Finding competitor keyword gaps

A specialist bike shop has a decent site, good reviews and a handful of rankings, and still can't work out why the shop two towns over gets found for everything. The answer is usually in plain view: the rival built pages for searches the bike shop never knew existed. A competitor keyword gap is a search a rival ranks for and you don't, and it is the cheapest research you will ever do, because someone else has already proved that the demand exists and that a business like yours can rank for it.

Your search competitors aren't the businesses you'd name

The competitor for a keyword is whoever occupies the results for it, and that set changes from keyword to keyword. When you look at who actually ranks for the searches on your shortlist, three kinds of site show up.

Direct rivals sell what you sell, to the same kind of customer, in your market. These are the ones worth studying, because what works for them can work for you.

Directories, marketplaces and publishers dominate many commercial results. A national listings site ranking for "plumber Leeds" is not a model you can copy; it ranks on a scale you don't have. Note them, then ignore them.

Adjacent trades share a few keywords but not a customer. A heating engineer and a plumber overlap on boilers and nowhere else.

Pick three to five direct rivals by searching your most important keywords and noting which real businesses appear again and again. A rival you admire who never appears there is a business competitor, not a search competitor.

Three kinds of gap, and what each one tells you

Once you have rivals, every keyword they rank for falls into one of three buckets relative to your site.

They rank and you have no page. This is a missing-page gap, and it's the strongest signal you'll get: a business like yours ranks for it, so the demand is real and the keyword is winnable. The fix is a new page.

You both rank and they're higher. This is a weak-page gap. You have the page; it's losing. Open both pages side by side and ask which one answers the search more completely, matches the intent better and has earned more links from other sites. The fix is usually improving what you have rather than building something new.

They own a whole topic you haven't touched. A rival with a cluster of pages on electric bike servicing, when you have none, has left you a missing-section gap: the largest and slowest kind to close, planned as a group of pages rather than one.

Two things that look like gaps and aren't: their brand terms, which nobody else can rank for, and keywords for things you don't sell. A gap is evidence of demand, not an instruction to chase it.

Find the gaps with what's public

You don't need a paid database for this. A rival's site tells you its keyword strategy if you know where to look.

1. Read their navigation and their XML sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml. The list of pages is their keyword map: every service, location, category and guide page exists because somebody decided that search was worth a page, and the title tag usually names the keyword.
2. Search the phrase from each title and see who appears. If they rank and you don't, you've found a gap. The free Google rank checker confirms a position for any domain and keyword in a market, faster than scrolling by hand.
3. Check your own side in Google Search Console. Its Performance report lists the queries your site appears for, so you can separate missing-page gaps from weak-page gaps without guessing.
4. Record it. A sheet with the keyword, the rival, their ranking page, your page or "none", and the intent rung from the last lesson is all the structure you need.

Do this for each rival and the gaps will start to repeat. The repeats are the ones to take seriously: three rivals all holding a page for "bike fitting service" is a stronger signal than one.

Pick the gaps worth closing first

A long gap list is a to-do list with no order. Sort it with four questions, in this sequence.

1. Which rung is it on? Ready and Service-seeking gaps come first, because closing one changes revenue; Informational gaps come last. The buying-intent ladder gives you the rung.
2. Could you honestly be the best answer? A gap for a service you offer half-heartedly is a page that will never be good enough to rank.
3. Is it winnable now? Look at the pages that rank. If they're thin, old or from small businesses, the gap is open; if they're deep pages from sites with far more links than you, it's a gap for next year.
4. Does it belong to a group? Several gaps pointing at one missing section are better planned as a cluster than as scattered pages. Topic clusters covers how.

Take the top handful into the next lesson, where each gap becomes a row in your keyword map with a page assigned to it.

What to take away

• Your search competitors are the real businesses that appear repeatedly in the results for your keywords, not the rivals you'd name from memory.
• A gap is a keyword a rival ranks for and you don't, and it comes in three kinds: missing page, weak page and missing section.
• A rival's navigation, sitemap and page titles are their keyword map, and they're public.
• Sort gaps by intent rung, honesty of fit, winnability and whether they form a cluster, then close the top few before hunting for more.

Next

Turn your shortlist and gaps into one page each, with no two pages fighting for the same search, in Mapping keywords to pages.