrases consisting of three or four words that are specific to your product, service, location, and brand. 

While these keywords often have low search volumes because of their specificity, they’re valuable for SEO because they’re less competitive. 

But most importantly, they’re more likely to drive website traffic and conversions because the searchers using them are looking for particular products or services. Then, you will have better chances of ranking for particular multi-word phrases than general single-word or double-word terms.

Geo-Targeted Keywords

Especially if you’re a business that serves local customers, you’ll want to include geo-targeted keywords in your list. 

Geo-targeted keywords might include words like “near me”, “in (specific location)”, “open now”, etc. 

• residential landscaping in Chicago
• patio installation company near Lincoln Park
• Chicago area landscaping services

4 steps to find your keyword gap with RankingGap

There are many tools out there that will help you identify the keyword gap. The tools on these platforms allow for a specific page on a competitor’s site to be analyzed, identifying which keywords that page is ranking for. 

If you are looking for a tool to explore, find new keywords and what people are looking for then RankingGap is the best choice to explore the monthly search volume and cost of those keywords.

With RankingGap, you can do all the 4 steps necessary to find your keyword gap. Let’s discover the 4-step-guide now.

Step 1. Finding Your Top Competitors: 

If you want to find your keyword gaps, you’ll need to know who your competitors are. You may already have a few ideas, but you need to know for sure who you’re going up against. It might be surprising to find exactly what websites are drawing traffic from your target audience.

For this step, you can use the Competitor Discover feature in RankingGap to find competitors. 

Just enter your domain, RankingGap will show your potential competitor with the overview and the graph.

Step 2. Use RankingGap to find your keyword gap:

To get the best list of competitive keywords, consider comparing your website with your competition. Ask yourself questions like:

• What do competitors target that my business is not targeting?
• What do I target that my competitors don’t?
• How do they target differently than my brand?
• How many keywords do they target per page?
• What type of content do they produce around those keywords?

The best thing about RankingGap is that you can compare your website with four of your competitors in a single profile to determine the best keywords within your niche effectively.

If you don’t know which web pages or where to start, you can just compare your website to your competitors’ websites to identify all the ranking keywords. Conducting a domain to domain analysis also helps you identify your competitors’ overall best-ranked keywords and content.

RankingGap has 4 keyword views:

• “Unique” keyword view: Keywords that you rank, but your competitors don’t.
• “Missing” keyword view: Keywords that your competitors rank, but you don’t.
• “Common” keyword view: Keywords that both you and your competitors rank.
• “Gap” keyword view: Ranking keywords that you and most of your competitors don’t have.

Do you think that comparing domains (including the sales page, landing page, blogs, etc.) is way too broad of a strategy? And you only want a method to gauge keyword data for a specific category effortlessly?

By using page intersection, you get to compare your content about “male skincare guide” with all the blog posts relevant to your topic from your competitor’s website.

To dig in deeper and obtain hyper-specific keyword gaps, you can do an exact URL matching. Comparing specific web pages (URLs) allows you to find the most relevant ranking keywords required to optimize your page.

Step 3. Shortlist your keywords refine and filter keywords based on what you identified

Once you’ve gathered up a big list of keywords to fill your gaps, it’s time to decide which ones are actually worth pursuing.

You shouldn’t just be pulling out random keywords and hoping for the best. They need to be relevant to your target audience, and a good choice for increasing growth.

It’s important to understand where the keyword is coming from, so consider looking back to your competitor. You can analyze how much traffic they get. Are they top in your industry (and a difficult target to beat), or a moderately successful but low-hanging fruit (much easier to catch up to)?

RankingGap has the Advanced Filter feature for you to shortlist your ideal keywords.

• SERP features: You can filter keywords according to the SERP features you want. If you see recurring keywords, no worries! That’s just keywords ranked with different SERP features that you can filter out.
• Ranking position: Set it to “1 to 10” if you are aiming for the first page in the SERP. Otherwise, you just need to choose your preferences.
• Competition: You can leave it blank, but to narrow your keywords down, you can set it as “0 to 30” percent (low). A percentage of 30 – 50 is considered to be of medium competition; anywhere above 50 is too high.
• CPC: You can leave CPC as it is if your focus is on improving your organic traffic. But it can also give you an idea of how competitive a keyword is.
• Search volume: A general rule of thumb is to pick keywords with a volume of a minimum of 1000.

Keywords with the highest value should be your main keywords, while the lower value keywords should act as related keywords supporting the main term.

You should then create a label for every keyword you have. You can mark it as the main or supporting keyword. In RankingGap, you can star the keyword you want to note.

Step 4. Recognize a pattern in your final keyword group: 

Competitor keyword gap analysis shouldn’t end just with getting the list of relevant keywords you should use in your content. Instead, if done correctly, you’re able to learn more about your audience and get to know them better.

After you get that, you’ll get a clearer picture of who you are serving and what these people want. This will help you spot a pattern in your keywords, predict keywords that will improve your following content, and develop a winning strategy.

TL;DR

You need to keep in mind that this isn’t just something you do once. As new events pop up in your industry and your target audience evolves, keywords can shift and new opportunities can pop up. You want to stay on top of that and keep doing keyword gap research all the time.

RankingGap with a range of features is one great keyword gap tool for your business. Discover your competitors and your missing keywords with RankingGap now.