Finding the best keyword through the keyword gap tool for a full analysis of your keyword with keywords of your competitors! It is indeed from this keyword or backlink gap tool that your content will be written. What is a good keyword and how do I choose it with the keyword gap tool?
Every day, more than 3 billion queries are made on Google. You can imagine the difficulty of getting your pinout of the game to occupy the first page of search results.
And yes! Many of your competitors, like you, want to achieve the best possible ranking on search engines since a well-placed site has a better chance of being visited.
The catch? Most companies fail to think upstream on which queries their audience could find if a fast enough positioning is achievable and therefore do not supply their site with relevant content.
Fortunately, at Hub Media, we never miss this semantic study that takes place during the preparation of your SEO mission. Whether you want to optimize your visibility, launch advertising campaigns, or set up a blog with an effective content strategy, we invite you to discover below why Keyword gap in SEMRush is so important.
What is a Keyword?
In the natural referencing activity, the definition of the keyword is as follows: word or series of words typed or dictated by an Internet user to perform a search on Google.
As an internet user, when you do research, you type in a keyword phrase consisting of one or more words depending on the results you want from Google.
As a publisher or website owner, your goal is to appear high in Google results when someone types in a key phrase to find you.
Choosing the right keyword is therefore decisive in order to capture the Internet users who are looking for you. To achieve this, it is essential to know the habits of Internet users in order to find the right keywords.
What are your Google search habits?
According to a 2016 study by SEMRush on Internet users’ search habits, you type an average of 3.5 words per request and requests made up of one word only represent 2.4% of requests.
Below, the number of words per request:
- 1 word: 2.4% of requests,
- 2 words: 22.9%
- 3 words: 34.1%
- 4 words: 22%
- 5 words: 10.8%
- 6 words: 4.6%
- 7 words: 1.9%
- more than 7 words: 1.2%
This study is based on a database of 100 million keywords (key phrases) representing 6.3 billion monthly searches on Google. In particular, it makes it possible to highlight the potential of key expressions made up of several words.
We call a query composed of several words the long tail, it represents more than 80% of the queries typed on search engines.
You use a long tail query when, for example, you need an answer to the question: what is a keyword?
In the series of questions asked to Google, the prize goes to: how to make love?
Long tail key phrases are also used when searching for a business near you. You then type a query of the type: store + type of store + name of the city. These are so-called geolocated searches and use local referencing techniques.
The use of long-tail queries will certainly increase with the rise of voice search, on the contrary, generic key expressions (1 or 2 words) will be used less. This parameter must be taken into account when choosing the right keywords.
What is Keyword Gap?
Keyword Gap Analysis in SEMRush is all about finding keywords that drive traffic to your competition, but not to your site.
You might want to know what is keyword gap, in detail. Well, the Keyword Gap tool offers a side-by-side comparison between keyword profiles of up to five competitors. All you have to do is enter the domains and choose the types of classification of keywords ( keywords organic, payment PLA) to analyze.
The Keyword Gap tool offers a side-by-side comparison between keyword profiles of up to five competitors .
All you have to do is enter the domains and choose the keyword ranking types (organic keywords, paid PLA) to analyze. The report will then show you all the top opportunities for each site, the keyword overlays, the common keywords shared by all the sites, and more.
This information is very beneficial when planning an SEO campaign, as you can see exactly where the best opportunities are in your niche.
- Instant SEO competitive analysis between you and your main competitors
- Ability to compare subdomains, subfolders and URLs (available only with a Guru or Business subscription)
- Visual charts of keyword overlays between sites
- Find the unique keywords that your competitor ranks and you don’t
- Organic, paid and PLA (Google Shopping) analysis
- Ability to compare mobile and desktop keywords
Take the example of “cell phone” for a cell phone repair business. It will be better to specify other unequivocal terms in the following key words. Like, for example, “mobile-repair” or “mobile-repairer”. Even be even more explicit, which leads to a decrease in the number of visitors but an increase in the quality of these prospects, with a third word. Like the example “repair-cell-phones”. SEOs gave the name of long tail.
