How to Use a Content Gap Analysis to Find Your Next Best Content

Most companies publish content consistently and still wonder why their website doesn't generate leads. The problem usually isn't effort. It's direction. Your buyers are searching for answers at every stage of their journey, and if your content doesn't show up when they search, a competitor's content will. A content gap analysis is the answer.

A content gap analysis is the process of identifying topics, keywords, and buyer's journey stages that your competitors cover but your content does not. Done well, it tells you exactly what to write next and why it will work.

We'll walk through the six-step framework we use with our clients to find gaps, prioritize opportunities, and build a strategy that moves buyers through the funnel.

Step 1: How Do You Perform a Competitor Content Analysis?

A competitor content analysis means systematically reviewing what topics, formats, and keywords your content competitors are covering so you can understand what your audience is already finding and what you're missing. It's the logical starting point because your competitors have already done the research on what your buyers want to read, and their rankings tell you exactly what's working.

Who Are Your Content Competitors?

Your content competitors are not always your business competitors. A content competitor is any website that ranks for the keywords your buyers use. That might include industry publications, trade associations, software vendors, or agencies in adjacent markets. Start by identifying three to five websites that consistently appear in search results for your most important topics.

What to Look For

Once you've identified your content competitors, pull their top-performing content. You're looking for:

• Topic coverage: What subjects do they write about consistently? Are there topic clusters you haven't covered?
• Content formats: Are they publishing long-form guides, comparison pages, case studies, or video content?
• Publishing frequency: How often are they adding new content?
• Pillar pages vs. blog posts: Do they have comprehensive resource pages that anchor clusters of related content?

Tool: SEMrush Organic Research

In SEMrush, enter a competitor's domain into the Organic Research tool. You'll see their top-ranking pages by estimated traffic. Sort by traffic to find their highest-performing content. Export this list and note the topics, formats, and keywords driving the most visits. Do this for each of your three to five competitors and you'll quickly see patterns in what your audience values.

We've done this for clients in competitive B2B markets and consistently find that competitors are ranking for entire topic categories the client hasn't written about at all.

Step 2: How Do You Identify Content Needed for Each Buyer's Journey Stage?

Identifying content for each buyer's journey stage means mapping what your buyers need to read at the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages and then checking whether your content actually covers those needs at each one. Most company blogs are heavily weighted toward Awareness content and nearly empty at the Consideration and Decision stages, which is exactly where leads are lost.

The Three Stages and What Belongs at Each

Why This Step Comes Before the Audit

Before you audit your own content, you need a map of what should exist. Otherwise, you're just cataloging what you have without knowing what's missing. By mapping the buyer's journey first, you create a benchmark to measure your content against.

Take a look at your competitor content list from Step 1 and assign each piece to a buyer's journey stage. You'll likely find that the most successful competitors have a balanced mix across all three stages.

A spreadsheet works well here. Create columns for competitor name, content title, URL, topic, and buyer's journey stage. This becomes the foundation for your gap analysis.

Step 3: How Do You Conduct a Content Audit of Your Existing Blog?

A content audit is a structured review of every piece of content on your website, including what exists, how it performs, and whether it serves your buyers at the right stage of their journey. The goal is to understand what you have before you decide what to create.

Building Your Content Inventory

Start by crawling your website with Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs). Export a list of all your blog posts and pages, then build a spreadsheet with these columns:

• URL
• Page title
• Primary topic
• Buyer's journey stage
• Approximate word count
• Date last updated
• Organic traffic (from Google Search Console)
• Impressions and average position (from Google Search Console)

What You're Looking For

Once your inventory is built, you're looking for four things:

1. Thin content: Posts under 600-800 words that cover a topic superficially. These rarely rank and often hurt your overall domain authority.
2. Outdated content: Posts that reference old statistics, outdated tools, or strategies that no longer apply. These erode trust.
3. Keyword cannibalization: Multiple posts targeting the same keyword, which splits your ranking potential and confuses search engines.
4. Missing buyer's journey stages: Entire stages of the journey with little or no content coverage.

Step 4: How Do You Assess the Keywords Your Competitors Rank For?

Assessing competitor keywords means using SEO tools to identify which search queries your competitors rank for in positions one through twenty that your website doesn't rank for at all. This is sometimes called a keyword gap analysis, and it's one of the most efficient ways to find high-value content opportunities you can realistically pursue.

Keyword Gap Analysis vs. Content Gap Analysis

A keyword gap analysis is a subset of a full content gap analysis. A keyword gap analysis focuses specifically on search queries. A full content gap analysis also examines topic coverage, buyer's journey alignment, content quality, and content format. Both are valuable, but the keyword data gives you the clearest signal of where search demand exists that you're not capturing.

Running a Keyword Gap Analysis With SEMRush

In SEMrush's Keyword Gap tool, enter your domain alongside two to four competitor domains. The tool will show you keywords your competitors rank for that you don't. Filter for keywords where competitors rank in positions one through twenty and you rank outside the top fifty (or don't rank at all). These are your highest-priority gaps.

