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What is a keyword gap analysis?

A keyword gap analysis helps you identify the gaps in search visibility and content between your website and your competitors. This allows you to refine your content strategy and expand your website’s content. When you perform a keyword gap analysis, you’ll discover:

Search terms for which your competitors rank, but your website does not yet.
The search terms for which your competitors rank higher than you.

These findings will help you optimize your content or set priorities for your content creation.

There are various terms used for a keyword gap analysis. In Semrush’s tools, the feature is called “Keyword Gap”; in Ahrefs, it’s called a “content gap”; and many SEO specialists refer to it as a competitor gap analysis. At SmartRanking, we also call it a competitor gap analysis, because the ultimate goal is to identify gaps and growth opportunities based on your competitors.

Why do you perform a keyword gap analysis?

A keyword gap analysis is an important complement to the well-known keyword research that is typically conducted as part of an SEO strategy. By also using keyword gap analyses, you can be sure that you won’t overlook any search terms or pieces of content for which your competitor ranks well.

In addition, a keyword gap analysis provides insights into how easily competitors can be found and what they’re focusing on within their SEO strategy. For various projects, we’ve identified new product categories, product segments, and services thanks to keyword gap analysis. This has enabled several clients to expand their product or service offerings, which not only has a positive impact on their organic performance but also boosts the return on investment from other marketing channels.

It’s important to remember that SEO is all about optimizing your website for your target audience and creating helpful content. If you see content on your competitor’s website that isn’t relevant to your target audience or for which you can’t offer a good solution, there’s no point in optimizing for it. It’s therefore crucial to always take a critical look at the results of a keyword gap analysis.

The Right Tool for a Gap Analysis

There are several tools that offer features for performing a keyword gap analysis. Some of these tools include Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Similarweb, and RankingGap. Over the past few years, we have tested countless tools to determine the best one for performing a keyword gap analysis.

Based on our findings, we’ve concluded that Semrush is by far the best and most user-friendly tool for keyword gap analysis—and therefore our favorite tool. No other tool offers the combination of different reports and filters that Semrush provides. These include features such as:

A visual overview of the overlap between your website's search terms and those of your competitors.
The ability to compare your website with 1 to 4 competitors.
Filtering for or excluding certain search terms.
Filtering by search volume and search intent.
Filtering by keyword rankings for your own and/or your competitors' sites.
Sorting all the data.

How do you perform a keyword gap analysis?

To conduct a thorough analysis using Semrush, follow the steps below. This will give you a clear understanding of the optimizations you need to implement and the pages that are missing from your website.

It may seem obvious to identify the websites you want to use to gain insight into the gap, but this is often taken too lightly. It’s important to identify the competitors that have the widest gap from you or those with the greatest overlap in their product or service offerings.

Semrush’s “Domain Overview” feature helps you with this, but sometimes other tools provide even better insights. To identify competitors, we mainly look at the Visibility Rating overview in SE Ranking.

Using the left-hand menu in Semrush, you can easily navigate to the “Keyword Gap” feature. Enter your website and a competitor here. Although Semrush offers the option to enter up to four competitors, we prefer to run the analysis one competitor at a time. This is because it gives you more control over the filtering options.

When you enter multiple competitors and filter by “Competitors in Top 10,” only the search terms for which each competitor ranks in the top 10 are displayed. That’s good to know, but we’re often more interested in search terms where at least one of the competitors ranks in the top 10. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be all of them.

Before you create exports, we recommend filtering the data in Semrush first. For example, exclude certain search terms, filter by specific search terms, filter by your competitors’ search term rankings, and/or filter by search intent. By filtering within Semrush first, you’ll end up with a more organized export.

Although you can gain a lot of insights from the Semrush interface and use it to supplement your planning or strategy, we prefer to export the data. To do this, we select the “Shared” overview and then export all the data.

We upload the exported data to a Google Sheets file and usually filter it using a set of filters or formulas. This gives us a clear overview of relevant search terms, which the SEO consultant then translates into specific action items.

Using the Results of the Keyword Gap Analysis

Whether you have a content plan, an overview of all optimizations, use the keyword gap to supplement your keyword research, or take a different approach altogether: you use the results to enhance your strategy.

Using the insights from the analysis, we supplement a project’s keyword research and immediately incorporate the action items into the content plan and our project management system. This way, we have a clear overview of all action items, and they are integrated into the strategy.

Next, you’ll start working on the action items in concrete terms, which includes optimizing existing content and creating new content. This approach provides an effective method for closing the gaps with your competitors and systematically improving your search engine visibility. We prefer to prioritize the action items based on an estimated impact versus effort, taking into account the impact on the project’s business objectives.

As part of our process, we typically supplement the tracking project with the search terms we’ve identified, so that we can effectively monitor the impact of our optimizations and content creation.

Tips for Conducting a Keyword Gap Analysis

At SmartRanking, we conduct several keyword gap analyses each month. Based on our experience, we have the following tips for you:

To gain even greater insight into your prioritization, it’s helpful to cross-reference the results with Google Ads data. Using Google Sheets and a VLOOKUP() formula, you can list your Google Ads revenue and clicks next to the search terms from the keyword gap analysis. Do you see any overlap? If so, start by focusing on those search terms and content pieces first.

In practice, we see that marketers blindly act on the results of the keyword gap analysis in an effort to do everything they can to increase topical authority. This often leads to the creation of content that is completely irrelevant to your website. So be critical of this approach, because content must provide added value for your target audience.

A keyword gap analysis usually reveals a large number of search terms for which you are not found, or are found less easily. Prioritizing these can be challenging, so it helps to focus on search terms or groups of search terms where the user has a transactional search intent. Once you’ve completed all the action items for those terms, you can then move on to the search terms where the user has a different intent.

When filtering data in Semrush, we recommend immediately filtering out branded search terms related to your own brand and your competitors. This will help you narrow down your dataset and find the truly relevant search terms more quickly. Keep in mind that visitors may also make typos when entering brand names. For example, people search for our SEO agency using queries like “smartranking,” “smart ranking,” “smartrank,” and “smart seo.”

Depending on the size of your market, you’ll likely find hundreds or thousands of search terms for which your competitor ranks but you don’t. In addition, SEO tools also show search terms for which your competitor ranks outside the top 10. In some cases, these are valuable insights, but more often than not, they’re search terms that aren’t relevant. That’s why we recommend—especially when dealing with thousands of search terms—focusing only on those where your competitor ranks in the top 10. In tools like Semrush, you can easily filter by this criterion. Another option is to filter by this criterion in Google Sheets.

By using the insights, steps, and practical tips above, you can conduct a valuable keyword gap analysis. Would you like to gain even more insights from a gap analysis or take your SEO strategy to the next level? Feel free to contact us with no obligation.

This article was written by Jarik Oosting

With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive to achieve results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With more than 15 years of experience in the field, Jarik has built up a wealth of knowledge, ranging from technical SEO to complex migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help companies achieve their online growth goals. He is also the author of the book *GEO – Being Visible in AI Answers*, which explores how companies can remain discoverable as AI search engines reshape the search landscape, and he is a frequent speaker.

His academic background in Information Science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in Natural Language Processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about search engine visibility, but about sharing knowledge and guiding companies toward sustainable online success.

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