We will help you implement a study to choose the keywords that define your business, drawing on monthly Internet searches and search engine results. In an SEO strategy, we will study your market, the competition, and determine the choice of keywords by setting priorities of importance.
What is the objective of Keyword Gap Analysis?
Keyword gap analysis can help you identify competitor’s content gaps. These gaps are the differences between what your Content Marketing strategy offers and what your audience is looking for. These gaps are often taken advantage of by competing companies, so it is essential to know the main areas that may suffer from this and work to avoid this problem.
These gaps are generated when the Marketing team is not being 100% efficient in the way it plans and executes its strategy.
Gaps are an issue that negatively impact the potency of campaigns , but they can be easily identified.
In this post, we’ll go into more detail about this concept of Keyword gaps, how they happen and what practices can help detect them.
Unfortunately, in reality, everything is not that simple, a Keyword Gap Analysis can improve your chances of appearing in a good position on Google. The competition and popularity of a keyword are criteria to take into account when making choices.
In summary, a Keyword Gap Analysis should meet the following criteria:
- The relevance: on or keywords should best describe your business and be used by your customers.
- The potential: the keyword must generate qualified traffic on your site. If it is never typed on Google, its potential will be zero.
- The competition: if the competition is too strong on a keyword, it will consider finding an alternative and exploit the long tail.
- Gone are the days when it was enough to fill in the “keywords” meta tag with lots of keywords. In addition, the arrival of artificial intelligence with the rank brain algorithm adds an unknown factor in the search for the right key expressions.
What is Keyword Overlap in Semrush?
Not too long ago, SEMrush’s Traffic Analysis released its Audience Overlap feature: it could compare two websites and show you the percentage and an absolute number of users visiting both sites.
The new Audience Insights report has replaced the Audience Overlap tab, and it begins with a chart showing the shared and unique audience volumes for the sites of your choice.
This is also the case when you enter your own site in Traffic Analysis, but only with a maximum of 4 competing sites.
By using Audience Insights, you can:
- See a list of sites with a similar audience;
- Compare shared and unique audiences;
- Analyze your competitive segment and the multiple intersections between rivals in an easily understandable diagram;
- Enable Safe Mode to eliminate adult sites.
How to use SEMrush for Keyword Gap Analysis?
Welcome to the revamped Keyword Gaps tool. Remember, with Keyword Gaps, you can compare your domain’s keyword profiles and those of your top competitors’ domains side-by-side and find out which unique keywords you’re not taking advantage of. Thus, you can perform better than other domains.
We’ve changed the principle of the tool slightly, but we’re sure it will be more convenient for you: we’ve improved the report preview so that the most needed keywords are just a click away!
#1. Enter up to five URLs/subdomains/subfolders
As you know, previously the tool could only compare entire domains and nothing more specific. Now, when you get started, you can choose to compare specific URLs, subdomains, subfolders or a combination
Thus, it will be easy to determine:
- What keywords you didn’t use in a specific article
- Which subdomains or subfolders on a site have insufficient content to rank well for keywords
- As before, you can still choose the types of keywords you compare for each domain: organic, paid, or PLA.
#2. See the best growth points
The new Top Opportunities widget shows you the keywords you should pay attention to first. Depending on the types of keywords you compare, the results in the widget will be determined in different ways.
Try to compare:
- Organic keyword profiles from different domains to see the highest volume keywords that your domain is not taking advantage of.
- Organic and paid results for your domain to determine where you can save on your advertising budget since you already have a high organic rank.
- Paid and organic results for different domains to see the keywords for which a competitor tries to drag traffic to their site , such as your domain’s position in the top 20 results and a competitor that launches ads.
#3 Check out an instant visual SEO competitive analysis
The Keyword Overlap feature has been improved to create a better visual picture of your market’s position compared to competitors.
Overlay mechanisms will react differently to any filter applied. Also, if you click on the intersection of the circles, you will see a table with a list of keywords related to that section. Do the test!
#4 Filter keywords by “intersection type”
Everything you used to do with the “intersection type” filter is still available. Just select the domain you want to analyze under “All keyword information for” and apply one of the filters:
- Shared – keywords that all domains rank for
- Missed – keywords for which all domains rank in the Top 100, but not yours (the site you put in the first field labeled “You”)
- Weak – keywords for which your competitors’ domains rank higher than yours, but where you rank too.
