Content gap analysis for SEO, as a keyword gap checklist

Content gap analysis for SEO is easier to get right if you treat it like a pipeline with defined inputs, filters and outputs, rather than a brainstorm. The input is a keyword gap: the searches a rival ranks for in Google and your site does not. The output is a handful of page briefs. This checklist covers every stage in between, written for people who would rather follow steps than read theory.

Stage 0: inputs

• Your domain. The whole site, not a single page.
• One rival domain. Choose by search overlap, not by who sales talks about. A company you compete with on deals can rank for a completely different set of searches. If you need data to pick, seogeoaeo.ai's Competitor Finder returns the 30 domains sharing the most Google keywords with yours and marks which are close rivals (38 credits).
• One market. The country your customers search from. Mixing countries makes the list meaningless.

Stage 1: pull the gap

The fast way is the Keyword Gap tool on seogeoaeo.ai. Inputs map one to one: url, competitor, market (20 codes, from us and gb to jp and ae). It fetches the 300 most searched terms the rival ranks for and you do not, and drops anything where the rival is below position 20.

Each row includes:

Cost: 85 credits, shown before the run. Plans start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits. You can run it from the browser or call it over REST or MCP from a script.

Stage 2: filter

• Remove brand searches. Anything with the rival's name. The report's blog topics list already leaves these out.
• Remove off-intent terms. Search a sample yourself. If the results page shows things you do not offer, drop the term no matter how large its volume.
• Apply a difficulty ceiling. Newer sites should start low. The report marks easy terms and builds its blog topics list from informational searches with difficulty 50 or less.
• Check for existing coverage. Search your own site for each remaining topic. A match means the term is weak, not missing. Move it to a separate list for rewrites, because a second page on the same topic competes with the first.

Stage 3: group

• Group by rival URL. If 15 gap terms land on one rival page, that is one brief. The report lists the rival pages winning the most gap terms, so this is mostly done for you.
• Pick a main term per group, the one with the most searches that passed every filter.
• Attach 3 to 10 related terms from the same group.

Stage 4: write the brief

For each group, a brief needs five fields:

1. Main term and related terms.
2. The format the results page favors: guide, calculator, template, comparison.
3. A summary of the rival page, written by someone who read it.
4. What your page will add: a worked example, real numbers, a missing step.
5. Which of your existing pages will link to it.

Field 4 decides whether the page has any reason to rank above theirs. If you cannot fill it, skip the brief.

Stage 5: handle the weak list separately

The Keyword Gap tool does not output keywords where both sites rank and you trail, and it cannot see your Search Console. Pull that list from the Search Console Performance report instead: your measured queries, clicks, impressions and average position. Fix those pages before writing new ones on neighboring topics.

Known limits

• One rival per run. To compare up to five domains in one report, Semrush's Keyword Gap does that inside a subscription, with paid plans from $139 a month.
• Volumes and difficulty are estimates.
• A run where the data provider has no record of the two sites is refunded; a run that compares them and finds no gap is still charged.

For most small teams, one run per main rival per quarter is enough. See what credits cost before you plan the schedule.