 Howdy, most fans, and welcome to a new edition of Whiteboard Fridays. My name is Lydia Infante, and I'm the senior SEO manager at sanity.io. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about SEO gap analysis. And yes, I know it's a very unsexy topic, but bear with me because it's worth it. SEO gap analysis takes us to the first principles of what we do in SEO, because ranking on Google is not ranking in a vacuum. Ranking is outranking your competitors. You've got a very limited space on the first page of the SERPs, and you need to be doing better than your competitors to be able to rank there. That means that you need to know what your competitors are doing and how you're going to do it better. But first of all, you need to know who your competitors are, who they are really. We're going to be speaking about competitor identification in a different Whiteboard Friday in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that. Once you have your set of competitors ready, you're going to proceed to benchmark yourself against them. And we're going to be doing this across the three pillars of SEO. So we're going to be looking at content, we're going to be looking at links, and we're going to be looking at tech SEO. We're going to look at how our competitors perform for each of those and how we compare. So when it comes to content, the very first thing that we want to look at is the estimated traffic by type that our competitors and we have. So when I'm talking about traffic by type, what I mean is like, are they getting branded traffic versus unbranded traffic? Product traffic, editorial traffic, it's going to be very different depending on the vertical that you're in, so adapt it to make it yours. We're also going to be looking at the number of editorial URLs that they have, and how much traffic these editorial URLs are getting each on average. And lastly, we're going to be looking at the number of keywords that they're ranking for. We're not going to be looking at all of the keywords. We're going to be aiming for the range of one to 30. Again, you can make this yours. You know your market better, and you know what's relevant. But that should narrow the entire pool to stuff that's a little more relevant to your competitors. Then we're going to be looking at links. We're going to begin with the link app analysis. That is, we're going to look at how many links your competitors have, and how many referring domains are pointing to your competitors. Then we're going to use this to measure link growth. We're going to look at how many links your competitors had six months ago, or 12 months ago, if your market is a little slower. And we're going to get a percentage of growth out of that. That's going to indicate to you whether your market, your search market, is very aggressive with link building, and you need to make an effort to keep up, or it's a little bit more relaxed. Then we're going to be looking at branded search. So how many people are looking for your competitors' brands, versus how many people are looking for your brands? That's going to indicate the level of brand awareness that you have within your target audience in comparison to your competitors. And we're going to take it one step further, and we're going to be looking again at branded traffic. There should be a very correlated relation between branded search and branded traffic. If you're first for branded search, you should be first for branded traffic, and so on. But if there isn't, it might be an indicator that you don't have content within your site that's responding to the user's queries about your brand. So that's definitely a very quick win that you could action right now. Lastly, we're going to be looking at Tech SEO. And this is incredibly difficult to measure, because the requirements on Tech SEO vary from website to website, from vertical to vertical. I am personally in the SaaS market, so my requirements for Tech SEO is essentially make it readable and make sure that JavaScript's not blocking anything, classic crawling and rendering issues, and that's about it. But if you're in e-commerce, you're likely dealing with faceted navigation, you're dealing with filter management, and it's a little bit more demanding. So the best way that I have found to measure Tech SEO changes and performance is Core Web Bitals scores. We're going to go on the Chrome UX report on Data Studio, and we're going to look at the main three Core Web Bitals, grab the number, the percentage of good URLs, according to Google, and then we are going to average them out into one score. Then we're going to be looking at PageSpeed. You can do this with PageSpeed Insights, and we're going to be looking at the scores for mobile versus desktop. I don't average this out, because I think they provide really useful information of what issues your industry is running into when it comes to mobile usage of the team. And then lastly, we're going to do some manual checks. Take a look at the robots.txt. Take a look at the sitemap, how they manage canonicalization, and that's going to inform you better on how you could outperform your competitors. And if this seems very complicated, don't worry. I have provided a free template for you so that you can make it yours. Thank you so much for watching my Whiteboard Friday. My name is Lidia Infante, and you can find me on Twitter at Lidia Infante M. You can find me on my website at Lidiainfante.com. And see you soon.