- Strong – keywords for which all competitors rank lower than your domain
- Unique – keywords for which only your domain (or the analyzed domain) manages to rank
- All Keywords – a combined listing of all keyword positions among competitors
#5 Exporting Keywords
At any time you can export your list of keywords to an excel, CSV or CSV Semicolon file. The export functions of this tool are a great ally in competitive research analysis and can be used to draw a roadmap for a search marketing campaign.
In the exported file, you will be able to see the positions of each domain for the keywords they compete for.
In the export widget, you can choose to export the selected keywords, all the keywords in the list, or just the first 100, 500, 1,000, 3,000, 10,000, and 30,000.
If you are exporting selected keywords, you can also remove them from your list once the export is complete.
Before exporting, you can also add keywords to Keyword Manager. Keyword Manager lets you update keyword metrics for up-to-date statistics on demand.
Use Keywords in Your Website Content
Once your keywords are organized into groups, you’ll have a list of topics that you can begin targeting in online search. You can create new content to drive organic search traffic, or create paid search campaigns to capture paid search traffic.
To capture more organic search traffic, we recommend separating your groups into three categories. The first category below includes the keywords that will require the least effort to target.
Keyword groups where you already have a lot of content: For this category, focus on updating your existing content to more directly target your new keywords. This could mean changing content titles, section headers, or adding a new content section to existing articles.
Keyword groups where you have some content: To target your new keywords in this category, you should do a mix of updating your existing content and publishing brand new content.
Keyword groups where you have no existing content: To target keywords in this category, you’ll need to create a whole new body of content on your website. This category will require the most effort to drive more traffic to your website, and should be prioritized last.
Measure Results Using Position Tracking
After you’ve done the work to target your new keywords, you’ll want to monitor your progress. To do so, you can use SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool. This tool allows you to upload the keywords you’ve started targeting, and monitor your SERP rankings over time.
What is Keyword Difficulty or KD?
Keyword Difficulty (KD) is a metric that tells you how much SEO effort it takes to organically rank a page in the top 10 results on Google for a certain keyword. You can use KD% to plan your SEO campaigns and set priorities. Researching keywords with low KD% scores will help you find long-tail keywords and unlikely results for your campaigns. The higher the percentage, the harder the competition will be and the more work you have to work on before you see results.
Suppose you are considering two keywords for an SEO campaign: keyword A, which has a KD of 40%, and keyword B, which has a KD of 80%. Focusing on keyword A, you have a better chance of ranking faster on the first page. If you try to rank for keyword B, it would be more difficult and take longer.
To find the keyword difficulty for any keyword, go to Keyword Overview and enter the keyword in the search bar. Then. Below we can see that the “SEO” is rated at 88%. You’ll also see a column titled KD% in any Semrush report that contains keywords. You can filter or sort these columns to find your best opportunities.
The full list of Semrush reports where you’ll see keyword difficulty includes: Need to find KD scores for your target keyword list? You can check up to 100 keywords at a time via the keyword preview. You can also filter any of our keyword reports by KD% range to focus on a specific difficulty range. For very low volume keywords that are of little interest to customers, we may not calculate KD% until they are requested by a customer. All you need to do is add your keyword to a list in the keyword manager and find the refresh metrics button.
Once this refresh is done, you should see a live calculation of that keyword’s KD score, along with other metrics like click potential and SERP features.
One thing to note is that you don’t want to confuse seo keyword density with competition density. While both metrics estimate how difficult it is to target a keyword; Keyword difficulty (KD%) represents the difficulty of ranking in organic search (SEO) Competitive density (Com.) Measures the difficulty of ranking via paid search (PPC). Competitive density is based on the advertisers we see serving PPC ads on the SERPs.
Keyword type
Enter the URL to compare, select “type of keyword”. It refers to the type of search engine results you are analyzing.
- Organic keywords are those for which a domain has an organic ranking in the top 100 results.
- Paid keywords are those for which the domain ranks via Google Ads on the first 8 positions.
