What are you missing in your SEO keyword strategy?

Keywords underpin an effective SEO strategy for every business. However, they are often used inappropriately or approached in the wrong way. Finding the right keywords is just the first step to using them to get the most from an investment in digital marketing. It’s also essential to understand how to optimise a keyword strategy, including how to identify when your site is missing ranking opportunities. One of the simplest ways to highlight what is missing in your SEO keyword strategy is to look at keyword gaps.

Keyword gap analysis

There are a number of key reasons to carry out keyword gap analysis to support your SEO strategy:

• Ensuring that your content is as optimised as possible
• Identifying where your competitors are doing better
• Finding opportunities to better present your products that will more effectively meet what customers need when they come to your website
• Insight into selling points, product ideas and competitive advantage you might not otherwise have been able to identify

Closing the gaps

Keyword research often revolves around a core term for your business. However, your customers may have a different idea of what that should be and that’s where gap analysis can be essential. There are three ways to identify where you might be missing out.

1. Start with your own analysis. There is a lot you can do in terms of keyword gap analysis with the analytics that you already have. For example, identify the lowest performing pages on your website and look at why they might be performing poorly. Compare them to competitor pages that perform better – what could be improved in terms of the way they address customer need, cater to the target audience and answer specific questions? Making changes like this could fill in the gaps on your site where keywords aren’t currently enough.
2. Look at the keywords competitors are ranking for. You can easily access this type of analysis through a wide range of SEO platforms today. You’ll be able to see which keywords competitors are ranking for and you’re not, those that are organic and paid and drill down into specific sections of competitor sites, depending on the tool that you use.
3. Use semantic analysis. The process involved in semantic analysis usually involves taking a search query and effectively ‘reading around’ it. There are a number of different tools available to do this quickly and easily. Each one will take your search term and see what a search engine returns for it and then perform analysis to identify underlying concepts and entities. This is compared against your page content to see where you’re missing out related concepts. You’ll get suggestions for words, phrases and content to add to your site to ensure that it performs better in organic terms – the more you’re able to expand your content to do this in a readable and interesting way the more you’ll close the keyword gap.

Keyword gap analysis is a simple and effective way to identify what might be missing in your keyword SEO strategy.