Content gap analysis

What a content gap analysis is

A content gap analysis compares two lists. The first is every question a buyer needs answered before they will pay you. The second is what your website actually answers. The difference is the gap, and the deliverable is that difference, written down and ranked.

It is the opposite of a content audit. The audit judges what exists. The gap analysis finds what is missing. Businesses that have published a lot usually need the audit first; businesses with a thin site need this first.

Where the questions come from

Not from a keyword tool alone, though search data is one source. The list is built from five places, because each one catches questions the others miss.

• Sales conversations. What people ask on the first call, and what they ask just before they say yes. Whoever sells for you is interviewed for an hour.
• The inbox. Support and contact-form messages from the last year, read for the questions that repeat.
• Search data. What people type before they reach you, and what they type on your site once they are there.
• Competitors. What the three sites you lose to have bothered to answer, which is a strong signal of what buyers asked them.
• Customers. Where you allow it, three short calls with people who bought recently: what did you need to know, and where did you find it?

What you get

The gap list. One spreadsheet. Each row is a question, in the buyer's words. Columns record where it came from, how often it came up, whether the site answers it now (fully, partly or not at all), which stage of buying it belongs to, and a value rank. The value rank is the point: a question asked just before a purchase is worth more than one asked out of curiosity, and the list is sorted that way.

The brief. Three or four pages. The ten gaps that matter most, what kind of page or piece should fill each one, and roughly how long it will take. It also names the questions you should deliberately not answer, because they attract the wrong buyer.

The call. Forty-five minutes to walk through it with whoever will write or commission the work.

A worked example

An illustration. A small commercial cleaning company has a website with six pages. Its sales calls, once listened to, contain the same questions again and again: are your staff bonded, what happens if something is damaged, can you work outside office hours, do you bring your own supplies, and what does a monthly contract for an office of this size cost. None of the six pages mentions any of them. Two competitors answer all five on their sites.

The gap list has 31 rows. The brief says: five pages, one per question above, in that order, because those five come up at the decision point. The other 26 gaps are real but earlier in the journey, and the brief says to leave them until the five are live. The company writes five pages in six weeks and, for the first time, the site answers what the phone has been answering for years.

Ranking the gaps

A gap list without a ranking is just a longer to-do list, so the ranking is where most of the judgment goes. Each question is placed at one of three stages: before the buyer knows they need you, while they are comparing options, or at the point of deciding. Questions at the deciding stage rank highest, because a page that answers one of them is read by someone with money in hand.

Within a stage, two things move a question up: how often it came up across the five sources, and whether a competitor already answers it. A question asked often that nobody answers is the best gap there is. A question asked once, that three competitors already cover, sits at the bottom and may not be worth filling at all.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, who buys it, who talks to buyers.
2. A fixed price. Agreed in writing before the work starts.
3. Collection. One to two weeks: interviews, inbox, search data, competitor review, customer calls where permitted.
4. Analysis and ranking. A few days.
5. Delivery and walkthrough. The list and the brief arrive the day before the call.

What it costs

A gap analysis on its own is quoted after the first call, because the cost depends on how many sources there are to work through. It is included in every content strategy plan, where it is the section called "what they need to hear". If you are going to want the plan, start there and the gap analysis comes with it.

What happens next

The gap list is a writing brief. You write the pages, or your person does with coaching, or I write them as service pages and articles. The list is also the natural input to a content calendar, since it already says what to write and in what order.