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You pour time into creating content, but what if it isn't answering your users' real questions? That disconnect is a content gap, and it often leads to frustrated users and more support tickets. Instead of guessing what your audience needs, a content gap analysis provides a clear roadmap. It’s a straightforward method for finding exactly what information is missing from your user's journey. By using a few simple techniques, you can fill these holes, give users the answers they're looking for, and see your website traffic improve as a result.
Content gap analysis is a powerful tool that can help you identify areas where your content is lacking and create new content that better meets the needs and interests of your audience. Not only does it enhance the user experience, but it also helps increase engagement and maximize company resources.
In this article, we’re taking a look at content gap analysis and why it’s so important for organizations that want to create successful content strategies. We’re covering everything from what it is and why it matters, to the specific steps you can take to perform a content gap analysis. Let’s dive in and explore the why and how of content gap analysis!
Quick Takeaways
- Content gaps are areas where your existing content isn’t adequately addressing topics or questions your users are interested in
- Content gap analysis helps identify content gaps and create new content that better meets the needs and interests of your audience
- Addressing content gaps helps improve the overall quality and relevance of your content, ultimately leading to better engagement and more satisfied customers
- The 6 steps include: defining goals and objectives, understanding your users, analyzing existing content, identifying content gaps, creating new content, and measuring results
Performing gap analysis helps companies create compelling, helpful content that meets the needs and interests of their users.
What Is a Content Gap?
When we talk about content gaps, we are referring to areas where your content may be lacking. Content gaps are topics or questions your users may be interested in but your existing content fails to cover or adequately address.
What Is Content Gap Analysis?
Content gap analysis is the process companies use to identify areas where their content is lacking. Simply put, it is how you evaluate your existing content to figure out which topics or questions your users need you to cover.
By using a content operations platform, you can analyze your existing content and identify areas where there may be gaps or opportunities for improvement.
Content Gap Analysis vs. Keyword Gap Analysis
While building out your content strategy, it's easy to confuse content gap analysis with keyword gap analysis. Though they both aim to find what's missing, they approach the problem from different angles. Content gap analysis is a user-focused process that looks at the big picture. It helps you find entire topics or user questions your content doesn't answer, ensuring your documentation covers the complete user journey. Think of it as making sure you have all the necessary chapters in your user manual. This approach directly improves the overall user experience by making your content more comprehensive and helpful.
Keyword gap analysis, in contrast, is a more tactical, SEO-driven activity. It focuses specifically on the search terms your competitors rank for that you don't. This helps you find opportunities to capture more search traffic by targeting phrases your audience is actively using. The two processes work best together. For example, a content gap analysis might reveal you're missing a guide for a specific product feature. A subsequent keyword gap analysis would then help you identify the exact terms and questions people are searching for related to that feature, ensuring the guide you create is easy for them to find.
Why Bother With a Content Gap Analysis?
Once you’ve completed the content gap analysis, you can work on creating new content that fills those gaps and provides your audience with the information and insights they are looking for.
This helps improve the overall quality and relevance of your content, ultimately leading to better engagement and more satisfied users. Other benefits of content gap analysis include:
- Staying ahead of the competition. By identifying gaps in your content, you can create new content that sets you apart from the competition and positions you as a leader in your industry.
- Saving time and resources. Content gap analysis can help you prioritize your content creation efforts and focus on the topics and questions most important to your audience. This can help you to save time and resources by avoiding content creation that may not be relevant or useful to your audience.
- Measuring content performance. Measuring the effectiveness of your content is essential to meeting the needs of your users. Content gap analysis can help your organization make data-driven decisions about how to achieve better results with your content.
Content gap analysis is an important step in creating effective, helpful content that meets the needs and interests of your users.
Build Topical Authority
Think of topical authority as becoming the go-to expert on a subject. When users know they can find comprehensive, reliable answers on your site, they stop looking elsewhere. A content gap analysis is your roadmap to building this kind of trust. It helps you find the missing or weak content that your audience needs at different stages of their journey, showing you exactly what new content to create or which existing articles to improve. By systematically filling these gaps, you’re not just adding pages to your site; you’re building a complete, interconnected library of knowledge that covers a topic from every angle. This thoroughness signals to both users and search engines that you are a definitive source of information, making your content the trusted standard and improving the overall user experience.
Align With Search Engine Priorities
Search engines have one primary goal: to provide users with the most helpful and complete answers to their questions. When you perform a content gap analysis and fill those gaps, you are directly aligning your content strategy with this priority. As noted by one industry source, "Search engines like websites that offer full and helpful content." By identifying what's missing, you can discover new keywords to target and create content that ranks higher, bringing more visitors to your site. This process makes your help documentation and other technical content more discoverable, ensuring users can find the official answers they need right when they search for them. It’s a straightforward exchange: you provide comprehensive value to the user, and search engines reward you with better visibility.