Running a Keyword Gap Analysis With Ahrefs Content Gap

Ahrefs' Content Gap tool works similarly. Enter your competitors' domains and your own, and Ahrefs will surface keywords that multiple competitors rank for but you don't. The more competitors ranking for a keyword, the stronger the signal that it's worth targeting.

Running a Keyword Gap Analysis With Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz Keyword Explorer is useful for validating keyword difficulty and search volume once you've identified gap opportunities. Use it to prioritize which keywords are realistically winnable given your domain authority.

When we run this analysis for clients, we consistently find dozens of keywords with meaningful search volume that competitors rank for on page one while the client doesn't appear until page five or six. This is where the opportunity lies, since the content simply doesn't exist yet.

Step 5: How Do You Find the Gaps in Your Current Content?

Finding your content gaps means synthesizing the data from Steps 1 through 4 into a prioritized list of topics your buyers are searching for, your competitors are covering, and your website doesn't address. A gap is not just a missing keyword, it's a missing answer to a question your buyer is actively asking, and closing it is how you turn search traffic into leads.

Cross-Referencing Your Data

At this point, you have four data sets:

1. Competitor content topics and formats (Step 1)
2. Buyer's journey stage mapping (Step 2)
3. Your existing content inventory with performance data (Step 3)
4. Keywords your competitors rank for that you don't (Step 4)

Now you look for overlap. A true content gap exists when a topic appears in your competitor content analysis, maps to a buyer's journey stage you're underserving, and corresponds to a keyword you don't rank for. Those are your highest-priority opportunities.

What Should a Content Gap Analysis Template Include?

A content gap analysis template is a structured spreadsheet that captures everything you've found across Steps 1 through 5 and turns it into an actionable content plan. If you're searching for a content gap analysis template, here's exactly what it should include:

This template gives your team a single source of truth for your content strategy. Every new piece of content you create should trace back to a gap identified in this document.

Step 6: How Do You Create Quality Content to Fill Your Gaps?

Creating quality content to fill your gaps means producing pieces that are comprehensive enough to rank, specific enough to serve your buyer's intent, and well-structured enough to be cited by AI answer engines. Volume alone won't move the needle. A thin post that technically covers a gap topic will not outrank a competitor's 3,000-word guide.

Start With a Content Brief

For each gap you've prioritized, build a content brief before writing begins. A good brief includes:

• Primary keyword and secondary keywords
• Buyer's journey stage and search intent
• Target word count (benchmark against the top three ranking pages for your target keyword)
• Required sections and H2 headings
• Internal and external links to include
• Specific questions the article must answer
• Call to action

A brief takes 20 to 30 minutes to write and saves hours of revision. It also ensures that every piece of content is built around a real gap, not just a topic someone found interesting.

Build an Editorial Calendar

Once you have a prioritized gap list and briefs for your top opportunities, map them to an editorial calendar. We recommend planning content in 90-day sprints. Assign each piece a target publish date, a writer, and a review date. HubSpot's content calendar tools make it easy to manage this alongside your broader marketing activities.

Download a blog planner template for beginners here.

Write for AI Overviews, Not Just Search Rankings

Search has changed. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity now answer questions directly in the search interface, pulling from content that is well-structured, authoritative, and directly responsive to the query. To compete in this environment, your content needs to:

• Answer the primary question in the first paragraph, don't bury the answer
• Use question-format headings that match how people actually search
• Include a FAQ section that addresses related questions concisely
• Be comprehensive by covering the topic thoroughly enough that a reader doesn't need to visit another page

The bar for content quality has risen significantly. A 600-word post that skims the surface of a topic will not rank, and it will not be cited by AI engines. The good news is that most of your competitors haven't cleared this bar either, which means there's real opportunity for well-crafted, comprehensive content.

Use SEMrush's SEO Writing Assistant

Once your draft is written, run it through SEMrush's SEO Writing Assistant. It scores your content for readability, keyword usage, originality, and tone of voice, and gives you specific recommendations for improvement. It's not a replacement for good writing, but it's a useful quality check before you publish.

Generate More Leads That Make It Through the Funnel

A content gap analysis is not a one-time project. It's a repeatable process that keeps your content strategy aligned with what your buyers are actually searching for. You start by understanding what your competitors cover, map that against your buyer's journey, audit what you already have, identify the keywords you're missing, find the gaps, and then fill them with content that's built to rank and built to convert.

The companies that generate consistent leads from their content aren't publishing more. They're publishing smarter. They know which gaps to fill, which buyer's journey stages to prioritize, and what quality looks like for each topic they target.

Whittington Consulting is a digital marketing agency that helps companies make their websites into sales engines. We specialize in HubSpot, SEO, content marketing, and website redesign to generate qualified leads and grow revenue. If you'd like help running a content gap analysis for your business, you can learn more about our content marketing services and request a conversation here.