What Is a Content Gap Analysis?
A content gap analysis is the practice of finding relevant topics you haven’t covered or could cover better to improve your visibility in traditional search results and AI platforms.
Performing a content gap analysis usually involves identifying:
- Terms your competitors rank for in traditional search that you don’t
- Large language model (LLM) prompts your brand doesn’t show for
- Topics you need to cover to address all stages of the customer’s journey
Performing a content gap analysis can also mean evaluating content you’ve already published to find opportunities to improve it.
For example, you could update an existing piece to address additional customer pain points or include expert insights to provide a unique and valuable point of view.
Why Perform a Content Gap Analysis?
Performing a content gap analysis helps you find ways to improve your content’s performance in traditional search and generative AI.
More specifically, doing a content gap analysis allows you to:
- Boost visibility: Discovering new topics and improving your existing content provides you with more opportunities to appear in search results and answers in AI tools
- Acquire competitors' traffic: Covering topics better than your competitors can divert their traffic to your site
- Become more efficient: Performing a content gap analysis can be a faster way of generating ideas compared to doing keyword and prompt research from scratch
- Improve business results: Creating high-quality content on topics your audience cares about can lead to more conversions
How to Do an SEO & GEO Content Gap Analysis
Learn how to do a content gap analysis that can lead to better SEO and generative engine optimization (GEO) results by following these workflows:
1. Find Competitors’ Keywords
Performing a keyword gap analysis to find terms competitors rank for that you don’t helps you fill content gaps at the site level—meaning you can find topics you haven’t covered at all.
Use Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool to find these keywords quickly.
Add your domain and the domains of up to four competitors, then click “Compare” to run the analysis.
In some cases, the tool might return tens of thousands of potential keyword opportunities.
Applying different filters is a good way to narrow down the list.
Let’s say you want to focus only on your competitors’ top keywords that are easy to rank for. Because your domain is new and has little authority.
Select the “Position” filter, hover over “Competitors,” and click “Top 20.”
Then, go to the “KD” (keyword difficulty) filter and select “Very easy” (this will show only terms that are very easy to rank for in the top 10 results).
After applying the filters, scroll down to the keyword list and select “Missing” to see the keywords all your competitors rank for that you don’t.
Click “Untapped” to display keywords that at least one competitor ranks for but you don’t.
Then, select the keywords that best align with your brand, product or service, and audience.
2. Find LLM Prompts You Lack Visibility for
Finding LLM prompts (the questions users ask LLMs) where you don’t show prominently or at all in the response uncovers content gaps for AI search.
Semrush’s AI SEO Toolkit lets you see prompts relevant to your brand and whether you’re mentioned or cited in the LLM responses.
Just go to the Visibility Overview dashboard. You’ll first see a high-level look at your AI visibility:
Scroll down to “Prompts” to see which responses include a mention of your brand (the “Your Brand Mentions” tab should be selected).
Click the “Opportunities” tab to see prompt responses that mention your competitors but not you.
Click on any response in the “LLM Response” column to view it and see how brands are mentioned in the actual response. And look for links to those competitors’ content (indicated as “Sources”).
Review any linked content to get a sense of why LLMs are citing it. And use it as inspiration to improve your existing content or create new content.
You can also track your appearance in responses to specific, high-value prompts. Ajdin Perco, Director of Content, Automation/AI, and Ops at Organic Growth Marketing, suggests focusing on prompts that are highly relevant to your product or service.
“For instance, perhaps a particular feature provides your company with a competitive advantage. You’d want to track how your brand is showing up in prompts related to this feature.”
Here’s the approach Ajdin uses for keeping track of all those important prompts:
“We build an LLM matrix that contains prompts prioritized by features and solutions highly important to our clients. And we then analyze LLM visibility gaps for these prompts.”
Semrush’s Position Tracking tool makes it easy to monitor how visible you are for specific prompts.
During setup, select the LLM you want to monitor. And click “Continue To Prompts.”
Add the prompts you want to track and click “Start Tracking” when you’re done.
Go to the “Overview” tab to see whether you appear in responses for your prompts, the specific positions you appear in, and how your positions have changed over time.
3. Research What Your Audience Wants
Researching common desires and pain points helps you identify content gaps that are highly relevant to your audience.
