Effective Ways for Identifying Content Gaps
What Are Content Gaps?
Content gaps refer to the topics your target audience is looking for that are not currently covered on your digital website.
Content gaps are common. After all, there are only 31,000 keywords with monthly search volumes exceeding 100,000 searches according to Ahrefs—but there are over 200 million keywords that have between 10 and 1,000 monthly searches.
Depending on your industry, there are potentially thousands of topics your target audience is searching for that you may not be covering.
Different Kinds Of Content Gaps
Keyword Gaps
Keyword gaps mean realizing that not all keywords are created equal. This means that you might be focusing your marketing strategy on short-tail keywords and those which are popular. However, it might be the time to make a switch and search for other long-tail digital keywords. Long-tail keywords are less competitive and will generally rank higher on sites.
Topic Gaps
Topic gaps are when you don’t analyze the topic carefully. It means you might not be covering those topics that your readers are interested in and might not have comprehensive ideas for readers at all levels. Therefore, you should know what people are searching for these days and which type of digital content you should be producing to attract the maximum audience to your website or marketing business.
Media Gaps
Media gaps occur when you don’t include attention-grabbing media in your content. You might not be incorporating video or visual marketing, which many people find engaging. You can fix your marketing strategy by adding videos, images, infographics, and other non-text-based media.
How To Identify Content Gaps?
Examine Your Target Audience
If there are times it feels like your audience holds the key to your company’s success, it’s because it does. As a marketer, almost everything you do comes back to the audience. These are the people you’re trying to persuade and charm. If you’re not playing to their wants, needs, and questions, what are you doing? The same principle applies: when you’re looking for content gaps, look to your audience. Use client personas to identify customer pain points.
Review the Competition
There are two types of content gaps: company gaps and industry gaps. Company gaps are topics and areas your business hasn’t covered in content. These may be popular industry topics and related to the products or services you offer. You just haven’t created pieces about them yet. Industry gaps are ones that nobody has covered yet, not even other sources, like your top competitors. Looking at the competition can help you find both types, but most specifically, the company gaps.
Monitor Community Discussions
Social media, comments sections, and discussion boards are where people go to air their grievances. They may feel more powerful and anonymous behind that screen. But this gives another way to examine the thoughts, wants, and needs of your audience. Community forums and platforms make it easy for people to ask questions and get responses, but sometimes a short answer isn’t enough. Especially if you see people asking the same questions over and over on different platforms, that’s when you’ve found a content gap.
Look at Keyword Rankings
Review the keywords you’re using when you create content. Are your pieces ranking for any of those keywords? You may be excited if they are, but that’s less important if they’re not generating traffic. Keyword and search engine results page (SERP) rankings can be a vanity metric if they’re not translating to real traffic or sales.
Check the SERPs
If you’re looking for content gaps, what is looking at the top-ranking content going to do? Especially if you’re not trying to copy exactly what’s already out there? Checking the SERPs isn’t about looking for what’s available. It’s about looking for what’s missing. SEO can be a tricky area for content marketing. It doesn’t have hard and fast rules. You have to play both sides, looking at what artists call the positive and negative space of the search results.