Keyword Gap Analysis or aka Competitive Keyword Analysis is the process of discovering the keywords (gap) that drives organic traffic to your competitors’ site, but not to yours. In other words, this procedure will help you discover the opportunities you might be missing out on.
Organic vs Paid Traffic
Organic traffic refers to the visitors that visited your site or page from an unpaid search result or from your content reaching them, hence the term “organic”. Whereas for paid traffic, visitors visit your site from paid search ads.
Organic traffic is known to be the most valuable source of traffic because if your content is ranked in the top five SERP by Google, this means that your content is high quality. In addition, organic search leads have a 14.6% close rate on average.
A study by Chitika demonstrated the importance of landing on the first page of Google searches.
The chart shows that the results in the first page of Google receive 92% of all the search traffic while the traffic drops by 95% on the second page.
While ranking in the top 10 searches on Google is rewarding, the downside to organic searches is that it takes time to get indexed and to start generating traffic from this source. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau once said, “Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet”.
Rather than having to wait patiently for your SEO to grow, you can alternatively pay for the chance to be seen on the first page of Google immediately. Google’s Adwords program is the most used pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program available today.
However, the amount of unique accounts or visitors your site gets to reach really depends on how much you are willing to spend on the ads. Logically, the more you spend, the more traffic you will get.
In spite of that, your leads will stop coming in as soon as you turn off the ads. Not to mention that though the traffic going in is large, they might not be the right target or niche for your site.
You need to keep in mind that paid search uses a charging model based on cost per click, not per lead.
It is no brainer that organic traffic has much better advantages than paid searches- long-term ROI, brand sustainability, and most importantly, cost-effective. So, how do we boost it?
Pro tip: Read up our comprehensive strategies to Keyword Gap Analysis.
First: Research Your Topic
What are you trying to sell? Products or services? In order to rank high on the search page, you need SEO keyword tools to know what keywords are related to the products or services that you are selling.
More importantly, you have to know what your audience is typing into the search engines. The smartest way to do this is by using a good and reliable keyword research tool like BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence tool. or LSIGraph’s Keyword Research.
With this tool, you can choose the right keyword to target based on the metrics available, such as keyword volume, trends, keyword competition, related keywords, and more.
Find a topic you would want to inspect and its relevant keyword. For example, if you want to focus on digital marketing, the relevant keyword that you can research could be social media marketing.
If you are unsure which keyword to use, you can sort the keywords based on their value. The higher valued keyword means it can potentially bring more traffic to your website at a lower competition.
What makes BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence stand out from the rest of the keyword research tools on the market is the keyword analyzer feature. It helps you see why someone might be searching for the keyword in the search engine. With this data, you will be able to plan your content in such a way that meets your users’ needs.
Second: Use Keyword Research/ Keyword Audit to Identify Opportunities
How do one identify a keyword opportunity? To start off, you can identify “low-hanging fruit”. These are keywords that have a high search volume and low competition that your site isn’t ranking for.
You can do this with BiQ’s Keyword Intelligence tool where you can untap local keyword opportunities.
First, enter your target keyword. Then, choose your preferred locations and languages.
The fantastic keyword tool will show you the list of relevant keywords the local people are using.
Your target keyword’s search volume could be 1,000 in your preferred location and possibly less than 100 in another. That’s simply because of the different demands in different places.
So choose the keyword that has high volume but lower competition. I know it can be quite challenging to decide which keyword to use. That’s where you can sort the keyword value in Keyword Intelligence.
A high-value keyword means it will bring more traffic to your website at a lower competition.
Alternatively, you can do a keyword audit as it remains as one of the most important and effective practices to building a strong SEO strategy. Many variables must be considered in keyword auditing, including the precise search phrases your audience uses and the type of content they seek. As a result, the keyword audit process provides insight into your target audience’s ideas, desires, and anxieties, making it a very powerful marketing tool.
Though this tactic is effective, the drawback is that it involves a lot of data about keywords which is very difficult to keep track of. Thankfully, there are some keyword audit tools available like Moz or Google Keyword Planner.
You can learn how to do a comprehensive keyword audit on your site here.
