As a construction website owner, you probably have whipped your website into shape – you make sure you publish good content, drive quality traffic to your site, rank well for keywords, and so on. However, you notice that your website has not achieved its full potential when it comes to capturing leads.
Ever think of an easy solution to this problem? Well, content gap analysis is the answer! Designed to spot weaknesses in your content strategy, a content gap analysis helps you identify the topics you must write about to reach your target audience. This tactic zeroes in on your shortcomings for your entire content inventory and individual content pieces so your website can perform better in search engines and effectively satisfy your audience’s needs.
This blog post will serve as your guide to content gap analysis. Discover content gaps, why perform content gap analysis, its benefits, and more.
But What are Content Gaps?
Content gaps refer to the areas where your construction content might be lacking. These content gaps are simply topics or questions your audience or users might be interested in, but your existing content fails to address or cover them.
Content gaps cause problems. When information is hard for your users to find, it creates friction in the overall customer experience. In turn, it hurts the perception of your construction brand, possibly resulting in a poor reputation and loss of revenue.
What is Content Gap Analysis?
To put it simply, it is the process used to determine the opportunities and gaps in a website’s content. It usually involves evaluating your existing construction content, performing a content audit, and comparing it to your end user’s search intent or desired content. Just like what we stated above, the goal of content gap analysis is to determine areas where your content is missing or where improvements can be made to your overall content strategy.
Sure, there are other SEO strategies you can pull off right now to lay the foundation of your website. However, conducting a competitive content gap analysis can add another strong layer to reinforce it. Content gap analysis is proven to be a powerful and handy tool that can help your brand achieve any of your construction marketing goals and achieve long-term success in the future.
Benefits of Content Gap Analysis
Performing content gap analysis has proven to improve the overall relevance and quality of your construction content and website, resulting in better user engagement and more satisfied users. Apart from these benefits, other good things come from conducting a content gap analysis. This includes:
- Higher conversion rates: By addressing gaps in your content, you can better guide online users through the entire sales funnel.
- Increase organic traffic: Filling the gaps in your content, particularly the ones that are associated with SEO, can drive more organic traffic.
- Measuring content performance: Measuring the overall effectiveness of your construction content is important to meeting your audience’s needs. With content gap analysis, you can make data-driven decisions about how to get better results with your content.
- Staying ahead of the competition: By determining gaps in your construction content, you can come up with new content that will absolutely sets you apart from the fierce competition and positions you as an authority in your sector.
- Save time and resources: Performing a content gap analysis helps you prioritize your content creation efforts. This helps you focus more on the topics and questions that are most important for your audience. As a result, it helps you save time and resources by avoiding the creation of content that might not be relevant to your target audience.
How to Conduct a Content Gap Analysis?
We finally come to the section where we will share with you some beginner-friendly tips on how to execute a content gap analysis on your own.
1. Define your goals
Defining your goals and objectives is the first thing you need to do when performing a content gap analysis. This can help you determine the questions and topics that are most important to your target audience. You can also focus on goals related to traffic, lead acquisition, search engine rankings, and anything else that can help you enhance your overall content marketing strategy and achieve greater results.
Here are some questions you can start asking yourself:
- Why are you analyzing your construction content?
- What are you hoping to achieve in the entire process?
- What do you want to improve?
2. Perform a content audit for Search Engine Optimization
No matter what your objectives and goals are, your content gap analysis must always begin with a content inventory. This gives you a full picture. Start by making an inventory in a quick spreadsheet.
This spreadsheet must contain all the details of your website and each web page. It includes website assets like images, videos, PDFs, etc. Make sure to itemize the URLs, topics, page titles, content types, date published, date last updated, and so on.
You can always refer and go back to this spreadsheet, especially when you are constantly monitoring your website if it has covered a certain topic or not.
3. Look for gaps in the buyer’s journey
Review your content inventory regularly and ensure you have content for each phase of your buyer’s journey. The goal is to capture them early to build brand awareness and answer their many questions as they move through the recognition, consideration, and decision-making stages. Overall, this can help you establish engagement and prevent potential leads from abandoning your construction website to find answers elsewhere.