How to Run a Content Gap Analysis in 6 Steps
Step 1: Start With Your Goals
The first step is to define your goals and objectives. This will help you identify the topics and questions that are most important to your audience.
Consider the following questions:
- What am I trying to achieve?
- How will I know when I have achieved my goal?
- Are my goals realistic?
Answering questions like these will be a great starting point and help you develop realistic goals and objectives. Make sure your objectives are specific and measurable so you can track your progress and ultimately achieve your goals.
Step 2: Determine the Scope of Your Analysis
Once your goals are clear, the next move is to define the scope of your analysis. This means deciding exactly which content you'll evaluate. Are you looking at your entire knowledge base, or just the documentation for a single product? Will you analyze a specific part of the user journey, like onboarding materials, or compare your content against a top competitor? Setting a clear scope keeps the project manageable and ensures your team focuses its efforts where they matter most. This helps you prioritize your content creation and concentrate on the topics most important to your audience. For organizations with extensive documentation, this step is critical to avoid getting overwhelmed. A centralized platform, like a Component Content Management System (CCMS), simplifies this process by making it easy to isolate the specific assets you need to review.
Step 2: Map Your Customer Journey
Next, you’ll need to understand your users’ interests, needs, and pain points. This will help you create content that resonates with your audience and provides them with helpful information and insights.
Use personas to guide your understanding of your audience, and research their behavior on social media and search engines to find out more about their interests.
Identify Gaps for Each Stage
With a map of the user journey in hand, you can begin to overlay your existing content onto each stage. This process helps you see your documentation from the user’s perspective, revealing where they might get stuck or have unanswered questions. For example, a new user in the onboarding phase might be looking for a simple quick-start guide, but if all you offer is dense, technical reference material, you have a significant gap. By analyzing each stage separately and comparing what users need with what you currently provide, you can build a clear list of missing topics. Filling these gaps is essential for creating effective self-service help content that supports users proactively, ensuring you build a comprehensive resource library that guides users smoothly from beginner to expert.
Step 3: Audit Your Existing Content
Once you clearly understand your goals and users, you can start analyzing your existing content by:
- Gathering data on your existing content and its performance
- Analyzing your audience’s behavior on your website and other digital channels
- Comparing your content to your competitors’ content
This will help you identify gaps in your content and areas where your content may need to be performing better.
Analyze Your Website's Performance Data
To understand what's working and what isn't, you need to look at the data. Measuring your content's performance is the only way to know if you're truly meeting user needs. Look at metrics like page views, time on page, bounce rates, and internal search queries. This information shows you which topics are popular and where users might be getting stuck or leaving your site. This process helps your team make data-driven decisions about what content to create or improve. Instead of guessing what users want, you can use concrete evidence to guide your strategy and allocate resources more effectively.
Look for Outdated or Low-Quality Content
Your content library is a living thing; some pieces will inevitably become outdated or less relevant over time. A key part of your audit is to identify pages that used to perform well but have seen a drop in traffic. This could be due to product updates, changes in procedures, or simply new information becoming available. This content can confuse users and damage your credibility if it's no longer accurate. Regularly reviewing and updating this content is a core part of good content governance. By finding and refreshing these low-quality or outdated pieces, you not only improve the user experience but also reinforce your position as a reliable source of information in your industry.
Step 4: Pinpoint the Gaps
Based on your analysis of existing content, you can identify the content gaps and areas that need improvement. This may include topics or questions your audience is searching for but not finding answers to in your existing content.
Identifying your content gaps will help you find new content opportunities based on your audience’s interests and pain points. Then, you can prioritize the gaps based on their relevance to your business goals and audience’s needs.
Use SEO Tools for Competitor Analysis
SEO tools are your best friend for finding content gaps at scale. A content gap analysis feature, common in most major SEO platforms, allows you to compare your website against your competitors. The tool shows you the keywords and topics your competitors are ranking for in search results that you aren’t. This process helps you find topics you haven't written about yet, or topics you could write about better. By identifying these specific keyword gaps, you can build a data-driven list of content ideas that are already proven to attract your target audience. This approach takes the guesswork out of your content strategy and focuses your efforts on topics with established search demand.
Analyze Top-Ranking Content
After using tools to identify high-level gaps, it’s time to dig deeper with manual analysis. As the experts at Backlinko suggest, you should search for your target topic and carefully check the top-ranking articles to see what they are missing or what could be done better. Look for unanswered questions in the comments, outdated statistics, or a lack of practical examples. This is your opportunity to create something more comprehensive, accurate, or actionable. For technical documentation teams, this step is crucial for ensuring your content is not just present, but is the most thorough and helpful resource available, directly addressing user pain points that competitors may have overlooked.
