Search gap research

What search gap research is

Search gap research lists the searches your competitors have a page for and you do not. It is competitor-relative and it is search-side. Every line in the deliverable is a real search somebody types, held by a named rival, with nothing of yours appearing anywhere on the results page.

It is not the content gap analysis. That one starts with your buyers and lists the questions nothing on your site answers, built from sales calls, the inbox and customer interviews rather than from search data. It finds gaps that nobody in your market has filled. This one finds gaps your competitors filled while you were not watching, which is a different and usually more urgent list.

It is also not competitor SEO analysis, which takes their winning pages apart to see how they are built. This service does not care how their pages are built. It only asks which searches they cover and you do not.

When you need one

You need it when you are losing ground and cannot see where. Inquiries from the website are thinning, nothing on the site has changed, and the obvious searches still bring you up. The loss is almost always happening on searches you never knew existed.

It also suits a business entering a territory or a product line where someone else got there first, and a business whose blog has been written from the inside for years. In both cases there is a set of pages your rivals treated as obvious and you have never thought about.

You do not need this if you have no competitors you can name, or if the ones you name are national companies with thousands of pages. A gap against a company you cannot possibly outwrite is not a gap, it is a fact of life. You also do not need it before you know what your own buyers type: start with the list of searches your buyers make, because a gap only matters if the search leads to money.

What gets compared

Three or four competitors, named by you on the first call and chosen because you actually lose work to them, not because they are the biggest names in the trade.

• Every indexed page they have. Their whole public site, page by page, including the sections buried under a blog archive nobody links to. The subject of each page is recorded, not its quality.
• The searches each of their pages is built to answer. Taken from the page itself and from the search data available for it, then checked against the live results page to confirm the search is real and they genuinely hold a place on it.
• Your own coverage of the same searches. Whether you have a page, whether it is findable, and whether it is aimed at the same thing or merely mentions the words in passing.
• What the results page rewards. For each gap, what kind of page currently occupies the top of it. A gap that wants a supplier page is a different job from a gap that wants a thousand-word explanation, and the sheet says which.
• Whether you could actually win it. An honest judgement, per gap: whether you know enough about the subject to write the better page, and whether the rival holding it is beatable. Gaps that fail this test are listed and marked closed.

Nothing here is a word-count or keyword-density comparison. The question is never how many times they used a phrase. It is what a reader wanted, and which of you gave it to them.

What you get

The gap sheet. One spreadsheet. One row per search: the search, which competitors cover it, what kind of page they use, whether you have anything, what the results page rewards, and a winnable or not-winnable mark with a reason.

The coverage map. Two or three pages showing the subjects where your rivals are thorough and you are thin, the subjects where you are strong and should defend, and the ground nobody has taken. The last group is usually the smallest and the most valuable.

The shortlist. Ten to twenty gaps, ordered, with the page type each one needs. This is the part people work from, and it is written so it can be handed to any competent writer.

The walkthrough. Forty-five minutes on video, with whoever will act on it.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Guelph firm that sells and services commercial coffee equipment has 34 pages, of which 12 are products and 9 are posts about coffee origins. Three rivals are named on the first call.

Between them the rivals hold 140 pages. The comparison finds 61 searches they cover and the Guelph firm does not. Most are not glamorous: descaling intervals, water hardness, what a grinder burr replacement costs, whether a lease can be broken, which machine suits a 40-seat restaurant. Two of the three rivals have a page for each of those. The Guelph firm has none, and its nine posts about coffee origins match no search any buyer makes. Of the 61, 22 are marked winnable, because the rivals answered them in a paragraph and the owner has spent fifteen years answering them properly on the phone. The shortlist puts the service and repair searches first, since those bring a caller who already owns a machine and needs someone today.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who you lose to, what you sell, and where you think the ground has shifted. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Set by the number of competitors and the size of their sites. Agreed before anything starts.
3. Access. Read-only access to your own search data, and the names of the three or four rivals to examine.
4. The comparison. Six to ten working days for three competitors of ordinary size. A rival with several hundred pages adds time, and the quote says how much.
5. The walkthrough. Sheet, map and shortlist arrive the day before the call so you can read them cold.

What it costs

Quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the work scales with how many rivals you name and how much they have published. The pricing page sets out the four ways of working here and the bands that carry published numbers. The figure is fixed in writing before anything begins.

What happens next

Most people do one of three things. The shortlist goes into an ordered plan with a budget and a calendar attached. Or the winnable gaps go straight to writing, usually as narrow pages that answer one question completely. Or, when the same rival keeps holding the ground, the next step is taking their pages apart to see what they are doing that you are not. This piece of work stands on its own: you have the list, you know which gaps are worth closing, and nothing further is assumed.