How to find content your competitors have and you do not

A competitor’s menu and sitemap list what they have chosen to build pages for. Most sites publish a sitemap at /sitemap.xml. Open it, group the pages by subject, and mark every subject you have no page for.

Searching Google for site: followed by their domain shows roughly which of those pages Google has indexed.

Take ten searches a customer would make before buying, and note who appears and with which page. Read the “People also ask” box and the related searches at the foot of the results. Each one is a question real people ask, and your site either has a page that answers it or does not.

Search Console’s Performance report has an average position figure. Switch it on and filter for positions greater than 10. The searches left are those where Google already considers your site relevant but places it on the second page or lower.

For each one, find the page that should be answering. It is usually thin, off the subject or missing.

Ask ChatGPT the questions customers ask in your market, or read Google’s AI Overview for them, and note which sites are cited. A competitor cited there has a page that states the answer plainly. The method is set out in how to check if ChatGPT recommends your business.

A gap is worth a page only when three things are true.

• Someone making the search could become a customer.
• You are already close: the second page of results is closer than nowhere.
• You can say something the pages already ranking do not.

Gaps that pass all three come first. A gap that fails the first is traffic with no business in it.

One subject per page, with the answer in the first paragraph and headings that match the questions people ask. Link to the new page from the pages around it, so that visitors and search engines can both find it. Then note the date, and watch the search in Search Console over the following weeks.