Keyword gap: terms your competitors rank for and you do not

The most direct list of missed opportunities you can build — once you filter out the terms that belong to someone else's product.

What a keyword gap is

Take every term a competitor has ranked for in the first fifty over the last week, and remove those where your app ranks too. What remains is the gap. "Does not rank" includes being measured and not found, not only never having been measured.

Why relevance has to filter it

Competitors are not single-purpose. A peer ranks for things that have nothing to do with you, and when several apps track the same competitor, its rank data covers all of their keywords. Without a relevance filter against your own listing, an exercise app's gap list can fill up with coffee-machine terms — we saw exactly that. Relevance to your own text is the first cut; the competitor's rank is the second.

Reading the list

Terms where the competitor sits in the top ten are proven, but may need weight you do not have yet. Terms where they sit at 11 to 30 are the realistic ones. Most gap terms already have a popularity estimate — in our measurements 670 of 718 — so the list can be sorted by popularity from the start rather than waiting a night.

Keep the ones you already track in view

A gap term that is already in your pool does not leave the list. The problem was never adding it; it is ranking for it. Seeing it there, marked as tracked, is the reminder that the listing still does not carry it well enough.