To find keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t, run a keyword gap analysis. Enter your domain and three to five competitor domains into a tool like Ahrefs Content Gap or Semrush Keyword Gap. Filter for terms where competitors hold page-one rankings and you don’t rank at all. Then cut the list down to terms that match services you actually offer.
At Peak Marketing, this report is one of the first things we pull for a new law firm client. It almost always turns up practice-area and city terms the firm should already rank for. Below is how we run it, plus the filters we use to separate real opportunities from noise.
What is a keyword gap?
A keyword gap is a search term that sends traffic to a competitor’s site but not to yours. Ahrefs explains the math plainly: take every keyword a competitor ranks for and subtract the keywords your own site ranks for. The leftover list is your set of targets.
SEOs used to do this by hand, exporting two keyword lists and matching them in Excel. Gap tools now automate the comparison and handle several competitors in one pass.
Who counts as a competitor in search?
Your search competitors are the sites that rank for the terms you want. They are not always the firms you see in court or at bar events. A personal injury firm in Boise might lose clicks to a firm in Meridian, a statewide legal directory, and a national injury-law blog, all on the same results page.
Ahrefs and Semrush both have competitor reports that find domains by keyword overlap. Start there, then pick three to five sites that resemble you in size and services. Leave large directories like Avvo or FindLaw out of the first pass. They rank for thousands of terms on domain strength alone, and chasing their footprint is rarely a realistic plan for a single firm.
If your site is new and ranks for very little, overlap reports have little to work with. Search your main services and city names in a private browser window and write down who keeps showing up.
How do you run a keyword gap analysis?
The workflow is nearly identical in the major tools. Here is the version we use:
- Open the gap tool. In Ahrefs it sits under Competitive Analysis as Content Gap. In Semrush it is called Keyword Gap and lives in the SEO menu.
- Enter your root domain as the target, then add competitor domains. Ahrefs accepts up to 10 competitors. Semrush compares your domain against up to four others.
- Set the country database to the market you serve. A comparison scoped to one country is far more useful than one that mixes locations.
- Set position filters. A good default is keywords where at least two competitors rank in the top 10 and your site does not rank in the top 100.
- Export the results to a spreadsheet so you can sort, tag, and group them.
What do Missing, Weak, and Untapped mean in Semrush?
Semrush sorts gap results into tabs. These are the ones that matter most when you are hunting for opportunities.
| Tab | What it shows | Typical response |
| Missing | Keywords every compared competitor ranks for and you do not | Build a core page you are missing |
| Weak | Keywords you rank for, but lower than all competitors | Refresh or expand the existing page |
| Untapped | Keywords at least one competitor ranks for and you do not | Write a narrower article or FAQ |
Ahrefs does not use these labels, but you can recreate them with its position filters.
How Peak Marketing filters a gap report
A raw gap report for a mid-sized law firm can run to several thousand rows. Most of them do not deserve a page. We run each candidate through a short set of questions before it goes on a content calendar.
- Does it match a service the client sells? A family law firm’s report may show “how to write a will” because a competitor also handles estate planning. If the firm doesn’t take those cases, the keyword is a distraction.
- What does the search result look like? Open the results page. If the top spots belong to court forms, government pages, or dictionary definitions, a law firm blog post will struggle to break in.
- How many competitors rank for it? A term several competitors share signals proven demand. Ahrefs suggests filtering for keywords all of your competitors rank for when you want the strongest list.
- Is the difficulty realistic? Compare keyword difficulty to your own site’s authority. A newer site should start with lower-difficulty terms and work upward.
Don’t throw out terms just because a tool shows little or no search volume. Local long-tail queries like “contested divorce attorney Twin Falls” often register as near zero in keyword tools, yet they come from people ready to hire.
Weak keywords are usually the faster win
Weak keywords already have a page behind them, so improving that page is often quicker than building a new one. The usual fixes are covering the parts of the question the current page skips and pointing more internal links at it from related posts.
What should you do with the keywords you find?
Group the keywords before you write anything. Terms like “Idaho DUI lawyer,” “DUI attorney near me,” and “DUI defense lawyer Idaho” belong on one page, not three. Map each group to a single URL so your own pages don’t compete with each other.
Next, study the competitor page that ranks. Note its format, its depth, and the questions it answers. Your goal is a page that serves the searcher better, not a copy with the words rearranged. Google’s guidance on helpful content says its ranking systems favor content made to benefit people over content built mainly to win rankings. A gap list tells you what to cover. It does not tell you how to write it.
The same gaps often carry over into AI search. A competitor that owns a topic in Google is frequently the source cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews for related questions. Closing the gap in organic search tends to improve your odds there as well.
How often should you run a gap analysis?
Once a quarter works for most firms. Run it sooner if a competitor redesigns its site, opens a new office, or adds a practice area. Keep each export dated so you can see which gaps you closed and which new ones appeared.
Close the gaps that bring in clients
A keyword gap analysis shows exactly where competitors collect search traffic you could be earning. The tools handle the comparison in minutes. The real work is deciding which gaps are worth your time and building pages that deserve to rank.
If you would rather have that work handled for you, Peak Marketing builds keyword gap analysis into every SEO campaign we run, on month-to-month terms with no long-term contract. Reach out and we will show you which keywords your competitors are winning right now.
Sources
- Ahrefs, “Content Gap” tool overview: https://ahrefs.com/content-gap
- Ahrefs Help Center, “How to use Content Gap to find keyword ideas from Competitor Websites”: https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/9025740-how-to-use-content-gap-to-find-keyword-ideas-from-competitor-websites
- Ahrefs Academy, “Content Gap”: https://ahrefs.com/academy/how-to-use-ahrefs/competitive-analysis/content-gap
- Ahrefs Blog, “What’s New at Ahrefs” (Content Gap 2.0 position filters): https://ahrefs.com/blog/whats-new-at-ahrefs-july-2023
- Semrush Knowledge Base, “Keyword Gap”: https://pl.semrush.com/kb/28-keyword-gap
- Semrush Blog, “Keyword Gap Analysis”: https://semrush.com/blog/keyword-gap-analysis
- LLMrefs, “Content Gap Analysis Semrush: Step-by-Step Guide”: https://llmrefs.com/blog/content-gap-analysis-semrush
- Google Search Central, “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
