What Are Content Gaps — Can AI Identify Content Marketing Gaps?

With companies churning out new content daily, an effective content marketing strategy requires constant optimization to address content gaps. 

Content gaps are relevant information (or content) that’s missing from your website. 

They are essentially opportunities to expand content and improve search engine rankings and authority. So it's important to identify and address them as soon as possible. 

Fortunately, this is easier than ever with the help of content optimization tools and artificial intelligence (AI).

Read on to learn about content gaps, their role in content strategy, and how to identify missing information from your website.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

• Content gaps highlight missing information that's relevant to your website.
• There are three main types of gaps: topic, keyword, and media.
• This missing information can impact your content strategy’s SEO, user experience, and competitive edge.
• You can identify content marketing gaps through keyword research, competitor analysis, and content audits.
• Using content optimization tools or prompts with AI tools can help you identify missing relevant content, make data-driven decisions, and predict trends.

What Are Content Gaps?

Content gaps are relevant topics or information your audience can’t find on your website. 

Let’s say you run a digital marketing agency, for example. If a user searches your site for information about why they should hire a digital marketing agency and can’t find it, you could consider it a content gap.

Although they can come in various forms, three of the most common types of content marketing gaps include:

Topic gaps

Your site may provide information on many relevant topics, but does it cover all of your audience’s interests? If not, you may have a topic gap. 

For example, a site focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) strategies may be missing information on up-and-coming topics like increasing SEO traffic in the age of AI.

Keyword gaps

Are you covering all the most relevant keywords for your niche? Keyword gaps often occur with long-tail keywords and trending topics. 

For example, a topic like “SEO techniques” that doesn’t include the emerging long-tail keyword “SEO for voice search” could be considered a keyword gap.

Media gaps

With 91% of businesses using video as a marketing tool, addressing media gaps — or a lack of video content on your site — has become increasingly important to stay competitive and engage users. 

For example, you could include how-to videos to demonstrate how to use your products or services.

It’s worth the effort to identify content gaps when you consider what filling in those gaps can do for your content strategy.

How Do Content Gaps Affect Content Strategy?

If your current content marketing strategy isn’t getting the level of results you’re looking for, it could be due to content gaps. 

Here’s how content gaps can affect your content strategy:

• SEO: If your site isn’t ranking for relevant keywords, you’re likely missing out on valuable opportunities to rank on the SERPs — opportunities that your competitors may take advantage of.
• User experience: Content gaps can lead to high bounce rates, which can also impact rankings. On the other hand, filling content gaps encourages users to stick around because it provides them with the information they’re looking for.
• Competitive edge: If you can identify and cover relevant topics you and your competitors are missing, you can gain a competitive advantage. The next time users search for related information online, they may opt for your content if it’s more comprehensive.

Due to ever-changing search trends, market shifts, and audience needs and interests, consistent content gap identification is key to getting results. However, this doesn’t have to be an overwhelming process. You just need to find the method that works best for you.

How to Identify Content Gaps

Methods of identifying content gaps often require effort, but they are a go-to choice for many content marketers for one important reason — they work.

Here are a few tried-and-true ways to identify content gaps:

• Keyword research: Find relevant keywords you’re missing from your website and optimize them in your content. Depending on the topic, you can update old content with these missing keywords or use them to create something new.
• Competitor analysis: Perform a competitor analysis to see if competitor websites include keywords or topics you’re missing. If they are, you can jump on those opportunities and any extra traffic that comes with them.
• Content audit: Check your website’s content to see if you’re missing important topics or keywords. Would users need to look elsewhere for more information about something?

Although effective, the problem with traditional methods is that they often require a lot of time-consuming manual work. At least, they did in the past.

Fortunately, quickly and easily addressing content marketing gaps is one way that AI is revolutionizing the world of content marketing.

Can AI Identify Content Gaps?

Yes, AI can help you identify content gaps. Using AI to perform a gap analysis comes with several benefits, including:

• Saving time: AI algorithms can analyze large data sets in much less time than humans.
• Making data-driven decisions: AI can give you actionable recommendations and insights directly based on the data at hand.
• Predicting trends: AI excels at predictive SEO, which can help you prevent content gaps by predicting future trending keywords and topics.

The best part? It can be easy to use AI to find missing content — once you know what you’re doing, that is.

How to Identify Content Gaps With AI and Content Optimization Tools

Now, let’s look at two ways to identify content gaps: content optimization tools and AI prompts.

Content optimization tools

Content optimization tools may use AI (depending on the tool) to analyze existing content and suggest missing keywords. 

Some of the most popular options include:

• SurferSEO
• MarketMuse
• Frase.io

Though effective, one of the main problems with these options is that they can be expensive.

Consider trying Originality.ai’s free content optimizer. In addition to comparing keyword density to competitors, this optimization tool includes a ChatGPT prompt feature that you can export to help you expand articles to include missing keywords. Speaking of which…

AI prompts

Some chatbots like ChatGPT can also help you perform a gap analysis. 

Here are example AI prompts you can use to identify different content gaps:

• I run a website [insert link] that focuses on [niche], similar to [competitor website]. Perform a content gap analysis to see which topics they’ve covered that are missing from my website.
• I’m in [niche] industry. List keywords where [competitor website] outranks [my website] in this niche. Identify vulnerabilities in their content, like a lack of in-depth analysis or low-quality backlinks, that I can take advantage of to outrank them.
• I'm going to give you a blog post with the primary keyword [insert keyword], and a list of related keywords. Identify which keywords or subtopics I’ve missed in the blog post.

You may need to play around with the prompts or different AI tools to find what works best for your needs.

Final Thoughts

Identifying and addressing content gaps is key to an effective content marketing strategy. Although you can do this manually, using AI to perform a content gap analysis can help you speed up the process.

However, it’s important to remember that AI needs human oversight for best results. So, review it with a critical eye and fact-check it in case any AI hallucinations come up that could compromise your content.

Discover more ways to improve your content marketing strategies:

• What Is Search Intent? How Is AI Changing Search Intent Marketing?
• 5 Benefits of SEO Forecasting Guide
• 10 Types of Content Optimization Tools