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A search demand gap analysis is an essential part of a search engine marketing audit to check how well your search engine optimisation and/or pay-per-click marketing is working for your company. It will show you the commercial opportunity available from search engine marketing and compare your current performance against this opportunity, so showing sales growth potential. It’s often completed as part of a quarterly or annual review, but due to seasonal fluctuations in search volumes and changes in Google’s ranking approaches and competitor activity it should also be completed more regularly; we suggest monthly.
Here’s an example of a gap analysis. As, you can see it’s based around the main strategic high volume generic for a particular market, in this case related to LCD TVs.
A gap analysis will show you where you are underperforming for particular keyphrases or products and you can then set goals and then brief an agency or colleagues to take actions to improve performance in these areas.
A gap analysis also has the benefit that it enables you to compare performance of your search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing. Since these channels are often treated separately, it helps bring these together in an integrated way to compare their relative performance. For example, in the example above where bounce rates are relatively high or market share is relatively low the cells are shaded in red.
A gap analysis is a comparison of the potential visits, leads or sales from searchers arriving on the site against what the company is actually achieving. It should focus on high volume phrases which are typically two to three keyword phrases including brand searches. However, a form of the analysis can also be completed for longer ‘long-tail’ keyphrases made up of more than 4 keywords.
As for the review of the performance of all traffic sources, the main measures you need to look at are traffic volume, quality and cost:
These measures are all available from your web analytics system such as Google Analytics from which data is extracted for the analysis.
You should also measure the percentage traffic gap which can be calculated by comparing the number of visits against demand indicated by a keyword research tool. We recommend using the Google Keyword Tool to review demand in a single country. It’s best to select the exact match reporting although it can be worthwhile to select phrase match for a different form of long-tail review.
Dr Dave Chaffey is Insights Director at ClickThrough Marketing. As Insights Director he’s responsible for the quality of analysis and reporting used to review and improve the performance of clients’ natural and paid search campaigns. He’s also involved in consulting on digital and search strategy for ClickThrough’s clients through analytics-based audits typically using Google Analytics for which he holds the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ).
You can also read his advice on best practice and updates on the latest developments in digital marketing at his Smart Insights Digital Marketing advice site. Dave is a recognised expert in digital marketing, listed in 2004 by the Chartered Institute of Marketing as one of 50 marketing ‘gurus’ worldwide who have shaped the future of Marketing. Dave is author of five best-selling business books including Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice and eMarketing eXcellence (with PR Smith). He is also author of the Econsultancy best practice guides to Search Engine Optimisation, Paid Search Marketing, Web site design and Managing Digital Channels. Dave also contributed the foreword to ClickThrough’s first two search engine marketing books.
Are you spending time worrying about SEO? Or worse, spending untold money trying to move up the search engine results pages only to find that for no good reason your website has vanished from the top 100 pages?
If you find your days and nights are haunted by keyword research, writing META tags, hunting down keyword density tools, aching over whether the copy is sufficiently optimised……
Then, STOP!
Open your website right now and ask yourself these simple questions:
1. Does my website look good?
2. Does it tell a prospective customer everything they need to know about my products and services?
3. Does it include useful, helpful, valuable, content about my products and services eg how to manuals, articles, links to other resources and so on?
4. Does it include full contact details that are easy to find from every page?
5. Does it sell? Or, from a customer point of view, is it easy to buy?
6. Have I recently added some fresh content for regular visitors?
If the answer to all of the above is “Yes”, then you do not need to keep worrying about SEO. What you need to do is find who your customers are and where they hang out – in forums, in blogging communities, on Twitter, in social networks, etc – and go and talk to them. Network. Socialise. Share your experience and help people out. Build your reputation as a good person to deal with and you will find that on its own will encourage people to check you out, remember you, recommend you.
When you are asked questions and can give a great answer, add it to the FAQ on your site to help someone else.
There is far more that will attract your target audience to your website than just SEO. Word of mouse is far more effective in finding your target audience. Think beyond the search engines.
If your answer to any of the above is “No”, then you need to resolve some very basic issues with your website before anything else.
And when you feel you have got enough customers from being social, then you may wish to have a look at your needs for SEO again. And you may find it is no longer required because satisfied customers and people you have met in your ’socialising’ are doing more than a little on-page SEO could do by linking to you, recommending you in blogs, on Twitter, to their networks and so on.
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Short of inspiration about the right keywords to use to attract your core audience audience? Here’s a slightly different way to find keywords this week:
Go to samepoint, enter one of your keywords or phrases into the search box, and click ’search’.
Then below each entry in the results, look at the keyword box and see how many of those terms you are using. Repeat this procedure with as many keywords and phrases as you fancy.
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SEOBook have put up a really useful and free keyword research flowchart
We shall be shortly launching a Keyword research ebook on the CTM site so sign up to our newsletter today to be informed as soon as that is available for free download.
