Keyword tools love to hand you a list of "gaps": searches your competitors rank for and you don't. The obvious response is to write a page for each one.
Before we did that on our own agency site, we checked every item against the pages we already had. Most of the "gaps" weren't gaps.
What the tool said, and what was true
The tool's action list for our site held 136 opportunities. We sorted every one by hand in August 2026:
| What the tool called it | Count | What was actually true |
|---|---|---|
| Competitor gap, write new content | 67 | 45 already had a live page. 13 were "near me" searches. About 9 were genuinely missing |
| Improve existing content | 61 | Real: 19 of our pages ranked between positions 28 and 90 |
| Quick wins | 3 | Real, all on pages we already had |
| Technical issues | 5 | 1 real broken link, 2 real thin titles, 3 false alarms on pages we had deliberately set to noindex |
So of 67 "write something new" suggestions, about 9 deserved a new page. Writing all 67 would have given us dozens of near-duplicates competing with our own pages, which is one of the more reliable ways to make a site's rankings worse.
Why the gaps look real
The tool matches keywords to URLs, not to meaning. Some examples from our list:
- "multi family marketing" was flagged as a gap with the lowest difficulty on the whole list. We already had a multifamily marketing page, and that exact phrase was already its focus keyword.
- "seo for roofing contractors" was flagged. We had a roofing SEO page.
- "med spa marketing agency" was flagged. We had a guide to choosing a med spa marketing agency.
Our pages simply didn't rank high enough for the tool to connect them to those searches. That's a ranking problem, not a missing page.
"Near me" searches depend on where the searcher is. Google shows different results to every location, so a single office can't rank nationally for them. A tool that pulls them from a competitor in another city will always list them as gaps.
How to check a gap list in an hour
- Export the list to a spreadsheet: keyword, volume, difficulty.
- Search your own site for each keyword. In Google, type
site:yourdomain.comfollowed by the keyword. If a page of yours covers the topic, write its address in a new column. - Check Search Console for that page. Open the page in the Performance report and look at the Queries tab. If the "gap" keyword is already there with impressions, Google already connects the two. The page just needs to rank better.
- Mark "near me" and city searches separately. Only keep the ones for places you actually serve, and handle those with location pages or your Google Business Profile, not blog posts.
- Sort what's left into three piles:
| Pile | What to do |
|---|---|
| Already have a page | Improve that page: answer the search more directly, add internal links to it. Don't write a second one |
| Can't win (near me, other cities) | Drop it |
| Genuinely missing | These are your real gaps. Write them |
The rule we follow now
No new page until we've checked that no existing page already covers the search. Most of the time the right move is to make an existing page better, not to add another one.
