- SEOs have a great vantage point in the form of data that actively help identify business opportunities and gaps. 30-second summary:
Are your leads slipping through the cracks in these business gaps? - SEO pioneer, serial entrepreneur, and best-selling author Kris Jones identifies three critical aspects that can be fixed to create the foundation of a successful SEO strategy in 2021
One of the strangest things to try to explain to someone who isn’t so familiar with digital marketing is how business owners can target business opportunities that aren’t currently on their radars. After all–if we consider the problem semi-philosophically–how can we know what we don’t know? Relying on human logic alone would make that task quite tricky. As SEOs, we have plenty of tools to help us identify business opportunities and gaps.
That means we aren’t targeting keywords, audiences we aren’t going after, backlinks we aren’t getting, and content topics we aren’t covering on our websites. In other words, these are the foundations of a successful SEO strategy in 2021, and you could be missing out on leveraging them for yourself. Here are three pointers for using SEO analytics to identify your business gaps in keywords, content, and backlinks.
Find your keyword gaps.
Digital marketers have known the fluctuation in the importance of keywords since the late 1990s. But no matter how much that has changed, you need to rank for the right keywords, or else you won’t show up for anything. But have you ever done a few searches for keywords you want to rank for and not even been able to find your website in the SERPs? Doesn’t it frustrate you to see your competitors on page one? You can be as good as they are. The way to do it is to run a keyword gap analysis in a tool such as Semrush or Google Search Console (GSC). Semrush is better and more user-friendly, but if you can’t access that, let me cover GSC first. You first have to link your Google Analytics and GSC together. Afterward, go to Analytics and navigate to Acquisition>Search Console>Queries.
You’ll see the search terms people have used to get to you and those queries’ clicks, impressions, and click-through rates (CTRs). Export that data into an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet, and then compare the number of actual site visits that those keywords got you to the number of impressions you got for those keywords. The difference percentage will give you a measurable idea of where to improve. However, I prefer Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool for this. You input your URL and those of a few competitors, and it compares your keyword numbers against your competitors. The tool shows you a keyword overlap diagram and your top opportunities for getting new rankings.