Here are a few of the best ideas for filling in the gaps at various stages:
- Awareness: High-level content delivering context and background, like blog posts, articles, podcasts, e-books, and videos
- Consideration: Website content that differentiates your construction business or showcases benefits, like white papers, case studies, testimonials, reviews from your construction clients, and product (service) comparison pages
- Decision-making: This can be rewards, offers, and landing pages that move your potential leads toward conversions. You can offer free consultations, trials, and discounts.
4. Find gaps in content depth
Another thing you have to pay attention to is the gap between your construction content and what is available in the SERPs. This is a common content void. You need to try a few tactics to provide more depth and substance to your readers.
Here are some tips you can follow through:
- Analyze all your content manually by reading the top-ranking pages in the SERPs to see how they treat the topic. Pay attention to the existing references, images, and other content assets. Compare this to your construction content to see what areas you can enhance and how to market your service offerings better.
- Brainstorm every now and then to generate content ideas and enrich your existing content if you want to enhance any of your content, rework and revamp it.
5. Identify holes in your content
For the best outcome, provide unique construction content that cannot be found elsewhere, even on your competitor’s website. When you immediately address the gap between what readers are mostly interested in and what is available in the SERPs, you are improving the value for readers. On top of that, you also score points using Google’s content system.
6. Review on-page SEO practices
Look at every piece of content on your construction website. Are they all fully optimized? If not, make sure you optimize each one well. Doing so can help rank your content in the SERPs.
Depending on the size and scale of your website, you may narrow down its page types, starting with the ones that are most important to your core business. In addition, each web page should be analyzed to check its overall readability and other on-page SEO elements.
We make a checklist of all the things you need to watch out for:
- Effective keyword placement
- · Powerful meta titles and descriptions
- Optimized schema makeup
- East to grasp concepts (jargon-free)
- Well-organized copy (short sections and paragraphs, clear headers, bullet points)
- Recent statistics and research
- Captivating graphics and images
7. Pinpoint major issues in your SEO performance
It is best to know how your content is currently performing. You can use Google Analytics or any SEO tool to determine your keyword ranking. You will find the high-performing pages and the pages that are not as visible as you expected them to be and will most likely require some revamping.
Here are more tips you can follow:
Prioritize pages that are ranking well and might need a little boost to reach the top positions. You are doing the right thing for these pages because they need a few tweaks to get them into the competition.
Use some of the best SEO tools, like SEMrush. This tool can give you insights into your competitors‘ weak spots, such as where they are experiencing a decline in keyword performance.
8. Monitor content performance regularly
Finally, as you find more opportunities to boost your construction website, add them straight to your content creation and optimization strategy. Once it is all implemented, use a tool like Google Analytics to track your entire progress in getting a larger portion of the SERPs.
Your positioning in the SERPs will fluctuate over time due to constant behavior changes and new competitors entering the scene. That is why it is very important to look for all content gaps, address these problems, and monitor content performance regularly to adapt to these shifts.
Find All the Gaps with ConstructionMarketing.io
With the ever-changing world of digital marketing and even the construction sector, it is important for brands like yours to stay ahead of the competition and provide valuable content to their target audience. As stated above, a content gap analysis is an effective and powerful tool that can help your construction brand achieve its goals and drive long-term success.
If you need professional help with anything that has to do with your content, our team at ConstructionMarketing.io can help.
We are ConstructionMarketing.io, a dynamic, full-service online marketing agency that focuses on driving growth through our digital solutions. Our agency has expertise in everything from content marketing and Local SEO to pay-per-click and social media marketing.
We can create the most compelling content for your construction website. We look for existing gaps, find solutions to fix them, and strive to ensure your pages rank higher in the search results! Our content is designed to delight, attract, convert, and close many potential leads!
Reach out to us and discover how we can support and elevate your content strategy.