How to Do an In-Depth Content Gap Assessment

How do you choose what topics to write about in content marketing? How can you attract new customers, leads, traffic to your niche? How can you be different from your competition and rise above the noise?

It's easy to answer: do a content gap analysis. It will reveal what opportunities are missing, where you can make a cut or bulk up, as well as how to best serve your target audience.

This analysis will allow you to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy, and then show you how to fill them.

You'll find the reasons a Content Gap Analysis is essential to your content marketing puzzle, and how you can conduct one in-depth to reap maximum benefits.

Quick Takeaways

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  Competitor analysis is the process of identifying which topics and what types of content are missing on your website.
  
• 
  Filling in the gaps in your strategy with quality content will strengthen SEO and build authority for your site. This will help you attract new leads to your business.
  
• 
  Conducting a content gap analysis involves setting clear goals, understanding buyer personas and mapping buyer's journey.
  
• 
  Once you have identified the content gaps in your business, you can fill them by creating content that is 10x more valuable than the rest. This means you can create engaging, fresh and relevant content that your audience will love.
  

What is Content Gap Analysis?

A content gap analysis is a way to identify topics and types that are missing in your content. You can improve your SEO by identifying new opportunities in your content marketing strategies. You can use content gap analysis to create a high-performing content strategy that targets consumers at all stages of the buyer's journey.

SourceCoSchedule

Analyzing your website, blog and landing pages, as well as any other content that you have, is possible. Your website is the most important area to focus on. It can guide buyers through each stage of their buying journey.

Why is Content Gap Analysis important?

Your SEO and content marketing strategies will be stronger if you can find and fill in the gaps in your content strategy. This will improve your website's performance overall. It will help you establish authority online, so more people can find your site and become customers and leads. You can also create better customer experiences that are more connected and holistic.

You will see the areas where customers are missing crucial content as they move through the buyer's journey. People could easily slip through the cracks if you don't address the issues.

It makes it easier for customers to navigate your sales funnel and smoother. This will help customers move faster through your sales funnel.

You can also perform a content gap analysis.

• Find topics that resonate with your target audience.
• Optimize every word of your content to maximize results
• To increase conversions, fill content with lead magnets.
• Find new niches and sub-niches your competitors aren't yet aware of.
• At every stage of the buyer’s journey, it is important to meet their needs.
• High-value content can drive valuable traffic to your site.
• Increase search visibility for new subjects

What is a Content Gap Analysis?

In five easy steps, you can do a detailed analysis of your content. You'll be able to identify the best places and reasons to place great content.

Before you start the process, make sure to have some basic information. You should identify the main goals that you want to achieve, and who your target audience are.

• Objectives: What are you trying to achieve by analysing your content? What do you hope to accomplish with this process? What are you looking to improve? You could set goals to improve traffic, leads, search engine ranking, and any other aspect that will allow you to improve your content marketing strategy.
• Target audience Do you know your target market? How does your customer's life cycle look? Your buyer personas are detailed descriptions of the fictional customer you want to represent. They include basic demographics, personality traits, motivations, challenges and pain points.

1. Cartography of the Buyer's Journey

Once you have a clear understanding of your audience and your goals, you can create a roadmap that shows the consumer's journey from start to finish. From the moment they are aware of your brand, to the moment that they choose to support you business, what is their journey?

Source: Hotjar

Are you able to provide content for web visitors at the awareness stage, such as emails, social posts and educational blog posts?

What about those who are interested in what your product or service is? You can help with your blog, social media, reviews and podcasts, case studies, guides, videos, and podcasts.

Are you able to convert customers into leads in the decision stage of conversion? This includes information about pricing, comparison guides, reviews and product/service demonstrations. It also contains information about how to buy a good or service.

The loyaltystage is also important. This stage involves customers who are looking for more than what you have already offered. Ask them for their feedback via surveys and reviews. To encourage them to share newsletters, updates and other assets, you can ask them for feedback.

You can map the buyer's journey by identifying all the steps that someone will need to take to move from the awareness stage up to the loyalty phase. Next, identify the key questions that the buyer will ask at each stage of their journey. You can include what they are looking for, what they require to get to the next step and how they will get there.

This is a simple example showing how a buyer would approach Nora, a content manager looking for help outside her job.

