What is a Keyword Gap Analysis?

When it comes to SEO, it’s more of a marathon than a sprint. No matter the pace, there is still competition to rank number one on search engines.

A keyword gap analysis allows you to compare your keyword rankings to another domain’s rankings. This will help you discover opportunities you may be missing. From this information, you can create a list of keywords that your competitor is targeting and determine their strategy.

An easy way to conduct a keyword gap analysis is by heading over to semrush.com and using their Keyword Gap tool.

The first step is to enter your domain and then identify the competitor(s) you would like to analyze and enter their domain. Next, click “go” and SEMrush will generate a report with data on all of the keywords.

In the example below, the numbers in the red box indicate the rankings for the keywords listed to the left for each company. You will see several instances where one company is ranking 10-30 positions higher than the other company. In the yellow box, we see the keywords “flashlight” and “flowers.” Home Depot has the higher ranking for both keywords while Lowes is trailing by 17 positions for flashlight and 50 positions for flowers. In this situation, there is an opportunity to optimize pages on the Lowes site targeting these keywords to improve rankings.

In this example, we see a dash under lowes.com and a 6 under homedepot.com. This shows that Home Depot is ranking 6 for “bean bag” on Google and Lowes is not ranking. If you see a dash under your domain these are keyword opportunities you’re missing out on. Determine if these are relevant keywords you would like to rank for, start a list, and start creating a content strategy.

To reiterate, this information will help you determine where you stand against competitors, what pages you should focus on and optimize, and keyword opportunities. If you have any questions about keyword gap analysis, please email me at jbreuler@wtwhmedia.com