A content gap analysis is a structured audit that answers one question: what are your potential customers searching for that your website currently has no good answer to? The "gap" is the space between the full universe of searches relevant to your business and the subset your content actually covers competitively. There are really three kinds of gaps worth finding: 1. Competitor gaps — keywords your competitors rank for and you don't. If three competing HVAC companies all rank for "heat pump rebates Ontario" and you have no page on it, that's demand you're conceding. This is the classic version of the analysis, and tools like Ahrefs and Semrush have literal "Content Gap" reports that intersect competitor keyword profiles against yours. 2. Funnel gaps — stages of the buying journey you don't serve. Many businesses have service pages (bottom-funnel) but nothing answering the comparison and research questions that come earlier ("tankless vs. tank water heater," "how much does furnace replacement cost"). You lose those buyers before they ever reach the stage you do cover. 3. Performance gaps — topics you technically cover but rank poorly for. A page sitting at position 40 for a valuable query is often a bigger opportunity than a brand-new topic, because improving existing content is faster than building authority from zero. How to actually run one: - Assemble your keyword universe. Pull your own Search Console queries (including everything you get impressions for but no clicks), competitor rankings from an SEO tool, People Also Ask questions, and — underrated — your sales team's list of questions customers actually ask. - Map it against your site. For each meaningful query cluster: do we have a page? Does it genuinely answer this? Where does it rank? - Classify each gap: no page exists / page exists but weak / page exists but targets the wrong intent (a common one — a service page trying to answer an informational question, or vice versa). - Prioritize by business value, not volume. A 50-searches-per-month query with buying intent ("emergency plumber Kanata") beats a 5,000-volume informational query in most service businesses. Score each gap on search demand, intent, competition, and closeness to revenue. - Turn it into a content roadmap with owners and dates — a gap analysis that ends as a spreadsheet nobody executes is the industry's most common deliverable. A worked example: a client selling accounting services had strong pages for "small business accountant Ottawa" but nothing for the ~40 question queries their buyers search first — "when does a small business need an accountant," "accountant vs. bookkeeper," "how much does a small business accountant cost." Filling twelve of those gaps over four months roughly tripled their organic entrances and, more importantly, put them in front of buyers two steps before the hiring decision. Frequency: a full analysis once or twice a year, with a lightweight quarterly refresh from Search Console data, is right for most businesses. Your competitors publish, search behaviour shifts, and AI search surfaces now reward comprehensive topical coverage — gaps reopen continuously. One caution: a gap analysis tells you what to cover, not how much to publish. Filling gaps with thin, templated pages creates a different problem (Google demotes low-value scaled content). Each gap deserves a genuinely useful answer or none at all.