• Nora must find a way of producing a lot more content quickly. Her marketing team only has one writer in-house, and she just added two clients to her company.
• She uses Google to search for “outsourced content production services”.
• She clicks on the article “11 Benefits of Outsourcing Content Creation”
• Nora discovers that outsourcing to another agency might be a cost-effective way to solve her problem.
• She searches Google for “best content creation agencies”, and she finds a listicle which rates and reviews 10 top agencies.
• She compiles a list of three top options and then digs deeper, reviewing their websites, testimonials, third-party reviews, and other information.
• Nora chooses the best option for her business. Nora signs up for their newsletter, and schedules a consultation.
• She is happy with the offer after the call and orders content from them.
• She is a loyal customer who no longer has to worry about managing all the work.
• For being a long-term customer, her new partner offers her a discount.
• She reviews the company with 5-star ratings whenever she can, and she recommends them to friends and coworkers.

Nora's journey was fairly seamless. She went from awareness to exploring her options. She made the right choice and became a loyal customer. Based on your products/services, and buyer personas, you can create a similar buyer's journey.

You can find a deeper guide to mapping your buyer's journey in “The Importance Of Customer Journey Mapping In Content Marketing”

2. Do Market Research

Next, conduct market research to determine the content gaps. You can interview potential clients, clients currently in business, industry experts, or send out surveys to get feedback.

Send market research surveys to different segments to ensure that you reach buyers at every stage of their journey. Ask hard questions to get the most from your surveys.

• Can you describe your main goals?
• What are your top problems?
• What are your options for finding solutions to your problems in the world?
• Have you tried any of these solutions? What failed to work?
• What information do you need to reach your goals and solve your problems?
• What is the most bothersome thing about this topic?
• What are your questions and concerns about [topic]?
• Why did you choose [A product/service] instead of [B product/service]
• What are the top 3 things you look for when looking for a solution?

You'll be able to better understand your customers' needs and concerns by getting feedback. You should gain a new perspective that will help you create content ideas.

3. Analyze your current content

To find out where your content is succeeding and where it's failing, conduct a content audit. Examine your content with the same eyes you use to evaluate competitors.

Your website is the first place you should start. This is where you will guide people through their entire buying journey, from awareness to decision making and brand loyalty. You'll lose future business if you leave any gaps in the journey.

Make a list of URLs on your website. Next, identify each page and label it with the stage of the buyer's journey if applicable. You can also “rank” each page based on how it performs. You can include things such as the average position on search engine results pages (SERP), monthly traffic and leads, click-through rate and CTR.

Depending on the performance of each content piece, you can categorize it in one of three categories:

• Keep in mind: This category contains high-performing content which may not require extra attention. To drive more traffic to the website, you might consider incorporating it in future campaigns.
• Optimize/update: You may need to revise or optimize good content that's not performing well.
• Remove: If it is too difficult to update or doesn't benefit your SEO, you can delete low-quality and outdated content.

This process can be made easier by tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console and SEMrush Content Audit.

Conducting a content analysis will help you identify the gaps in your buyer’s journey. You will know that if you have a lot of awareness-stage content, you should focus on creating more decision-stage and consideration-stage content.

4. Analyze Content from Competitors

Now it's time for you to compare your content with your competitors. Look at top competitors' websites to find out how they lead people through the buyer’s journey. What are their methods of getting visitors to each page? Are they focusing on certain types of content? Which areas do they succeed and which ones do they fail to achieve?

You can identify the strengths and weaknesses of their pages, as well as where they are doing it better than you. Note their most successful pages and keywords. Analyzing keywords and topics from competitors using search engines and competitor tools is also a good idea.

• Browse page one of Google. We aim to rank on Google page one for our target keywords and topics. To understand your competitors, look at page one of Google searches to see what is ranking for your keywords.
• Make sure you use the right tools. You can enter keywords from competitors to find their top-ranking keywords. To find the most relevant keywords for your business, you can do a Google search. To see what your business has done well, analyze the top pages and blog articles.

5. Fill any Gap

You're now ready to develop a content marketing strategy that will blow your socks off. You'll use the data that you have gathered to:

• Based on your goals, mapping the buyer's journey of your target audience
• Market research involves surveying current and future clients, as well as industry experts.
• Audit your website content
• Analyzing content from competitors

It's now time to fill in the content gaps that you have identified by creating new content that is 10x better than those of your competitors. Your new content must be comprehensive, engaging, and practical.

It's difficult to create high-quality content in a saturated market. But it is possible with the right resources and time.

You'll attract more visitors if you fill in the gaps. Your site will also provide a seamless customer experience for everyone who visits it.

Do a content gap analysis to determine if you can create 10x more content

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