SEMRush Keyword Gap Tool Tutorial
SEMRush Keyword Gap Tool
Hi guys, just doing another tutorial on one of SEMrush’s tools. This tutorial’s about the keyword gap tool, which is a relatively new tool from SEMrush. It’s one we’ve done a webinar on a few weeks back.
The webinar’s obviously me giving a brief overview of what the tool does, which I’m going to go over in a second, but we also have a guy called Jake Bohall who’s based over in America who was showing people how he dissects the information exposed into a spreadsheet and then, find opportunities to go for keywords there.
So, it’s quite a cool spreadsheet, which I’ll also link to below, and if you guys are interested in anything like that. But, to go back into the tool and just going to show you briefly how it works. It’s nothing complex fairly simple and easy to use, and where do you find the tool?
When you log in SEMrush, you see your usual dashboard over on the left-hand side, here.
And, on the left-hand side, you see GAP analysis. So, I’ll just zoom in so that you can see that.
And, if you open that up, it’s got a keyword gap, backlink gap and bulk analysis, so the tool is the backlink gap tool that we’re gonna be talking about.
So, when you click on that, it opens up these nice dashboards here, and it basically tells you what the tool does, so it compares up to five domain names. It can compare organic keywords, paid keywords or PLE keywords, which is Google shopping.
You can select intersection types. You can look for common keywords. You need keywords, or you need a domain’s keywords.
So, it does allow that advanced boards, and you can mess about with that and see in the data that comes back from that. We can explore the data. Use the filters and by keyword position volume, CPC, competition, and all that kinda stuff.
You can also export the data and you can visualize the data it’s getting, visualization thing, be it if you want to show that to clients and stuff like that. I always find that stuff like that, in terms of visual looks and sometimes works better for clients, then it does people like yourself who would probably build trust and tracing the data.
So, what you do is make sure that you select the right database first and foremost, so when it says database, you do have the ability to then scroll down into the country of your choice and SEMrush does have over 100 countries on there.
You can also select whether a device type, so desktop or mobile, and you can select things like currency here to GPP for the cost per click information. So, after that, you put in your domain names, so click, put on the domain name and first. Down below that, just here, you can select whether it’s organic paid or PLE keywords. For this example, I’m going to use organic keywords.
I’m gonna use a couple of other competitors who I know blog regularly, so Matthew Woodward just put his domain in there. I’m only gonna do four for this example. So, once you’ve entered all the domains you want to look at, there’s a green button over on the right-hand side here, which says, “Go.” You just click go.
And it will come up with nothing found. Now, the reason that this comes up with nothing found is, I’ve not selected all keywords here. So, this little bubble here, you want to make sure that you select all keywords between all the websites and then click go again.
And, it should come with the information.
So, I’m just gonna scroll down. What you can see are 459 keywords.
There are 70 searches per month for that. A keyword difficulty, 57.08. Cost per click, zero, competitive, 0.57. I think in the campaign page’s results is 81 million so we can see the other, Matthew Woodward ranks really well for that sales team. Only gets 70 searches so you can use functions on here. I’m gonna place that again and get the highest.
So, I’m going to get the highest volume search terms on there.
Finding Keyword Opportunities
So, you can see again, Matthew Woodwards position 18 for Fiverr, which gets 19,500 searches a month, but obviously, you can scroll down here and find good keyword opportunities. Ones that are on page one, for example. WPNG and the hosting company gets 4,400 searches. Matthew’s in position eight for that. None of the other guys are on there, so that’s a keyword opportunity. And, it’s really up to yourself what you determine what a keyword opportunity is.
You know, it might be a keyword that’s relevant to the affiliate views that you’re trying to promote or whatever you need be. You know, there are thousands of opportunities here between as a whole to get more blog posts out there. And so, you can have a look at all that and dissect all the data.
Filtering your Keywords
You can also use advanced filters, so you can include or exclude specific keywords and volume difficulty, the average cost per click and stuff like that, and you can also use containing what match and exact match begins with or ends with and add the filters there to filter down all these kinda keywords. So, it’s quite a good way of looking at data and see more opportunities there is.
Over here, on the right-hand side, you can export those data as well. And if you wanted to export it digitally to the clients, and if you click enable charts there, it does give you the red as being Matthew Woodward, the orange being Matt Diggity. The blue ones myself, and the green one’s Andy Drinkwater. We can see who the big player is there in terms of keywords between comparison with us all.
Matthew Woodward been blogging longer than most people and put a hell of a lot of hard work and effort into it, so I would fully expect to see that there and you know, that’s lots of people out blogging out there, probably want to aspire to do as well as Matthew Woodward so that is a kind of brief overview of the tool, there.
Now, you don’t have to. You can do one, you know, a comparison from my own website with Matthew Woodward and I can eliminate Matt Diggity and Andy Drinkwater or whatever. You don’t have to do five. It’s just an option to do up to five and if you wanted to. So, it’s really up to yourself what kind of comparison you want to do.
Dissecting the Data
And, you know, that is the kinda key basis of the tool, and what I mentioned at the start of the webinar was Jake Bohall who I’d done the original webinar with, was showing people how to use this detail, put it into a spreadsheet, and then, use your specific things to tell people, you know, keywords that you wanted to push, or keywords that you wanted to maintain and it’s all based in different metrics, so everyone’s different but it’s probably worth watching the film webinar if you really want to know how you how you can dissect information and also see Jake’s spreadsheet because what Jake does is export all this data, put it into a spreadsheet and then works from there to find out the best opportunities based on what he wants to do.
Also, what I would like to highlight it, with any SEMrush tool, if you feel that there’s something else that can be added to this tool in terms of functionality or whatever, you can send a suggestion if you press the green button up here, which will allow you to give SEMrush a better feedback if you feel that there’s something missing from the tool, but as I say, the tool is fairly basic. It’s fairly new, so I’m sure they will add to things as people suggest other things there. But, if you are looking for keyword opportunities then the keyword gap to tool is the perfect one to do that, and it’s simple and easy to use, as I’ve just described and as I say, something you can help yourself with, you know, without getting through spreadsheets of trying to work from your memory.
You can pull all this stuff up within seconds on SEMrush. And yeah the functionality there that may help you going forward, so hopefully you enjoyed that.
See the full webinar below:
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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