Three Easy Ways To Find Content Gaps

In this digital age if you’re not optimising your content regularly, you’re not doing digital marketing right. But one thing we *think* many people aren’t doing is creating new, long-life content on your website and taking a step away from the quick and easy content often found on company blogs.

Don’t worry, we’re not saying you should change your whole content strategy, ignore your blog and forgo your brand commentary and reactive insight. BUT what we are saying is, don’t underestimate the addition of new, thorough ‘static’ content on your site and the impact this can have on your digital and organic visibility.

And because we believe it’s super important to any digital marketer’s strategy, here are three easy ways to find your content gaps and boost your rankings and sales with super relevant (and free) content.

What are people asking about your industry?

You might think you know your customer, and we don’t doubt that, but what kind of questions are being asked in your space above and beyond your FAQs? There are some really simple ways to check you’ve covered everything, they are:

Yahoo Answers

Remember when this was a bigger thing than it is now? Well we still think it’s ‘kinda’ relevant. For one thing, if you type in your keyword a drop-down menu of questions appears. It’s likely some of your content already answers these questions, but maybe there’s one in there you haven’t covered?

Google related questions

All hail Google and its desperate need to answer your question. Its neediness is our benefit.

Take the keyword “accident claims” as an example. When I frame this as a question in Google search “what is an accident claim” I immediately get four questions “people also ask”. Thanks Google. BRB let me check if I’m answering them already with my site’s content.

Social

Never negate the importance of your interactions with your customers on social. As content creators it can be easy to forget that social provides a truly golden opportunity to listen and learn what’s important to your customers. 90% of the time you’ll have the content they need, but 10% of the time you won’t and it’s important to listen, truly read what they’re saying and think about how you can answer their question in your content.

What are your competitors doing?

Okay, okay, this one might not be ground-breaking but it’s important nevertheless. One of the easiest and time efficient ways to identify content gaps is to have a little look at your competitor’s movements and what they deem as important.

It’s important here that you don’t duplicate content or steal ideas, but that you use their expertise and knowledge to inspire how you demonstrate your expertise and knowledge.

Also bear in mind that, on your most competitive terms, you’re likely to have similar content – so there’s plenty of room to be industry leaders and break the mould here.

What are your tools saying?  

If you’re an in-house SEO this might be a tough one, as you’re unlikely to have access to the tools that digital marketing agencies do; but if you do, there’s a couple of tools that can help you make the process of finding content gaps much easier.

Searchmetrics

Searchmetrics is a great tool for finding content gaps. Not only does it have its own tool dedicated to content (Content Experience), its normal suite allows you to research loads of different things using your own website and chosen keywords.

If you have access to Searchmetrics, I recommend haunting the ‘Research’ tab, specifically SEO Research and Keyword Research, both of which are pretty explanatory once you’re on them.

Of course, this way of working is more search engine focused than user focused, but you might find some interesting starting points to base sections and topics of content on.

Moz

Moz is another great tool for looking at content gaps. In particular their ‘Keyword explorer’ tool allows you to type in a related keyword and see up to 1000 suggestions of related terms. You do need to take a large proportion of these with a keen eye, as some just won’t be relevant, but some of the suggestions it throws out will be and will inspire content creation.

The great thing about Moz too is that it gives you insight into how difficult it might be to rank for that keyword, what their anticipated search volume is and competitors for that search term.

Finally, Moz also analyses the search engine result page, so you can see exactly what opportunities there are to appear in answer boxes, how big the PPC listings are going to be on the results page and whether there are any related questions you can target too.

If you’re struggling to develop a content strategy, or feel like your existing content could be improved, get in touch and chat to us today about how we can help.