A content gap analysis shows you the searches competitors win and you miss. Here is how to run one without ending up with a 900 keyword list nobody uses.
A content gap analysis compares the keywords your competitors rank for against the keywords you rank for, and shows you what is missing. Done well, it turns into a prioritised list of pages to write. Done badly, it turns into a 900-row spreadsheet that sits untouched in a shared drive.
Running the comparison
Every major SEO tool has a version of this. Ahrefs calls it Content Gap; Semrush calls it Keyword Gap. You enter your domain, add three to five competitors, and ask for keywords where they rank and you do not.
Your competitor choice determines the quality of the output. Use organic competitors, meaning the sites that actually appear for your terms, rather than the companies your sales team worries about. A national brand ten times your size will generate hundreds of keywords you have no chance of winning this year. Two or three sites of a similar size and authority produce a far more useful list.
Filtering the list down
The raw export is almost always unusable. Cut it hard.
Strip out competitor brand terms first, because you can’t win those and they inflate the volume figures. Then remove anything with no commercial relevance to what you sell, no matter how tempting the search volume looks. Then apply a difficulty ceiling that matches your authority, rather than the tool’s default.
What survives is usually between 30 and 80 keywords. Group those into topics, because five related queries almost always belong on one page rather than five thin ones. The output you want is a list of pages, not a list of keywords.
The gaps tools will not show you
Keyword tools only know about queries with recorded volume and competitors already ranking. Three other gap types matter, but none of them appears in the export.
- Intent gaps. You have a page for the query, but it answers the wrong question. A buyer wanting prices lands on a definition.
- Funnel gaps. Plenty of top-of-funnel content, nothing that helps someone compare two options and decide.
- Sales gaps. The questions your team answers on every call. Nobody searches them in volume, but the page closes deals and increasingly gets quoted by AI assistants.
Ask your sales and support teams for their most repeated questions before you finalise the plan. That conversation reliably produces two or three pages worth more than anything in the tool export.
Turning it into a plan
Score each topic on three things: how much of your revenue it relates to, how realistically you can rank for it given your current authority, and whether the existing results are actually beatable. Look at what ranks now. If the first page is five sites with far stronger profiles and genuinely good content, park it.
Then sequence. Commercial pages first, supporting content after, and a review date so the plan survives contact with the next quarter. We publish this as a ranked build list rather than a keyword dump, which is part of how our data and insights work stays usable for clients who are not SEOs.
Common questions
How often should I run one?
Twice a year is enough for most sites, or quarterly in a fast-moving market. Running it monthly produces churn rather than insight, because rankings and competitor content do not change that quickly.
Do I need a paid tool?
For the competitor comparison, yes, in practice. You can do a manual version with Search Console and a careful look at three competitor sitemaps, which is slower but free and often surfaces intent gaps the tools miss entirely.
What if I have no real competitors online?
You almost certainly do; they are just not the companies you compete with offline. Search five of your core terms and note who appears. Directories, marketplaces and publishers count because they take the clicks.
For a short definition and related terms, see content gap analysis in our SEO glossary.
