Contents9
- 01What a gap analysis shows
- 02Picking the right competitors: those who take your clicks
- 03Reading by market and by language
- 04Sorting: from a thousand rows to a short list
- 05Searches where AI already answers are worth fewer clicks
- 06What the analysis doesn’t tell you
- 07What you get at the end
- 08Where to start
- 09Frequently asked questions
In short
The gap is measured against the sites that take your clicks, not necessarily your commercial competitors.
A gap is read by market and by language: a national list mixing every country misleads.
Sorting by intent, then by fit with your offer, takes you from a thousand rows to a dozen pages.
What a gap analysis shows
Your Search Console tells you which searches your site appears on, never the ones where it is absent: people are searching there for what you sell, and your competitors are the ones getting them.
The keyword gap analysis fills that void: you compare the searches where a few competitors rank with those where your site ranks, and keep the difference. Semrush, for example, sorts the result into several families in the documentation of its Keyword Gap tool, two of which are directly useful:
Definition
Missing and untapped keywords
A search is “missing” when all the compared competitors rank for it and you don’t. It is “untapped” when at least one of them ranks for it and you don’t. The first list is short and often strategic, the second is long and needs sorting.
The raw table is useless as it stands: against three established competitors, it quickly runs to thousands of rows, most of them unrelated to your business. All the value is in the sorting, and that is what you expect from an agency rather than an export, as our guide to what an AI SEO agency should deliver points out.
Picking the right competitors: those who take your clicks
This is the step that decides everything. The reflex is to compare yourself with your commercial competitors, the ones you meet in sales meetings. But on Google, your real competitors are the sites occupying your key searches: sometimes a direct competitor, often a comparison site, a specialist publication, a directory or a marketplace.
Take twenty or so searches that lead to a sale for you, type them from the area where your customers are, and note the sites that keep coming up in the top results. The two or three that come up most are the ones to compare with your site.
Key takeaway
A search competitor may sell nothing
A publication that ranks ahead of you doesn’t take your contracts, but it takes your clicks. Conversely, a commercial competitor absent from Google teaches the gap analysis nothing.
Reading by market and by language
The competitors ahead of you aren’t the same in Paris, Geneva or Brussels, and neither are the words: see our method for building your SEO strategy where your customers search.
Volumes call for the same care. According to Google Ads help on Keyword Planner, the volume shown is the average number of searches for a keyword and its close variants, calculated by default over twelve months, across all languages, and for the chosen area; the same page states that statistics are rounded. Without choosing the language, an analysis can therefore mix audiences you don’t serve. You run one per market and language pair: more work at the start, far fewer useless pages at the end.
Sorting: from a thousand rows to a short list
Sorting always happens in the same order, because sorting by volume first pushes generic searches that sell nothing to the top.
- Rank by intent.
Purchase (“payroll software price”), comparison (“X or Y”), information (“how to calculate”). Purchase and comparison come first: they are closer to a quote request.
- Drop what doesn’t match your offer.
A competitor may sell a service you don’t offer: its searches aren’t a gap, just a different business.
- Read volume as an order of magnitude.
It breaks ties between two searches with the same intent, not decides on its own.
- Look at who holds the spot.
A first page held by very large sites is won slowly, a first page of weak or old pages faster.
- Decide: create or improve.
A close but poorly ranked page gets improved; with no page answering the search, you create one.
The last step avoids creating a page on a topic already covered: two pages on the same search compete with each other and the engine keeps only one. That is the “one page, one query” rule of our topic cluster method, which also says where to place each new page and which offer it should lead to.
Searches where AI already answers are worth fewer clicks
On some searches, Google now shows an AI Overview, a generated summary that answers before the links. Pew Research Center measured what that does to clicks:
of visits with an AI summary led to a click on a traditional result
of visits without an AI summary led to that same click
of searches starting with a question word showed a summary
of one- or two-word searches showed one
A missing search phrased as a question (“what is”, “how to”) is therefore more likely to trigger a summary, and has fewer clicks to offer; a short search, as buying searches often are, triggers far fewer. Before approving a page, type the search from the target market and check whether the AI Overview already answers it in full. How to check it in your own Search Console: what AI Overviews do to your traffic.
What the analysis doesn’t tell you
Watch out
Competitor volumes and rankings are estimates
No tool has access to your competitors’ Search Console. Their rankings come from checks, their traffic and search volumes are estimated, and Google itself rounds its own. Two tools can give different numbers: you compare orders of magnitude, never units.
A search all your competitors have isn’t necessarily one to take either: it can be heavily contested, costly to win for a modest gain, or part of their business that isn’t yours. The gap shows where they are; your offer and your margins say where to go. Finally, the analysis only shows ground taken today, not topics nobody covers yet.
What you get at the end
The tool’s raw list
Thousands of searches, all markets and languages mixed
Topics that don’t match your offer
No priority other than volume
The short list, after sorting
A dozen pages to create or improve, per market
Each with its target search, its intent and the offer it leads to
A priority order that accounts for AI Overviews and difficulty
We built the clusters of our own blog this way: a map of searches by topic, then one page per intent. Our SEO engine crosses our Search Console with a written keyword register, which states for each target search whether it is invisible, seen or within reach. The gap analysis feeds that register, it doesn’t replace it.
Where to start
Knowing which pages you are missing against the competitors ranking ahead of you is one of the deliverables of our SEO audit, with an action plan ranked by priority.
If you are preparing a new offer or opening a country, the gap with competitors isn’t enough: you first need to measure demand. That is the purpose of our search-based market study, which delivers the map of searches grouped by intent, the competitors present and the first pages to create. And for those pages to then be written every month, reviewed before publication, that is the role of our SEO and GEO content engine.
Frequently asked questions
How many competitors should I compare?
Two or three per market, chosen among the sites ranking ahead of you on your key searches. Beyond that, the list grows with marginal searches without bringing new ideas, and sorting takes more time than it pays back. Better to rerun the analysis with other competitors later than compare everything at once.
Is Search Console enough for a gap analysis?
No. It shows the searches where your site already appears, with your real impressions and clicks, but never those where it is absent, nor other sites’ rankings. You need external checks to see the gap, read as estimates, and Search Console to then verify what your new pages bring in.
How often should I redo the analysis?
With every new market, new offer or site redesign, and otherwise once or twice a year. Between two analyses, tracking your rankings city by city shows which competitors are rising and on which searches, which tells you when to rerun the exercise.
Should I target high-volume searches first?
Not first. A low-volume buying search often brings more requests than a heavily searched question the AI Overview already answers, and the volumes shown remain rounded estimates. Volume breaks ties between two searches with the same intent; it is intent, and its link with your offer, that decides.
Sources
- The documentation of its Keyword Gap tool (new tab)semrush.com
- Google Ads help on Keyword Planner (new tab)support.google.com
Jim · founder of Brain Plus AI
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