
Business owners often fail to target opportunities because they do not appear on their radar. In their defense, how can they know something they cannot see? Unfortunately, relying on logic alone would not help them achieve the desired results in this case.
Thankfully, they have SEO tools at your disposal to identify the opportunities and gaps they might have missed out on. It allows them to optimize their business visibility through search engines to chase the target audience. They can strengthen their business foundations to create better SEO strategies.
Companies that are struggling to achieve their SEO goals often reach out to professional companies like Teckle Digital to understand what they’re missing. SEO gap analysis is usually their first step to understanding why the current strategy is underperforming. According to professionals, these are three crucial aspects of using SEO Data analysis to identify and fill your business gaps.
Identify Keyword Gaps
There have been several fluctuations in the importance and uses of keywords for a long time. But despite all these changes, there is no doubt that your website needs to rank for the right keywords to appear on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Have you noticed that your website does not appear on search engines for some of your preferred keywords? Instead, you can see your competitors on the SERPs, which can be frustrating. You can make your website outrank your competitors by performing a keyword gap analysis using tools like Google Search Console.
There are several other paid tools that you can use to identify keyword gaps as well. You may find some of these tools to be more user-friendly than Google Search Console. But if you do not have access to paid tools, here’s how you can use Google Search Console. Before you can use GSC, you will have to link it with your Google Analytics account.
Once you have done that, you will have to navigate to Acquisition > Search Console > Queries. It will give you the list of keywords and search terms that your visitors have used on search engines. You will also get additional data related to those keywords and search terms, such as impressions and click-through rate (CTR).
Comparing the site visits to the number of impressions for each keyword can give you ideas of how you can improve your keyword gaps. The process is relatively easier on paid tools.
You just need to put on your website URL along with some of your competitors. The tool automatically compares your keywords against those used by your competitors. You can also see a keyword overlap diagram along with the topmost opportunities for better rankings.
Identify Content Gaps
You must be aware that content should not focus on keywords alone for the best as your results. Keywords are useful to identify subjects for search engines. However, you should try to focus on relating your content to the actual topic. It should be able to address the questions and pain points of your target audience.
Your competitors might be doing a better job than you if you notice them appearing higher on search engines. In that case, you can use SEO data to identify content gaps. It starts with the previous step of identifying the competitor keywords. You may need to write your content for topics, but users will still use keywords to find your content.
You can use the same tool you are using for keyword gap analysis to find the keywords that your website is ranking for and position 11 onwards. If you see your competitor appearing on the first result page for these keywords, you need to take a closer look at your content.
You need to think from both SEO and user experience perspectives. See if you have provided detailed and updated information on the content that addresses problems faced by your target buyers. For example, are your blog posts talking about veterinary appointments without covering why pet owners may need to see veterinary doctors?
Manually analyzing your content and comparing it to your competitors can be a lengthy process. Instead, you can use keyword analysis to identify content gaps faster. You can also use the information to create new ideas for your content marketing strategies. You can use several research tools to find the current trending topics related to your target keywords.
Identify Gaps in Link Building
Backlinks are known to be the second most important factor that can affect your SEO and rankings. If you notice that your keywords and content strategies are exactly the same as your competitors, and yet your website ranks lower, backlink gaps can be the root cause. Search engines use backlinks to decide which source they can trust more when the other ranking factors are the same.
Your content can earn the trust of your target audience when they find your website using your target keywords. Similarly, backlinks act as a vote of confidence that allows search engine bots to trust your content. But there is a possibility that your competitors are doing it better than you.
That’s because not all backlinks offer the same value for SEO ranking. So if you see your website content lagging behind your competitors, you need to identify the link-building gaps. You will probably need paid tools to identify backlink gaps.
That way, you can identify the total number of backlinks used by you and your competitors. You should also take a closer look at the domain authorities of the backlinks used by your competitors to see if they are higher than yours. That way, you can identify those backlinks and contact the sources to see if you can link them to your content.
All three factors that we discussed above play crucial roles in the overall SEO presentation. So if you have noticed that your current strategies are not yielding the desired results, you need to analyze SEO data to identify the gaps. That way, you can strengthen the foundations of your SEO strategies and achieve better results. These three aspects can get you started.