How to use the keyword gap tool?

Why should you use this tool?

It’s important to know where you stand in relation to your competitors so you know where to focus your SEO efforts. Therefore, using this tool before starting a campaign can be critical. You’ll be able to see the keywords that your competitors are ranking for and you’re not. You’ll also be able to identify the keywords that are unique to your domain and uncover gaps in your competitors’ strategies. You can also use this tool for PPC research by identifying the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but have very little advertising competition. These keywords can be a great experiment to try to attract some traffic to you with an advertising campaign.

The benefits of using the Keyword Gap tool

The Keyword Gap tool offers many benefits, including:

• Ability to identify new opportunities to improve your rankings.
• A deep understanding of your competitors and their marketing strategies.
• You were able to accurately analyze your performance against your competitors.
• Opportunities to improve existing content based on missing keywords.
• You can discover new keywords that can generate a lot of traffic.

Comparing your domain keywords to competitors

To get started, simply enter the domain names you want to compare. To identify your top competitors, use the Organic Competition Report or the Advertising Competition Report to identify domains with similar keyword rankings. After you enter your domain name, the tool will automatically list some top competitors in the drop-down menu below the competitors fields. You can also specify an exact URL, subdomain, or subfolder in one of the fields to compare keywords at a more granular level.

Keyword type

Once you’ve entered the domains to compare, select your “keyword type.” This refers to the type of search results you’re analyzing.

• Organic: Keywords for which the domain ranks organically among the top 100 results on Google.
• Paid: Keywords for which the domain ranks in the top positions through Google ads.
• PLA: Keywords that triggered the domain’s paid product ads through Google Shopping.

If you click “Select Keyword Type for Each Domain,” you can choose to compare different keyword types across sites. For example, you can choose to compare your paid keywords with the organic keywords of a competitor’s domain. You can also compare different keyword types within the same domain. Simply enter the domain twice and set the keyword types accordingly. Once you’ve set these parameters, select your regional database and click “Compare.” The report will turn the information into relevant information in the Top Opportunity Vector, Keyword Overlap Chart, and Keyword Table at the bottom.

Top opportunities

The Top Opportunities Wizard shows the best keyword opportunities for the site labeled “you” (the domain entered in the first field). This information, along with any report, will change based on any filters you enter. For example, see below the top opportunities based on a filter that includes keywords containing “sports.”

Keyword overlaps

This visualization shows the overlaps in keyword portfolios between competitors. Again, this chart will update as you apply filters. If you click on a specific overlap, the report will update to show only keywords that had that overlap.

Keyword table

The main part of the report is the table at the bottom, where you can drill down into the details of each site and how its keyword profile overlaps with competitors. The types of overlaps are:

• Shared: Keywords that every entered site ranks for.
• Missing: Keywords where all competitors have rankings but your site (the site entered in the first field marked “You”) has no ranking.
• Weak: Keywords where you have a ranking but it is lower than your competitors’ rankings.
• Strong: Keywords you rank higher for than everyone else.
• Unutilized: Keywords where you don’t rank but one of your competitors does.
• Unique: Keywords where you rank but none of your competitors do.
• All words: The combined list of all keyword rankings among competitors.

How can you use these overlaps?

Obviously, you can use the Missing and Weak labels to diagnose a website’s weaknesses compared to its competitors. Use these filters and export the list to a spreadsheet. You can then plan an SEO campaign around these terms to try to re-attract some of the traffic from your competitors.

Types of strong and unique can be used to diagnose the strengths of a website. Finding unique keywords from one of your competitors can be a good way to find new opportunities, as it suggests that your other competitors are not taking advantage of that word either.

Filters

To drill down into the data, use the filters available at the top of the report. You can add filters to words to compare keywords on a specific topic. Using filters allows for precision and finding gaps where action is needed. First, there are options to change the database, device type, or date range. This allows you to analyze historical data, mobile data, or data from a different country. Next, the location filter allows you to filter a custom set of keywords where your site or competitors rank within a certain range. For example, you can specify all keywords where your domain is on the second page or higher with the following filter:

Locations – Your Domain – Custom Range from 11 to 20

This creates a list of keywords that you want to optimize for to compete with your competitors for first-page traffic. An intent filter allows you to quickly categorize and analyze keywords by specific search intent. You can select specific types of intent to filter the list of words in the table. After you apply the intent filter, you can export the data from the table for the filtered group.

The filter makes it easy to compare your competitors’ rankings for keywords with a specific intent type. You can gain valuable insights into relevancy to your content. If your competitors are ranking higher for your targeted keywords, check out their landing pages to understand why they might be ranking better than you. Then review your existing content or create new content that matches the search intent.

To see the full URL associated with a particular keyword, you can hover over the location to reveal the full URL.

The Keyword Difficulty filter includes 6 levels of difficulty for a page to rank for a specific keyword. The higher the KD score of a word, the harder it is for a website to rank organically in the top 10 of Google for the analyzed word. Use this filter to quickly categorize the words that are useful and meaningful to you.

Advanced filters include the ability to filter by keywords (include or exclude), search volume, CPC, competition density, and number of results. Filters can be merged for more precise data. See below for an example of a filter to include keywords containing “sports,” with transactional intent, and a CPC under $2.

Every time you apply a filter, it will automatically update the word table, top opportunities, and word overlap chart.

Export keywords

You can export your favorite keywords at any time to an Excel file, CSV file, semicolon CSV, or PDF. Exporting provides excellent research for competitive analysis and can be used for a marketing campaign. In the export, you can see the rankings of each domain for the keywords they are competing for. You can choose to export individual keywords with the checkbox and export them, export all words in the list, or export the first 100, 500, 1,000, 3,000, 10,000, 30,000, or 50,000 (depending on the size of the report). If you export selected keywords, you can also clear them from your list after the export is complete.

Before exporting, you can also add keywords to the Keyword Strategy Builder. The Keyword Strategy Builder gives you the option to refresh metrics on keywords to get up-to-date demand statistics. To export the report to PDF, use the “Export to PDF” button in the upper right corner of the report.

In the exported PDF file, you will find the top opportunity wick and the position comparison table. If you are unable to download the Keyword Gap report to PDF, please check if all wicks were generated correctly in My Report.

You can also find the top innings wickets and position comparison table in My Report. Editor under the Domain Analysis/KeyWord Gap category.