How to Close the Keyword Gap with SEMrush

Do you know how well your site is stacking up against the competition? Are you missing big opportunities to gain organic visibility? A keyword gap analysis will uncover actionable insights that will help you create a  user-focused SEO strategy. In this video, I’ll walk you through how to perform a keyword gap analysis using SEMrush.

 Video Transcript:

Like I said in the intro, we’re going to be showing you how to close the keyword gap in today’s video. So why is this important? Well, one, it’s important to know where you stand against your competitors so you can focus your efforts.

This will let you know what keywords your competitors are ranking for that you’re not ranking for. It’ll help you identify keywords that are unique to your domain, but also discover gaps in your competitors’ strategies. And lastly, it can help you identify terms that maybe your competition is weaker and there’s not a lot of competitive advertisements going on at the top, so you could steal some of that traffic by bidding on some very low cost, high quality ad spaces.

If you’re looking to follow along with us, you’re going to need SEMrush.  SEMrush has a lot of really great SEO tools, PPC tools, and market analysis tools. It’s the tool that we use the most here at our agency. We’re in it every single day leveraging all of the different aspects of the tool. But specifically for this one, we’ll be talking about their keyword gap tool. It offers a side by side comparison.

You just put in the domains and you click go and it’s going to analyze them based on the criteria. It’s going to show you the top opportunities, it’s going to show you where the keywords overlap. It’s going to show you a lot of really helpful information. It’s helpful especially in SEO campaigns because you can see especially where to focus and where you lie within your niche.

You’re going to get instant competitive analysis, unique keywords, organic paid and shopping data as well as visual charts that overlap and give you a visual idea of what’s happening.

If you don’t have a SEMrush, you want to give it a shot, you just want to try it and if you click below, you can get a 14-day free trial to leverage and try out SEMrush. I highly recommend it. If you haven’t used it, this will open it up and let you see what the tool can really do. Without further ado, we’re going to jump in and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this keyword gap analysis.

Alright, now we’re inside the keyword gap tool in SEMrush and as you can see, you can find this from dashboard>domain analytics>keyword gap. Right here puts the breadcrumbs right navigation. You can also find it under gap analysis. So what you do in this tool, you select your database, so the United States or wherever you’re located, you can also select a device, date, all of that is something that you can do. You can actually go back in time and do some historical analysis if you want to as well.

What you do after that is you put in your websites.  I grew up skateboarding so I liked skateboarding, so I decided to use this as an example. You put in your brands. Let’s say I’m working for zero skateboards and I want to start working on some different content, some opportunities that we might have in order to grow our brand’s visibility.

Then you would put in the competitor sites up in here and you hit compare. Now I have it selected on organic keywords, but I can also do this unpaid so I can do an analysis paid traffic. I can also do a shopping analysis. As you can see, there’s no data in those there.

These companies are relying solely on organic. From in here, it’s going to give me some opportunities. Now these are all pretty big known, well-known skateboard brands. These are all brands that probably do very similar things, but as you can see there is a couple of opportunities.

Pro skateboard brands is a term that zero skateboards is not ranking for. They do build pro skateboards, so it’s definitely a term that’s probably worth looking at. It’s got 250 search volume. It could be some very targeted volume. If we look over here at the keyword gap, this is going to give us a visualization of what’s going on. We’re going to see the number of terms these sites are ranking for organically, and then we’re also going to be able to see where do they overlap, so where they share. So zero and plan B share where zero and creature, we’re creatures by itself.

And then all these different subsets and segments where these keywords start to come together. And I can click into this and as you can see, as I click in now it’s gotten a little bit deeper. It took away some of those competitors. It’s brought this a little bit narrower and now it’s also opened up a lot more opportunities for me to focus on.

So what this tool does, it’s very interactive. It allows me to click in and start to get deeper insight. As you could tell from before. I only had one opportunity here, but once I clicked in the tool, it actually re-ran the analysis and allowed me to see some more meaningful data like pro skateboard decks for skateboards complete, skateboard online, cheap pro skateboards.

Underneath here it’s running analysis for all of the keyword data for my site and then comparing that against the competitors up here, it’s going to give us things like the terms that we’ve shared, any terms that we’re missing. Any term that is weak. And a weak term would be a term where our competitors are outranking us for anywhere that we’re strong. So where is our domain stronger and better ranking?  And like I said earlier, this is going to show us where we our strengths are, where weaknesses are and where we need to focus our effort.

Just because they’re ranking for something you’re not ranking for, doesn’t always mean you have to target it. But what this can really help you do is focus and allow you to go, okay, I know this is where we’re really strong. So like in the skateboard world, this is important, 8.25 skateboard. It’s the size of a board.

This is where they’re not ranking super high for it, but they’re moving, they’re ahead of the competition at least we’re seeing. Let’s say I wanted to narrow this down even more. I can do a couple things. I can either export this or I can start to use some of the filters.

So this volume, how much traffic does a specific keyword get. Let’s say I only want to look at keywords that have 11 to 100 volume. It’s going to bring this down even further. Let’s say I wanted to do keywords with certain positions, all domains that are somewhere in the top 50. Now we can start to narrow it down again.

All these filters allow us to analyze the data and go deeper. We can export this into an Excel file. We can also add it to SEMrush’s keyword manager, which allows us to add even another layer of keyword research. But again, if we’re looking at the gap, what we’re trying to do is know what we’re good at, but also what are we missing and are these terms that we want to rank for and are these terms that we should focus our content around.

And if you look at these, a lot of these terms have quite a bit of traffic but we’re not ranking for any of these terms or this site isn’t fictitiously right that I’m working for, they’re not in real life. But if I was doing SEO for them I would probably start to look at things like pro skateboard decks, pro skateboard completes because these are the things that people are looking to purchase online.

And as a company selling a product, these can be very helpful. And right now I don’t have any visibility on my brand and this was all uncovered with just a couple clicks. So take a look at the keyword gap tool. Again, if you want access to try this out in the description, there’s a link there for a 14 day free trial of all their tools. I highly recommend you check it out. If you’ve got any questions on SEMrush or specifically the keyword gap tool, please comment below. I’d love to continue the conversation. Happy Marketing!