How to Do a Content Gap Analysis

The single biggest source of bad content gap analyses is using the wrong competitor set. The right competitors are sites that compete with you on the same buyer journey for the same audience — not sites in your industry that target a different segment, not aspirational competitors much bigger than you, and not the obvious household names that have indistinguishable depth advantages.

Practical rule: pick 3–5 sites where, if you ranked above them on commercial queries, you would credibly capture the same buyers. For most B2B agencies that means peer-tier competitors with similar market positioning, not the giant sites that dominate the head terms.

In Ahrefs: Site Explorer > your competitor's domain > Organic Keywords > export the full list (or top 5,000 by volume). Repeat for each competitor. Then use Ahrefs's Content Gap tool with all competitors selected and your domain in the 'But the following target doesn't rank for' field.

In Semrush: Domain Overview > Keyword Gap > add competitors and your domain > set to 'Missing' (where competitors rank but you don't).

The output is the raw gap set — every keyword at least one competitor ranks for that you don't.

The raw gap set is too noisy to act on. Filter aggressively.

• Intent: keep commercial-intent and high-intent informational queries; cut pure top-of-funnel curiosity queries unless they fit your strategy.
• Volume: cut zero-volume keywords (often dataset noise) and queries with fewer than 10 monthly searches unless they're high-intent long-tail.
• Difficulty: cut queries where the SERP is dominated by sites with 10x your domain authority and you have no compensating advantage.
• Topical fit: cut queries that don't map to topics your business credibly covers — ranking for irrelevant topics doesn't help your buyers find you.
• Cluster: group remaining keywords into topic clusters (often the gap analysis surfaces 5–15 clear clusters from a few hundred queries).

Each cluster maps to a content shape: a pillar page (the umbrella topic, 1,500–3,500 words), supporting how-to and what-is pages (each targeting a sub-cluster of related queries), an FAQ surface (covering long-tail questions), and where applicable a tool or template (highest-converting shape for commercial queries).

Look at the SERPs for the queries you're targeting. If the top results are all guides, write a guide. If they're all calculators or tools, ranking with a guide will struggle. Match the format Google has already chosen for that query type.

Score each cluster on three dimensions: business value (how relevant to revenue), ranking difficulty (how hard to compete on), and topical authority fit (how well it builds on your existing content). Ship the high-value, achievable clusters first; defer high-value-but-hard clusters until you have more topical authority in the area.

Build a 6-month content roadmap from the prioritized cluster list. Re-run the gap analysis quarterly — competitors publish new content and your gap set evolves.