Gap Analysis Explained: Content, Page-Type, Structural Gaps

Full transcript

981 words · script draft, under review.

Intro

Most gap analyses I've seen are a spreadsheet. Two thousand keywords a competitor ranks for, and you don't. Sorted by volume. Handed over with a note: "here are your opportunities".

Nobody can act on that. Half of it doesn't fit the business. A quarter of it needs a type of page the site doesn't have. And the biggest reason the competitor wins isn't in the spreadsheet at all.

A useful gap analysis looks at three different kinds of gaps, with different inputs and different fixes.

In this episode, I'll take the three gaps from episode one and go through them properly: what each one is, what data you need, what you get out, and how the next nine episodes fit together into one process.

What counts as a gap

First, a definition. A gap is something with three properties at once.

There's demand: people actually search for it. Someone ranks for it, which proves Google rewards a page for it. And you don't rank, or you rank poorly.

That third part matters. A gap isn't only where you're absent. It's also where you're present but losing. If a competitor sits at position three and you're at position twenty-five, that's a gap too. It just needs a different fix than a missing page.

And one more rule. A gap is only worth filling if it fits what you're building. That's a filter we'll come back to.

What you bring with you

A gap analysis doesn't start from zero. If you've followed the series, you already have most of the inputs.

From traffic analysis: your baseline. Which pages get impressions and clicks, which queries you're close on, and whether your data is clean.

From keyword research: clustered keywords with validated demand.

From SERP analysis: snapshots, difficulty bands, weakness scores, and the gate decisions.

And from the last episode: a short list of three to five competitors, each with a role.

That's why gap analysis comes this late in the series. Done first, it's guesswork against competitors picked by gut feeling. Done now, every gap can be checked against demand and the SERP you already measured.

Gap one: content

Gap one is the content gap, sometimes called the keyword gap. These are searches where your chosen competitors rank and you don't.

The inputs are the keywords each competitor ranks for, which we'll export in episode thirty-eight, and your own keywords from Search Console. The method is a set difference: their keywords minus yours. But only after you normalize word forms, so you don't treat singular and plural as two gaps. Episode thirty-nine goes through that.

The output is a list of missing topics, grouped into clusters, with demand per cluster. Not two thousand keywords. Maybe forty clusters.

The weakness of this gap is that it only sees what can be expressed as a keyword. Which is why there are two more.

Gap two: page types

Gap two is the page-type gap. Your competitors have kinds of pages that you don't have at all.

A comparison page for every pair of products. A calculator. A page per brand. A page per use case. These pages often rank for hundreds of small keywords, each too small to stand out in a keyword export. But the type of page is the real asset.

The input here isn't keywords. It's URLs. You look at competitors' sitemaps and ranking URLs, find the patterns, and label each pattern with a page type. Then you compare their inventory with yours. That's episode forty.

The output is a short list of missing page types, each with an estimate of how many pages it would mean and which keyword clusters it would cover.

Gap three: structure

Gap three is the structural gap. Two sites can have similar content and very different results because of how that content is connected.

How many clicks from the homepage does an important page sit? How many internal links point to it? Are there hub pages that group related pages together? A page buried five clicks deep with two internal links gets less attention, from Google and from people, than the same page linked from a hub.

The inputs are crawls of your own site and your competitors' sites. Episode forty-one covers internal linking. Episode forty-two covers the outside view: links from other sites, in a light version, and when authority really is what blocks you.

The output is a list of structural changes. New hubs, links to add, pages to move closer to the top.

False gaps

Before the process map, a warning. Not every gap should be filled.

Some gaps are off-model. A competitor ranks for job listings or event pages, and you're a shop. That's their business, not a gap in yours.

Some gaps only exist for giants. If the only sites ranking are huge brands with authority you won't match for years, that's a different fight.

And some gaps fail the gates from episode thirty-five: demand below your floor, or a results page you can't win. A gap is just a candidate. The gates still apply.

The process map

Here's how the next nine episodes fit together.

We start from the short list of competitors we picked in episode thirty-six. First we find the gaps: keyword exports and the keyword gap, page types, internal linking, and authority. Then we size each gap by volume, winnability, and value, and turn it into a priority list. Then we write it up as a report. And finally, after shipping, we measure whether it worked.

For our example shop, with made-up numbers, that might end as forty-one content clusters, three missing page types, and two structural fixes. And from those, a plan with five items.

Wrap-up

So: a gap needs demand, proof, and your absence. Look for three kinds, content, page types, and structure, and filter out the false ones. The gap analysis process map is linked in the description. Next episode: we export everything your chosen competitors rank for, with the DataForSEO API, and store it so we can compare. See you there.