Third: Research Your Competitors
To start off, you must choose your competitor wisely. Focus on the top-performing competitors that rank high on the SERPs for your target keywords.
To carry out competitive research, you can start by typing your target keyword into Google and listing them out.
The domain authority of some of these competitors will be significantly higher. Consider filtering out those with authority that is similar to yours. It is better to look at competitors that are performing slightly better than you as it is easier to catch up to them.
It is not a smart choice to be aiming for keywords that you have no chance to rank for at all.
Alternatively, you can “stalk” their performance through reviews or customer feedback. Through this tactic, you can figure out what they are doing right and wrong. Usually what works for your competitors has a higher chance to work for you too.
Fourth: Use Keyword Gap Analysis To Compare And Research Your Competitors
Why should you do a competitive keyword analysis?
If your competitors are targeting relevant keywords and getting traffic from them, then they’re likely highly relevant to your business, too.
Now that you have a list of your competitors, it is time for comparison.
Compare among each of your high-ranking competitors and list out what keywords that they have in common. Now, compare yourself with these competitors. You want to discover these keywords, keywords patterns, or keyphrases that you were missing on.
Identify and collect all the semantic keywords used:
- Keywords you rank for, but they don’t
- Know which keywords that you have an advantage over your competitors.
- Use it to keep track of your website’s traffic (drop or increase).
- Know which relevant keywords you should be targeting instead.
- Keywords they rank for, but you don’t
- Identify the high volume, valuable keywords that your competitors are ranking on the SERP, steal them, and employ them in your content.
- Understand the strategy or keywords your competitors have that leads them to high traffic.
- Analyze valuable keywords your competitors use for your content ideas/strategy as well as re-optimizing existing content.
Ensure to audit them in detail based on your current targeting objectives to figure out what keywords would work well for your marketing campaign.
Find out the difference between Content Gap Analysis & Keyword Gap Analysis in our recent blog.
To make this process easier, you can also use BiQ’s Rank Intelligence to quickly identify the golden keywords that your competitors are ranking for.
First, enter your website URL into Rank Intelligence. Then, select the country where the audience is based.
You will get to see all the keywords your website is ranking for together with the important insights such as search volume, cost-per-click, and competition, and so on.
These insights let you know what are the search terms that searchers are searching for to reach your website.
Ultimately, you have to remember the goal of this process- to uncover hidden and valuable keywords used and not used by your competitors.
Fifth: Craft And Publish Your Content
Finally, you are now ready to create your content with all the golden keywords you have found through the keyword gap analysis process.
To boost organic traffic for existing articles or blogs, you can now reoptimize and replace your old keywords with high-valued and high-ranking keywords.
On the other hand, you can also leverage long-tailed keywords as short-tailed keywords are more challenging if you’re just starting out. These long-tail keywords provide more insight into what the search is about, and can drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Pro Tip: Impressive copywriting techniques can also increase traffic.
Last but not least, ensure that your article is formatted and is readable as it will affect your SEO. When the content on your website is clear to your target audience, people will learn about your service or product, and search engines will favour the site and rank it higher as a result.
Here are some tips on how to increase readability for your audiences and the search engine:
- Include relevant images to break up lengthy texts or paragraphs
- Use headings effectively
- Use bullets and lists like this one to provide information effectively
- Keep your content concise and interesting
Here’s our little secret to Digital Marketing success.
Repeating the keyword competitive analysis method from time to time is a good idea. It’s a great method to identify things you might have overlooked.
To recap, here are the five steps of keyword gap analysis you need to conduct to boost your organic traffic:
Step 1: Research your topic of interest to find the relevant and high-value keywords
Step 2: Identify keyword opportunities with keyword audit
Step 3: Identify and research your competitors to see where they rank and what works for them
Step 4: Identify high-ranking keywords that your competitor is ranking for through competitive keyword analysis
Step 5: Reoptimize your old content with the new keywords or draft and format your post and publish them
We are not saying that with these steps you will get tremendous traffic in 24 hours’ time, but with reasonable time, your content will certainly grow if you have put this keyword gap analysis to good use.
Try them out in RankingGap, and don’t forget about us when you get famous!
Updated: 5 April 2023