Check for Gaps in AI Search Results
The way people find information is changing, and AI-powered search is a huge part of that shift. A critical new content gap to check for is your absence in AI-generated answers. You can discover questions people ask AI tools where your brand isn't showing up in the citations or responses. Ask generative AI tools questions that your customers would ask and see what information they pull. If your content isn't being used as a source, you have a major gap to fill. This often means ensuring your content is well-structured and semantically rich, making it easy for AI to parse and trust, which is a core benefit of using a Component Content Management System (CCMS).
Consider Different Content Formats
Sometimes the gap isn’t about the topic, but the format. Your audience may be looking for a video tutorial, a detailed case study, or an interactive diagram, but all you offer is a wall of text. If your competitors are serving users with varied content types and you aren't, that's a significant gap. You should aim to create various formats like blog posts, case studies, or landing pages to meet different user preferences. The most efficient way to do this is by creating structured, modular content that can be easily repurposed. A system that supports multichannel publishing allows you to author content once and deliver it across any format, from a PDF to a knowledge base article, filling format gaps without duplicating effort.
Step 5: Create Content to Fill the Gaps
Using the insights you’ve gained from your analysis, you can create new content by using a CCMS, or component content management system, that fills the gaps in your existing content. This can be any form of content that provides your users with the information and insights they’re looking for.
Before you share your new content, be sure to:
- Plan and organize your new content creation process
- Collaborate with your team and stakeholders on content ideas and creation
- Optimize your new content to benefit users
This way, you can ensure that your new content meets the needs of both your audience and organization.
Use a Scalable Content Creation Process
Simply creating new content isn't enough; the process itself needs to be scalable, especially for technical documentation. Manually writing and updating content for every gap you find is inefficient and quickly leads to inconsistencies. This is where a structured approach using a Component Content Management System (CCMS) becomes essential. A CCMS allows you to create structured content as modular, reusable components. Instead of writing a whole new document from scratch, you can assemble existing components and create new ones as needed. This method ensures consistency and makes it much easier to manage and update your information over time, improving the overall quality and relevance of your content and leading to more satisfied users.
Step 6: Track Your Performance
Finally, it’s time to measure the effectiveness of your new content. This will help you understand how your audience engages with your content and identify areas where you may need further improvements.
Analyze the performance of your new content by tracking engagement metrics. Then, optimize your content creation process based on your content gap analysis.
Establish a Regular Cadence
A content gap analysis isn't a one-time project you can check off your list. Think of it as a recurring part of your content strategy. Your users' needs evolve, search trends shift, and your competitors are constantly updating their own content. Establishing a regular schedule for analysis—whether it's quarterly or bi-annually—ensures your content remains fresh, valuable, and aligned with what your audience is actually looking for. This continuous cycle of review helps you make data-driven decisions about your content, allowing you to prioritize efforts on topics that matter most and maintain your position as a reliable industry leader.
Put Your Content Analysis to Work
Performing content gap analysis creates a more effective content strategy that meets the needs and interests of your audience while also helping you to achieve your business goals.
Heretto Deploy API is the best way to make sure that any audience can access your content anywhere. Make your company’s content more efficient and effective today by booking a demo, or learning more about Heretto Deploy!
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should we perform a content gap analysis? Think of it less as a one-time project and more as a recurring part of your content strategy. A good starting point is to conduct an analysis quarterly or twice a year. This rhythm helps you stay aligned with your users' evolving needs and any changes in your product. If you tie it to your product release schedule, you can proactively identify and fill gaps before your users even notice they're there.
What’s the real difference between a content gap and a keyword gap? A content gap analysis focuses on the user's complete journey and experience. It asks, "What information is a person missing to successfully use our product?" This could be an entire guide, a procedural step, or a conceptual explanation. A keyword gap analysis is more focused on search engine visibility. It identifies specific search terms your competitors rank for that you don't, which is a useful tactic but doesn't give you the full picture of your user's needs.
Our team has a huge amount of existing documentation. Where do we even start? It can feel overwhelming, so the key is to avoid trying to analyze everything at once. Start by defining a manageable scope. You could focus on the documentation for a single product, analyze the content related to your most frequent support tickets, or map out just the onboarding journey for new users. Picking a specific, high-impact area makes the process achievable and helps you show results more quickly.
Is a content gap always a missing article, or can it be something else? A gap isn't always a completely missing topic. Sometimes the gap is in the format or the quality of the content you already have. For instance, you might have a long, text-heavy article explaining a complex process when what your users really need is a short video tutorial or a simple checklist. An outdated article with inaccurate screenshots is also a major content gap because it fails to help the user.
How does this process change for technical documentation versus marketing content? While the basic steps are the same, the focus is different. For marketing content, you're often looking at broad industry topics and search trends to attract an audience. With technical documentation, the analysis is much more centered on specific user tasks and problems. You'll rely more heavily on support ticket data, internal search logs, and direct user feedback to find gaps that prevent people from completing a task successfully. The goal is less about traffic and more about clarity and user success.
