Keyword Gap Category

Keyword Gap offers a side by side comparison of the similarities and differences between keyword profiles of up to five competitors.

Enter the domains and choose the types of keywords (organic, paid, or PLA keywords) to analyze. Then SEMrush will generate a report with data on all of the keywords and each domain’s ranking.

This information is super beneficial to SEO's as they run competitive analyses of their target market and competitors.

Instant SEO competitive analysis between you and your top competitors
See the unique keywords your competitor is ranking for that you are not
Organic, Paid, and PLA (Google Shopping) analysis
Visual charts of keyword overlap between sites

Why should you use this tool?

It’s important to know where you stand against your competitors so that you know where to focus your efforts. So using this tool before starting a campaign can be key.

You will be able to see the keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you’re not. You can identify the keywords that are unique to your domain, and discover gaps in your competitors’ strategies.

Keyword Gap can be incredibly useful for both SEO and PPC campaigns. Keyword Gap is currently located in both the Advertising Toolkit and SEO Toolkit. This way both SEO specialist and PPC specialists are able to capitalize on your competitions missing keywords.

Comparing Your Domain's Keywords to Competitors

To get started, simply enter the names of the domains that you want to compare. To identify your top competitors, use the Organic Research Competitors report or Advertising Research Competitors to identify domains with similar keyword rankings.

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Keyword Type

After entering the domains to compare, select your “keyword type.” You can compare organic, paid, and PLA keywords between domains. You do not have to compare the same keyword types for each domain.

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For example, you can choose to compare one domain’s paid keywords to another domain’s organic keywords.

You can also compare organic keywords to paid keywords for the same domain. Just enter the domain twice and set the keyword types accordingly.

Organic keywords are keywords where a domain has an organic ranking within the top 100 results.
Paid keywords are keywords where the domain is ranking through Google Ads on Google’s top 8 positions.
PLA keywords are keywords that triggered the domain’s product listing ads paid for through Google Shopping.

Keyword Data

For every keyword in the table you will see the following information:

Each competitor’s position in the selected month
Volume
Keyword Difficulty (KD)
Competition Level (Com.)
Results
Trend

Comparing Organic to Paid Keywords

Another clever way to use this tool is to enter the same domain twice to compare organic keywords to paid keywords. This is a quick way to compare your SEO and PPC efforts to ensure you are getting the most ROI.
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You can then determine whether or not you get enough traffic from organic search or if you need more paid traffic. If the ads don’t bring a significant amount of traffic you can stop spending your budget on these paid ads.

Let’s use nike.com for an example. We can see that they are running paid ads on many of the keywords that they already rank #1.

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If you notice this on your site you can try removing keywords from your PPC campaign in order to save money.

Intersection Types - Unique, Common, All

To each domain search bar, there are individual Venn diagrams. When you click on any of these you will be able to determine the intersection types for the keywords. “Intersection type” determines what keywords the tool will present to you.

intersection-type-keywords

All keywords - view every keyword that the entered domains are ranking for in Google’s top 100.
Keywords Unique to the first domain - see the keywords that the first domain ranks for but the second does not.
Common keywords - view all the keywords that both domains have rankings for in Google’s top 100 results.
Unique keywords - view the keywords that are unique to each domain and not shared by any of the other sites.

For a complete overview of the keyword market that these competitors get traffic from, select “All keywords.” This will show all the keywords in one report so you can see the full scope of the niche between domains.

Choose “Common Keywords” to only see the keywords where both websites have a ranking.

After choosing a keyword type and intersection type, you can start the tool and begin finding keyword gaps between the domains. When using this tool, there are two main views to interpret the data: Table and Charts.

Table view provides keyword metrics with sorting and filtering options. Charts, on the other hand, gives you a visual of the size and intersections of the keywords.

Table Filters

To dive deeper into the data, use the filters available. You can add filters for words to compare keywords around a specific subject.

By using filters, you can get specific and find gaps where you should take action. You can pinpoint the keywords where your competitor is on the first page and your on the second page or further.

This generates a list of keywords that you should start optimizing for in order to compete with your competitors for traffic.

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Mobile Keywords

Another great feature of this tool is the ability to compare mobile keywords in any of our mobile databases. See our stats page for an updated list of available mobile databases. Select the mobile icon at the top of the page and the comparison will refresh with the domains’ mobile rankings.

Analyzing mobile keywords is essential if you offer a service that people will search for while they’re on the go. Just like with the desktop report, you are able to pull data for organic, paid and PLA keywords.

Exporting Keywords

At any time, you can export your list of keywords into an excel file, CSV file, or CSV Semicolon. Exports make great research for competitive analysis and can be used for a search marketing campaign. In an export, you’ll be able to see each domain’s rankings for the keywords that they compete for.

You can choose to export selected keywords, all keywords or the first 100, 500, 1,000, 3,000, 10,000 and 30,000. If you are export selected keywords, you can also clear them from your list after your export is complete.

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If you are interested in more ways to outperform the competition, enjoy our "How to Benchmark Opportunities for Growth" quick guide.

SEMrush