An SEO Gap Analysis research project is possibly the most crucial component of an effective SEO strategy. How do you know which keyword groupings are relevant? Want to understand competitor SEO performance? Our guide will help you to devise an effective keyword targeting strategy using the SEO Gap Analysis.
How do I get the keyword ranking data?
Conduct keyword research to identify all of the relevant keywords in your industry. Add a relevant tag to each keyword from the research so keywords can be grouped together by theme, for example, “Enterprise”. Upload keywords along with tags into a keyword tracking tool, for example, “GetStat”. Track the keywords against your own website in order to get the rankings of your website for each keyword.
If your ranking tracking tool does provide a top 20 SERP report….
If your ranking tool provides a top 20 SERP report, you will not need to track the rankings for each of your competitors. A top 20 SERP report will provide you will all the websites ranking for each keyword in the top 20 positions. This is the best way to find out all the websites who rank for a keyword and sometimes it can surprise you!
If your ranking tracking tool does not provide a top 20 SERP report….
Track keywords against competitor websites in order to get their rankings for each keyword. This will only provide you with the rankings for the specified competitors but can still be very useful to compare your domain to a direct competitor.
5. Download ranking report into excel to start the analysis.
If your ranking tracking tool does provide a top 20 SERP report….
Download out the top 20 SERP report in Excel, the spreadsheet should include the below columns, however, if they don’t you will need to VLOOKUP the missing data from appropriate data sources. The one column which may need to be added manually is a “domain” column as a number of tools will provide the ranking URL but not the domain:
Keyword Monthly search volume Ranking Domain Ranking URL Tags
If your ranking tracking tool does not provide a top 20 SERP report….
Download out the ranking report for your website and competitors into Excel. As these will be downloaded out separately you will need to create a consolidated data view of all websites which includes the following columns:
Keyword Monthly search volume Ranking Domain Ranking URL Tags

Track keywords against competitor websites in order to get their rankings for each keyword.
6. Create a pivot table where the table includes “Domain” as rows, “Count of keyword” and “Average Rank” for values. This will allow you to see which domain is ranking well, the number of keywords they are ranking for and the average rank for those keywords.

