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A keyword gap example in five short steps

A made-up bookkeeping app takes a gap list of dozens of searches down to two briefs.

By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom · Editorial team

· 3 min read

The idea of a content gap is easy. Seeing one worked through is what makes it click. Below is a content gap analysis example in five short steps, using a made-up company so the numbers stay illustrative. The process is the real one; swap in your own site and rival.

The company: a small bookkeeping app for freelancers, selling in the UK. Call it ExampleBooks. Its rival in search, call it RivalBooks, keeps showing up above it.

1. Confirm the rival is a search rival

ExampleBooks's founder assumed the main competitor was a big accounting suite, because that is who prospects compare them with on sales calls. But in Google, the site above ExampleBooks most often is RivalBooks, a smaller app with a busy blog.

That matters. A gap list against the big suite would be full of payroll and enterprise topics freelancers never search. Against RivalBooks, the overlap is real.

Tool tip: if you do not know your search rival, seogeoaeo.ai's Competitor Finder lists the 30 domains that share the most Google keywords with yours, for 38 credits.

2. Pull the missing keywords

ExampleBooks runs a keyword gap with its own site, RivalBooks's site and the UK market. On seogeoaeo.ai, the Keyword Gap tool returns up to the 300 most searched terms the rival ranks for and you do not, keeping only those where the rival sits in Google's top 20. It costs 85 credits a run.

In our example, the list includes searches about expense categories, mileage claims, invoice templates, tax deadlines, and a handful of RivalBooks brand searches.

3. Throw out what does not fit

Three cuts:

  • Brand searches. Anything with "RivalBooks" in it goes. Nobody outranks a company for its own name.
  • Wrong intent. A cluster about corporate year-end accounts goes too. The results are aimed at accountants, not freelancers.
  • Already covered. ExampleBooks finds it has an old post on mileage claims. That topic moves to a separate "improve" list. It is a weak keyword, not a missing one, and a second page would compete with the first.

What is left are the invoice and expense-category searches, mostly low difficulty.

4. Group by the rival page that ranks

This is where a long list turns into a short plan. The report names the rival pages winning the most gap terms. In the example, one RivalBooks page, a free invoice template, ranks for dozens of the remaining invoice terms. Another, a guide to allowable expenses, collects most of the expense terms.

So the list of a few dozen keywords becomes two briefs:

  1. An invoice template page, with the main term and up to ten related ones.
  2. An allowable expenses guide, the same way.

The results pages tell you the format. For invoices, Google favors downloadable templates, so a blog post would be the wrong shape.

5. Write the briefs with an edge

ExampleBooks's writer opens both RivalBooks pages and reads them in full. For each brief, she notes what the rival page covers and what ExampleBooks can add. For the expenses guide, the addition is a worked example of a freelancer's month, with real category totals from ExampleBooks's own anonymized data. For the template, it is a version that fills in tax fields automatically from the app.

Without that addition, the new page would be a copy, and Google has no reason to prefer a copy.

What the example leaves out

The gap tool covers one rival per run and only keywords ExampleBooks does not rank for at all. For the mileage page and other weak terms, the founder uses Google Search Console's Performance report, which shows ExampleBooks's own measured queries, clicks and average positions. The gap tool's volumes and difficulty are estimates, useful for ranking options against each other.

If ExampleBooks wanted to compare against five rivals at once, Semrush's Keyword Gap does that, inside a subscription; Semrush's paid plans begin at $139 a month. For one rival a quarter, a $29 seogeoaeo.ai plan with 2,000 credits covers it with room to spare.

The takeaway in one line

A gap list of hundreds of keywords usually comes down to a few pages, once you cut brand terms, off-intent searches and topics you already cover, and group the rest by the rival page that ranks.