How to Use a Keyword Gap Analysis to Beat Your Competitors

Finding the perfect keywords for your content strategy can be stressful and time-consuming, and it’s frustrating to watch your competitors outperform you in search results. How can you improve your own strategy and beat your competitors?

A keyword gap analysis helps you identify topics competitors have covered that you’re not ranking for yet.

With a keyword gap analysis, you can:

• Find high-impact opportunities: What high-volume, super-relevant keywords are you not ranking for that your competitors are?
• Improve your content strategy for AI search: Take special notice of keywords that your competitors are ranking in AI Overviews for. How can you improve upon what they’re doing to rank there yourself?
• Stay competitive in your niche: New keyword opportunities emerge constantly. What keywords have your competitors capitalized on that you haven’t yet?

You can strategically work to add new content (and make it even better than your competitors’) and gain visibility in the search results pages (SERPs).

In this article, I’ll guide you through each step of running a keyword gap analysis. Plus, I’ll give you tips for how to create strategic content to rank in SERP features like AI Overviews, so you have the best chance of driving more traffic to your site.

Here we go.

The Keyword Gap Analysis Process

A keyword gap analysis helps you find missed opportunities, prioritize content topics, and improve your SEO strategy by targeting untapped search queries that drive traffic to competing websites.

While the primary use case for keyword gap analyses is to find keywords and topics your competitors rank for that you don’t, you can also find:

• Keywords you both rank for - These show areas of direct competition where you might need to improve your content to outrank (or keep outranking) competitors.
• Keywords only you rank for - These highlight your unique positioning and content advantages in the market…for now, anyway. Keep an eye on these to make sure you maintain your visibility.

For example, take a look at this keyword gap analysis report in Semrush. There are 4 domains being compared, and you can see how they overlap in terms of keyword rankings in the Venn diagram report card:

An important part of any keyword gap analysis is the ability to apply different filters.

For example, Semrush has filters for:

• Keywords missing
• Keywords shared (with one, two, three, or four competitors)
• Keywords with weak rankings
• Keywords with strong rankings

Is Keyword Gap Analysis Still Necessary?

AI search is majorly changing how people discover content, and it can unfortunately drive down click-through rate.

Even when impressions go up, clicks go down. It's known as The Great Decoupling. 

For some website owners, that makes rank tracking feel less important.

If searchers aren’t clicking on their sites from search results anyway because searchers’ needs are being met by the AI overview, why does analyzing competitor keywords and trying to rank above them even matter?

According to Exploding Topics Research Journalist James Martin,

So, ranking highly (and above your competitors) is still incredibly valuable in the age of AI.

How to Do a Keyword Gap Analysis

Step 1: Identify Your Top Competitors

Not all competitors are equal when it comes to SEO. You need to identify both your direct business competitors and your SEO competitors–websites that rank for keywords you want to target.

Go ahead and start with your known business competitors, such as companies that offer similar products or services to your target audience.

Then, either use an SEO tool to run some organic competitor research or use an Incognito window to search some of your top, bread-and-butter keywords and see who else is ranking for them.

For example, entering ebay.com into the Semrush Organic Research tool and navigating to the “Competitors” tab shows who their top SEO competitors are:

Step 2: Run Your Keyword Gap Analysis

I’m using Semrush for this tutorial, but you can use your SEO tool of choice.

To get started, I’ll open the Keyword Gap tool. For the sake of this tutorial, I’ll be comparing three websites that publish marketing content.

If you haven’t chosen your competitors yet, note that Semrush suggests competitors for you once you enter your own domain:

Step 3: Analyze the Keyword Report

It’s time to analyze the results of your keyword gap analysis. You may have a big list of keywords that you could easily spend hours on, but I’ll give you some tips here to find your quickest wins.

Tip #1: Start With Top Opportunities

In Semrush, you’ll see a card at the top called “Top Opportunities.” This is an easy way to get started reviewing your keyword gaps.

Click the ”View details” button:

That’ll automatically change your table to the top keywords (by search volume) your competitors are ranking for that you’re missing:

If you haven’t already created content around these keywords and they’re super relevant for your business and website, consider doing so!

Tip #2: Filter for Commercial and Transactional Intent

If you want the biggest bang for your buck, start with commercial and transactional keywords. These keywords target searchers who are more toward the middle and bottom of the sales funnel, so ranking for them could help improve your revenue quickly!

