I run a version of this on every single engagement, and I want to walk through the actual steps clearly enough that you could run a basic version yourself, even without specialized tooling.
Step One: Identify the Real Competitors, Not Just the Obvious Names
Start by identifying who's actually winning, in traditional rankings and increasingly in AI citation, for your core topic space, not just the most recognizable brand names in your industry. Run the actual queries a real customer would ask, both as classic Google searches and as prompts to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview, and note who consistently shows up. The competitors that matter for this exercise are whoever is actually winning visibility right now, which sometimes surprises people expecting only the largest, most famous names in their space.
Step Two: Catalog What They Actually Cover
For each real competitor identified, map out the specific topics, subtopics, and entities their content addresses, not just a list of their published article titles, but the underlying concepts and questions those articles actually answer. This is more thorough than skimming a competitor's blog index, it means actually reading enough of their content to understand what specific ground it covers conceptually.
What does E-E-A-T stand for in Google's Quality Rater Guidelines?
Step Three: Compare Against Your Own Coverage
Cross-reference that competitor coverage map against what your own site currently addresses. The gap, the entities and subtopics competitors cover that you don't, is the raw finding this whole process is meant to produce. Note not just binary presence or absence, but relative depth, a competitor might cover a topic you also cover, but in meaningfully more depth or with more specific, useful detail.
Step Four: Prioritize by Relevance and Impact, Not Just Volume
Not every gap deserves equal priority. Weigh each identified gap by how directly relevant it is to your actual business and audience, and by how significant the apparent opportunity looks, a topic multiple competitors cover consistently is a stronger signal than one only a single, less-established competitor happens to address. This prioritized list, not the raw, unranked gap list, is what should actually inform what gets built first.
How to Do a Content Gap Analysis (Step-by-Step) — self-check
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The Difference Between This and Entity Gap Analysis Specifically
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This process and entity gap analysis are closely related, and in practice I often use the terms to describe overlapping work. The distinction worth knowing: entity gap analysis specifically focuses on underlying entities and concepts at a structured, semantic level; content gap analysis, as described here, can be run at a slightly less formal level, comparing published content and topics more directly, useful as a starting point even without the deeper semantic tooling entity-level analysis benefits from.
What the Output Should Actually Feed Into
The prioritized gap list produced here is the direct input for building a real topical map, the gap analysis identifies what's missing and how urgent each gap is; the topical map organizes that prioritized list into an actual, sequenced content architecture. Running a gap analysis without following through into a structured map to act on it wastes most of the value the analysis produced.