Content Gap Analysis
Identifies content opportunities by comparing your site against competitors and scoring the gaps worth closing first.
Quick Start
Find content gaps between my site [URL] and [competitor URLs]
What content am I missing compared to my top 3 competitors?
Skill Contract
Expected output: a prioritized gap brief plus the standard handoff summary for memory/research/.
- Reads: your domain, competitor domains, topic/content-type focus, audience, business goals, and any user-provided or tool content inventory.
- Writes: a user-facing analysis and reusable summary.
- Promotes: durable keyword priorities, competitor facts, and pending strategy decisions to
memory/hot-cache.md, memory/open-loops.md, and memory/research/.
- Done when: each prioritized gap names the competitor(s) that cover it and you don't; gaps are bucketed into Quick Wins / Strategic Builds / Long-term; and the deliverable includes a dated content calendar entry per Quick Win.
- Primary next skill: seo-content-writer when the prioritized gap list is approved.
Handoff Summary
Emit the standard shape from skill-contract.md §Handoff Summary Format.
Data Sources
Optional integrations: ~~SEO tool, ~~search console, ~~analytics, ~~AI monitor. Without tools, ask for site URL, content inventory, competitor URLs, and business goals. See CONNECTORS.md.
Decision Gates
Stop and ask — gap analysis is competitor-relative and cannot run on demand alone:
- No competitor domains given and none inferable from
CLAUDE.md or prior research → ask the user to name 1-3 competitors, OR offer to switch to keyword-research for demand-side discovery instead.
- Your own domain/content inventory is unavailable and cannot be fetched → ask for the site URL or a content list, since "gap" requires knowing current coverage.
Continue silently — do not stop for: which 3-5 named competitors to deep-dive (pick the closest); missing optional tool data (mark Estimated/N/A and proceed); ambiguous topic scope (analyze the full overlap and flag the broadest clusters).
Instructions
When a user requests content gap analysis:
- Define Analysis Scope — confirm your site, competitors, topic focus, content types, audience, and business goals.
- Audit Your Existing Content — map indexed pages, content types, topic clusters, winners, and weaknesses.
- Analyze Competitor Content — compare content volume, traffic, type mix, topic coverage, and unique assets.
- Identify Keyword Gaps — group gaps into High Priority, Quick Wins, and Long-term based on volume, difficulty, and relevance.
- Map Topic Gaps — compare topic-cluster coverage and recommend pillar / cluster approaches for missing themes.
- Identify Content Format Gaps — compare guides, tutorials, comparisons, case studies, tools, templates, video, and research.
- Analyze GEO / AI Gaps — identify missing Q&A, definition, and comparison content that competitors get cited for.
- Map to Audience Journey — compare Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention coverage.
- Prioritize and Create Action Plan — deliver an Executive Summary, Prioritized Gap List (Quick Wins / Strategic Builds / Long-term), Content Calendar, and Success Metrics.
Label every metric Measured (tool/export), User-provided, or Estimated (model inference); never present an estimate as measured; if a required metric is unavailable, mark it N/A — do not invent it.
Quality bar: every gap names the competitor that covers it, its volume or traffic estimate, and why it is worth closing — never list a bare topic without that evidence.
Reference: See Analysis Templates for the compact templates used in each step.
Example
See references/example-report.md for a full SaaS marketing sample.
Advanced Analysis
Competitive Cluster Comparison
Compare our topic cluster coverage for [topic] vs top 5 competitors
Temporal Gap Analysis
What content have competitors published in the last 6 months that we haven't covered?
Intent-Based Gaps
Find gaps in our [commercial/informational] intent content
Save Results
Write path: memory/research/content-gap-analysis/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md; promote durable gap priorities and competitor facts to memory/hot-cache.md. See Skill Contract §Save Results Template.
Reference Materials
Next Best Skill
Primary: seo-content-writer.