In Semrush, just use the Intent dropdown to filter by Commercial and Transactional intents:

Tip #3: Look for Informational AI Overview Opportunities

Now, go ahead and filter for informational queries to find your strongest opportunities there.

The key with ranking for these keywords, though, is to run them through an incognito Google search to find out:

• Is there an AI Overview currently showing up?
• Why do you think those sources are being chosen for the AI Overview? What makes them different/exceptional?
• What other SERP features are there?
• What questions can you answer with your content to make it better than what’s already there?
• What else can you add to make Google favor what you have to say?

Use all of the information you find to inform your own content strategy.

Tip #4: Consider Keyword Difficulty

Different keywords have different ranking difficulties depending on other content and websites already competing. For example, it’s naturally harder to rank for “content marketing” than it is to rank for something like “content marketing for home improvement stores.”

When there’s less competition, it can be easier to gain visibility in the SERPs.

In Semrush, you can really use filters to your advantage to narrow down your keyword gap list. For example, when I narrow it down to keywords that competitors are ranking in the top 10 for and keyword difficulty is in the “Difficult” (middle) range, I suddenly have a lot of keywords that are more realistic to rank for:

Go ahead and try different filter combinations to zero in on the keywords that make the most sense for you to target.

Step 4: Create Content Hubs

Content hubs improve SEO by increasing topical authority and helping users navigate content more easily.

When it comes to creating content, using the pillar page or “content hub” model is the best way to systematically build out content around different topics.

A content hub is a centralized page that organizes related content around a core topic. It typically includes a main pillar page and several supporting sub-pages or blog posts linked together.

So, let’s say you run a children’s art supply company and one of the products you sell is modeling clay. You’ve run a keyword gap analysis and found that you don’t rank for “modeling clay” and other longer-tail keywords with “modeling clay” in them.

Your pillar page might be something like “The Ultimate Guide to Modeling Clay: Types, Ideas, Tools, & More.” Once that page is created, you want to create a bunch of supporting modeling clay articles that link back to your ultimate guide.

You might write:

• Best Modeling Clay Tools (+ How to Use Them)
• How to Store Modeling Clay to Keep it Soft
• How to Make Modeling Clay Monsters
• How to Make Modeling Clay Unicorns
• How to Bake Modeling Clay (The No Cracks Method)

You can even take the seed keywords you’ve found in your keyword gap analysis and plug them into the Semrush Keyword Strategy Builder for help creating your content hubs:

For more on building content hubs, check out What a Content Hub Is & How to Create One (+ Examples).

How to Track Keyword Gap Strategy Results

Now that you’ve identified some of the keywords you’re missing and created content hubs around them, you need a good way to monitor the results of your hard work. Here’s what to keep an eye on:

Ranking Changes

Use position tracking tools to monitor your progress on target keywords from your gap analysis. Don’t be bummed if you don’t see immediate results. These things can take time!

I recommend creating a tag or separate keyword list called “keyword gap” so that you can monitor just the keywords you’re working on from your gap analysis.

Here’s how that looks in the Semrush Position Tracking report:

To monitor your progress, track KPIs like:

• Ranking position changes over time
• Rankings distribution
• SERP feature appearances
• Rankings specifically in AI Overviews
• Visibility

Website Traffic

While improvements in rankings and organic visibility are nice to see, in the end, you’re hoping to grow your traffic and your business.

• Overall organic traffic
• Direct traffic
• Traffic from AI platforms
• Traffic specifically to the landing pages from your keyword gap work
• Conversions from organic, AI, and direct traffic

Engagement Metrics

Your keyword rankings and traffic numbers are great indicators, but they don’t always tell the full story about how your new keyword gap content is doing. Keep an eye on whether visitors are engaging with your content by watching these KPIs:

• Average engagement time per session
• Average session duration
• Engagement rate
• Scroll depth

Run Your Keyword Gap Analysis Now

Your competitors are capturing high-value traffic you're missing. A keyword gap analysis would reveal the exact opportunities they're exploiting while you're left wondering why their content outranks yours.

Take action now and:

• Uncover high-volume keywords your competitors rank for that you don't
• Identify commercial and transactional opportunities that drive immediate revenue
• Find realistic ranking opportunities based on keyword difficulty
• Build strategic content hubs that establish topical authority

Launch your keyword gap analysis with the Semrush Keyword Gap tool today and turn your competitors' success into your own roadmap to more traffic and more growth.