"Content gap analysis" sounds like an enterprise product with a demo call. The core of it, though, is a comparison any site owner can run with Search Console exports and one afternoon. The goal: find the topics where competitors earn traffic and you have either nothing or something half-formed.
Step one: pick the right competitors
Not the giants — the sites that actually outrank you for the queries you want. Search your five most valuable topics and note who appears repeatedly on page one that isn't a household name. Three to five of those is your real competitive set. A gap versus Amazon is trivia; a gap versus a site your size is a to-do list.
Step two: inventory their content
Crawl their sitemap (it's public: theirsite.com/sitemap.xml) and list their article URLs. You don't need their traffic numbers. URL slugs are embarrassingly honest — /best-time-to-post-on-linkedin tells you the exact query they targeted. Group their URLs into topics; you'll see their strategy in twenty minutes of reading slugs.
Step three: the three-column sheet
Column A: their topic clusters. Column B: your coverage (none / thin / solid). Column C: evidence — do you rank anywhere in the top 50 for that topic's core query? Check with site: and a few manual searches. The sheet sorts itself into three actions: create (they rank, you have nothing), improve (you have something thin), and skip (their content is genuinely weak — the gap is theirs, not yours; don't copy bad work).
Step four: sequence honestly
Start with "improve" items — your existing page plus one refresh cycle beats a from-scratch post for the same query. Then create for the topics where your expertise is real, not just where their traffic looks big. A gap you fill with thin content isn't a gap closed; it's a door opened for them to re-pass you.
Redo this every six months. Competitor strategies decay — half of what they rank for this year will be untouched by next year. Gaps are a renewable resource.