Here are a couple of ideas for how to discover what your audience cares about:
- Use social listening to understand your audience’s interests and pain points
- Conduct an online survey on a specific topic—such as favorite product features—and share a link to it on your website
- Use traffic analytics tools to understand the webpages that are popular among specific audience segments
Once you’ve uncovered some general concepts, use Semrush’s Topic Research tool to get specific content ideas.
Open the tool, enter your topic, and click “Get content ideas.”
You’ll see numerous ideas you can use to build content around.
Click “Show more” on any subtopic card to see headlines and related questions.
This will give you a good idea of how others have covered the subtopic. And allow you to consider what may be missing from their content.
4. Find Your Underperforming Content
Finding low-performing content can help you spot existing pages with gaps you can fill.
For example, you can use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to find pages that used to get a lot of visits from SEO and GEO but no longer do.
To start, log in to GA4 and go to the “Landing page” report.
Let’s first look at pages that have seen a decrease in traffic from traditional search engines.
Click the “Add filter +” button.
Select “Session medium” under the “Dimension” drop-down, choose “exactly matches” under “Match Type,” and check the box next to “organic” under “Value.” Click “Apply.”
Next, select a time range to compare—we recommend selecting at least three months of data (“Last 90 days”) to rule out temporary dips in performance. Select the toggle next to “Compare” and click “Apply.”
You can now see how organic traffic to your pages has changed over time. Look for pages with the most significant declines in the “Sessions” column.
Now, let’s look at pages that have seen decreasing traffic from AI platforms. Remove the current filter and once again click the “Add filter +” button.
This time, set the fields to the following before clicking “Apply”:
- Select “Session source” under “Dimension”
- Select “Matches regex” under “Match Type”
- Enter “(chat\.openai\.com|openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|claude\.ai|bard\.google\.com|poe\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|brave\.com)” under “Value”
Use the same time range for comparison as you did when assessing pages with decreases in organic traffic. And look for pages that have the most significant declines in the “Sessions” column once more—this time you’ll see declining traffic from AI platforms.
5. Analyze Search and AI Tool Results
Analyzing the search engine results pages (SERPs) and AI responses for all the keywords and prompts you want to target helps you fill content gaps both on your website and on individual pages.
In other words, you should analyze search and AI results for topics your website hasn’t covered at all. As well as topics you’ve covered but not well enough to drive positive results.
Let’s say you want to create a blog post about dental hygienist salaries to fill a content gap on your website.
So, you search for that keyword using Google to see what's currently ranking:
Next, study the content to understand the search intent (the reason users search a given query). Pay close attention to the webpages that are referenced in the AI Overview (if there is one) and how their content is structured.
Next, analyze the response you get for a similar prompt entered into an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude. (You might want to use something more specific and conversational like “What is the current range for dental hygienist salaries in the U.S.?”)
Study the response itself to see what details are covered. And evaluate any linked sources to get a better sense of how those pages are structured.
These analyses will give you a sense of what users, search engines, and AI are likely to find most relevant. And help you identify gaps in what’s currently ranking as well as gaps in your own content.
Some common gaps you might see include:
- Recency: Content that's no longer accurate or relevant is a significant gap. If the publish date is more than two years old, it’s likely to be outdated. LLMs also tend to favor more recent content.
- Readability: Content should be engaging and easy to read. Clear, well-structured, and easily digestible content is better for users, search engines, and LLMs. Add schema to help bots further understand your content.
- Expertise: Expertise is a part of Google’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) framework for content quality. Audiences value when experts create or inform content. So, consider how you can incorporate expert perspective in your content.
- Experience: Google’s E-E-A-T framework also mentions the importance of incorporating first-hand experience. For example, if you have a review site, you should actually try the products you're reviewing. Incorporating specific experiences may help with LLM visibility as well.
- Thoroughness: Content that isn’t thorough misses essential subtopics or doesn’t provide enough information about them. Filling these gaps can set your content apart as a helpful resource.
For example, many of the top results shown for the dental hygienist query/prompt above cite their own salary data. Which suggests it would be better to conduct your own salary survey than to merely cite existing research.
Fill Content Gaps and Track the Results
The goal of every content gap analysis is to improve your site’s performance. Today, that includes organic search rankings and LLM visibility.
Use Semrush’s Position Tracking tool to monitor rankings for target keywords and prompts related to every page you create and improve.
You’ll see any significant visibility drops on your dashboard, so you can investigate the issues immediately.
For even more insights, add your competitors to the report and monitor their rankings alongside yours.