- PLA keywords are keywords that have triggered paid domain SEO ads through Google Shopping.
Click “select the type of keyword for each domain” here, you can compare different types of keywords between sites.
For example, you can choose to compare your paid keywords to organic keywords.
You can also compare different types of keywords on the same domain. Just enter the domain name twice to set the keyword types accordingly.
Once these parameters are defined, choose your regional database and press “Compare”.
You can now report information in the Top Opportunities widget, the Keyword Overlap chart, and the Keywords table at the bottom.
How is Keyword difficulty calculated?
After updating the formula, we can now categorize the score into 6 main compartments. The first three are achievable and great opportunities for new sites, and the other three are more difficult. 0-14 = Very easy. These are the best opportunities to start ranking new web pages on Google as soon as possible without backlinks. 15-29 = Easy. These keywords have some competition, but it is still possible to rank them when you are just starting out.
To be able to rank them, you’ll need quality content focused on keyword intent. 30-49 = Possible.
A little more competition. You will need well-structured and unique content that is optimized appropriately for your keywords. The first three buckets will take more effort to rank, but they could still be acquired over time. 50-69 = Difficult.
You will need a few backlinks in addition to your well-structured, useful, and optimized content to be competitive here. 70-84 = Difficult. Even tougher competition. These keywords will take more effort in terms of getting referral domains with higher authority in order to rank your well-optimized and useful content on the first pages. 85-100 = Very hard.
What is keyword difficulty KD, well the answer is it should be taken into account when planning keyword research campaigns. On every report on Semrush, you can set a KD filter to find the best opportunities for you.
This can be useful in a number of cases. For example: When you create a new campaign, In a competitive analysis, run a keyword gap analysis to discover keywords from your competitor’s SEO strategy that could be good targets for you Audit an existing site and prioritize keywords for SEO versus PPC Prioritize long-tail keywords and handy fruits for faster SEO gains Filter high KD% keywords that would only waste your time/budget Target the toughest keywords with PPC instead of/in addition to SEO What is the Semrush keyword difficulty formula?
The new formula for keyword difficulty on keyword density checker Semrush can be explained in three main steps.
Step 1: SERP analysis. First, we take a look at the top 10 ranking pages in Google’s SERP and identify the quality of those pages. If you want to outperform your competition, you need to know how powerful their SEO is.
We check the number of referring domains pointing to each page, as well as the ratio of followed / untracked links and the overall authority score of the domains.
Next, we identify the median value of each and use it for the formula. Factoring in the median values in the top 10 helps to avoid inflated keyword difficulty scores that might put you off. For example, if a certain keyword has a super strong # 1 ranked page on the SERP, but the rest of the results aren’t as strong, you can still compete and get traffic from a top-3.
Step 2: Keyword Analysis. Next, we take a look at the keyword’s search volume, word count, SERP features, whether branded or not, and a few other features.
These metrics all have different weights depending on their likely impact on the first page ranking challenge. These parameters (and the weight they carry) include: Parameter Weight Median Share Number of referring domains for URL ranking 41.22% Median authority score for domain ranking 16.99% Search volume 9.47 % Median follow-to-no-follow ratio for URL ranking 9.17% Featured excerpt 4, 74% Instant Response 4.07% Brand Keyword 3.50% Local Pack 3.39% Knowledge Panel 2.71% Top Stories 2.03% People Also Ask 1.36% Site Links 1.36 % Number of words in the keyword -2.24% No SERP functionality -8.59% Step 3: Weigh everything by country.
Finally, after calculating KD% for a keyword, we will weigh the score according to the regional database it is in.
This helps us to avoid outliers and inflated/deflated scores in less populated countries.
Final Thoughts
Now you know that the Keyword Gap is an amazing way to analyze competitors. It becomes more essential when you are a small business overshadowed by all of those huge online presences, growing can be difficult.
You may not be able to afford to spend hours a day on marketing research like these big companies. However, you can see which keywords and backlinks are driving people to their websites and use them to grow – or experiment with similar keywords and gain an edge over the competition.
Know which ones are relevant and how to add them effectively to your content, and you will definitely notice an increase in traffic.
