Content gap analysis in one afternoon: a method that ends with a publishing list

AUGUST 7, 2026 · 5 MIN READ · SEO / CONTENT STRATEGY / COMPETITORS

A content gap analysis finds the topics your buyers are searching for where your competitors have a page and you have nothing. Done properly, it takes one afternoon and ends with a ranked list of pages to publish. Done the way it usually goes, it takes three weeks and ends with a 400-row spreadsheet that everyone agrees is very thorough and nobody ever opens again. This is the afternoon version.

Step 1: pick your real search competitors (30 minutes)

Your search competitors are whoever ranks for your money terms— not the companies your sales team complains about. Take five to ten queries a buyer would type when they are close to needing what you sell, search them, and write down who keeps showing up. Expect surprises: for many SaaS products the recurring names are a niche tool you have never heard of and two publishers who do not even sell software. Those are your competitors for this exercise, because they are the ones absorbing your buyers’ attention.

Then cut the list to two or three. Comparing against six competitors does not make the analysis six times better; it makes the output list six times longer and the afternoon six times less likely to end with decisions.

Step 2: inventory their topics (60–90 minutes)

For each competitor, build a rough list of what they have published. You do not need tooling for this — three sources cover it:

• Their sitemap. Try /sitemap.xml. It is the closest thing to a complete, machine-honest list of their pages, and most sites leave it wide open.
• Their /blog and /resources indexes. Skim titles; you are collecting topics, not reading posts.
• site: searches. site:competitor.com plus a topic keyword shows what Google has indexed from them on that subject — including the pages their own navigation has forgotten about.

Record topics, not URLs — “pricing-page teardown”, “integration with X”, “beginner guide to Y”. You will end up with maybe 60–150 topics per competitor. Anything you already cover, strike immediately. What remains is the raw gap.

Step 3: filter for intent you can serve (60 minutes)

This is the step that separates the useful version from the spreadsheet version, so it gets its own rule: a gap is only worth filling if the query behind it has intent your product can serve. Your competitor having a page is evidence the topic exists, not evidence it is worth your effort — some of their pages are their mistakes.

Go through the surviving topics and label each one:

• Buying intent— the searcher has the problem you solve and is close to choosing a tool. Comparisons, alternatives, “how to do X” where X is your job to be done.
• Adjacent intent — right audience, wrong moment. Worth writing eventually; usually where topical authority gets built.
• Not for us — traffic that would never become a customer. Strike it without sentiment, however large the search volume looks.

Be ruthless with the third label. The graveyard of content marketing is full of posts that ranked beautifully for queries the business could not monetize.

Step 4: output a publishing list, not a spreadsheet (30 minutes)

The deliverable is a ranked list of pages to write, with an intent label on each — buying-intent gaps first, adjacent second. Ten to twenty items is plenty; if you have more, you cut too little in step 3. Each line should be concrete enough to hand to a writer: the topic, the query it targets, the intent label, and one sentence on the angle your competitor missed. A list like that gets worked through. A 400-row export with twelve columns of metrics gets admired once and archived.

Re-run it quarterly

Competitors publish, engines reshuffle, and a gap analysis is a snapshot. Put a recurring date in the calendar and redo the exercise each quarter — it is faster the second time, because steps 1 and 2 mostly carry over and you are diffing against your own previous list. The teams that treat this as a loop rather than a project are the ones whose content calendar stops being guesswork.

If you would rather not build the inventory by hand, HawkOrbit’s Content Gap tool does steps 1 and 2 for you — it compares your content against one to three competitors and surfaces the topics they cover that you do not. The intent filtering in step 3 stays your job, which is fitting: it is the part that requires knowing your own business.