Keyword Gap Analysis: Identifying your competitor’s keywords with opportunity (with SEMrush)

Keyword research can provide you with a lot of insights, no matter what tool you’re using they all can provide you a great deal of insight into your own performance but also that of others. But while I was doing some keyword research I thought about writing a bit more about one specific part: gap analysis. In itself an easy to understand the concept, but it can provide a skewed view of your competition (or not). To demonstrate this we’ll take a look at an actual example of some sites while using SEMrush’s data.

What does your competition look like?

You know who your competitors are right? At least your direct ones, but often people who work in SEO or the level above (Marketing/Growth) don’t always know who the actual players are. I worked in the food delivery industry, but more often than not I was facing more competition from totally random sites or some big ones than our competitors (for good reason). So it’s important to know what your overlap is in the search rankings (it’s one of the reasons you should actually be tracking rankings, but that’s a topic for another day) with other sites. This way you know what competitors are rising/declining in your space and what you can learn from their strategies to apply to your own site. But this is exactly where the caveat is, is that actually the case!?

So let’s look at an example, as you can see in this screenshot from SEMrush the playing field for Site A is quite large. They’re ‘ranking’ for tens of thousands of keywords and are placing in a decently sized industry. While they’re ahead of their competition it’s also clear that there are some ‘competitors’ in the space that are behind them in search visibility.

So let’s take the next competitor, we’ll call them ‘Competitor A’. What we see here is that they rank for 250.000 keywords. A significant number still, compared to what we’re ranking for. It doesn’t mean though that all their keywords are what we’re ranking for. So let’s dive into gap analysis.

Keyword Gap Analysis

In short, there are three ways to look at keyword analysis:

• What keywords am I ranking for, that my competitor is also ranking for (overlap)?
• What keywords am I ranking for, that my competitor is not ranking for (competitive advantage)?
• What keywords am I not ranking for, that my competitor is ranking for (opportunity)?

Today we’ll only talk about the last one, what keywords could I be ranking for, as my competitor is already ranking for them, to drive more growth. When using SEMrush you can do this by creating a report like this (within the Keyword Gap Analysis feature):

Screenshot of: Creating a keyword gap analysis report in SEMrush

You always have the three options available to select. In this case, we’ll do the Common Keywords Option. And the result that we should see looks something like this:

Screenshot of the result, with a list of keywords.

What are the keywords with actual opportunity?

So there is apparently xx.xxx keywords that I’m not ranking for (and likely should). That’s significant and almost leads me to believe that we’re not doing a good job. So what the problem often is, which is not a bad thing. Is that the majority of these keywords are being driven by the long tail (specific queries with very low volume). So what ends up happening is that I’m likely looking at tons of keywords that I don’t want to focus on (and hopefully will benefit from by just creating a little bit more generic good content). So when I did this for a competitor and filtered down on keywords that were for them at least ranking position <20 and had a volume >10 monthly I had only 2500 keywords left. That’s just a few % of the keywords that we got started with. It’s required to add that I’m not saying to ignore the other keywords, but now you have the keywords that you have a real opportunity to drive actual results. In the end, you should be able to rank well, as your competitor is already ranking (position: <20), there is actual volume (>10) and you’re not in there at all.

This is just something that I was playing with while exploring some industries, and it’s a topic that I haven’t seen a lot of content about over the last years. While the data is often available it will both help you get new content ideas but also helps you identify the actual value (keyword volume should turn into business results: impressions x CTR x Conversion Rate == $$$) on the revenue side.