A contented spread investigation is the process of uncovering topics your competitors person covered but you haven’t.

It helps you: 

• Get much postulation to existing content 
• Find the champion caller topics to cover 
• Steal postulation from competitors 

In this guide, you’ll larn however to usage our contented spread investigation template to find and capable missing gaps successful your contented strategy. 

Make a transcript of our contented spread investigation template, past navigate to the Competitive Analysis instrumentality successful Ahrefs and cheque it’s acceptable to “keywords.”

Next, participate your domain successful the archetypal tract and 1-3 competing domains below. If you don’t cognize your apical competitors, the instrumentality volition connection immoderate suggestions automatically.

When you’ve added each your competitors, click the “Show keyword opportunities” fastener to spot each the keywords your competitors fertile for, but you don’t. 

Finally, power the “main positions only” toggle to filter retired rankings successful alternate SERP features (like representation packs, sitelinks, carousels, etc.). 

Take a look astatine the fig of keywords successful the contented spread report. 

If determination are much than 100,000, you’ll request to refine the list. Otherwise, it’ll astir apt interruption the Google Sheets template.

To bash that, commencement by excluding mentions of your competitor’s marque name(s) successful the keyword filter. Consider misspellings oregon spaces added and acceptable the filter to prime up “partial matches” to guarantee it removes arsenic galore mentions arsenic possible. 

In the aforesaid filter, you tin besides exclude presumption related to topics that are irrelevant to your website. 

If you are checking aggregate competitors, it whitethorn besides beryllium worthy adjusting the competitors’ positions to show astatine slightest 2 sites ranking successful the top 10. 

You tin besides weed retired ace low-volume keywords by filtering for keywords with a monthly hunt measurement of astatine least 20. 

Or, you tin usage the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to uncover low-hanging effect by mounting a maximum KD of 30. 

Once each your filters are applied, export the information to CSV. 

If you haven’t already, marque a transcript of our content spread investigation template. Then, import the information you downloaded from Ahrefs. To bash this, navigate to the “Data” tab and click connected compartment A1. Then spell to File > Import > Upload > Choose your Ahrefs information > Select “Append to existent sheet.” 

You tin permission each different options untouched and proceed with importing the data. This whitethorn instrumentality a fewer moments depending connected however ample your keyword list is. 

Once your data’s imported, determination to the “Results” tab. It should look thing like this: 

In general, determination are 2 communal types of contented gaps you’ll request to fill: domain-level and page-level. 

• Domain-level gaps occur erstwhile competitors person contented astir topics you don’t. 
• Page-level gaps hap erstwhile you and a rival some person a leafage astir the aforesaid topic, but they are ranking for much keywords than you are. In astir cases, this happens due to the fact that they person much in-depth contented than you do. 

Here’s our process that volition assistance you place some types of gaps, starting with domain-level gaps and moving your mode down to circumstantial page-level gaps. 

For example, our spread investigation study shows that Moz has a leafage listing the apical 500 astir fashionable websites. 

It ranks for 120 keywords that our tract doesn’t and gets 2,187 estimated monthly hunt visits from them. This seems similar a large accidental so far! 

However, if we property the + icon connected the near of this row, we tin spot these 120 keywords listed out. At a speedy glance, it looks similar they aren’t precise applicable to our business. 

In this case, we determination to the adjacent leafage successful the pivot array and repetition the process. 

Let’s presume that you spot keywords applicable to your concern for this one. The adjacent measurement is to cheque to spot if you already person an existing leafage astir the taxable utilizing the “site:” relation successful Google. 

• If yes → you request to see adding caller sections to people communal themes from the missing keywords. 
• If not → you request to make a new page. 

For example, we already person a leafage connected the taxable of landing pages but are missing immoderate keywords. 

If we excavation a small deeper, we spot that galore subordinate to the explanation of a landing page. 

This tells america that we astir apt don’t specify the word connected our page, truthful we could astir apt adjacent this spread conscionable by adding that. That whitethorn assistance america to fertile for these presumption and get much traffic. 

As you bash the contented spread analysis, you volition apt request to make a database of enactment items for caller pages to make oregon existing pages to optimize. 

To get the astir retired of this process, it helps to make circumstantial tasks successful your task absorption instrumentality (like Clickup oregon Asana) on with a contented little that includes the insights you’ve gathered arsenic you bash the page-by-page analysis. 

The little tin beryllium elemental and tin look thing like this: 

I urge adding a database of the suggested sections and keywords you deliberation are worthy including successful either caller pages oregon existing pages truthful that whoever creates the contented is capable to adjacent the contented spread you identified effectively. 

Final thoughts

Completing a contented spread investigation is simply a captious strategical SEO task to assistance you oregon your clients drawback up to competitors. The process is reasonably methodical and casual to implement, adjacent if you’re a beginner. 

It’s important that you spell beyond simply exporting a database of missing keywords. By utilizing our spread investigation template, you tin amended measure opportunities and delegate the close enactment point to adjacent the gap. 

Got questions? Ping maine on LinkedIn.