Define the goal first
Before collecting keywords, decide what the analysis should help with. Most teams need to know which pages to create, which existing pages to improve, and which topics should be ignored for now.
A good analysis connects search opportunity to business value. If a topic cannot support a product, service, category, or sales question, it should not automatically enter the first queue.
Collect the competitor set
Start with direct competitors, search competitors, and category publishers that already rank for buyer questions in your market.
Direct competitors show how similar companies position the offer. Search competitors show which pages Google rewards, even when the publisher is not a business rival. Both views matter.
Compare coverage
List the pages competitors have that your site lacks. Group them by intent: educational guides, comparisons, alternatives, implementation pages, pricing context, and product-led topics.
Do not only record the keyword. Record what the page actually does for the reader: define a term, compare options, explain a process, reduce risk, or move someone toward a buying decision.
Review your own site
A gap is not always a missing page. Sometimes the right answer is to expand an existing page, merge overlapping pages, rewrite a weak article, or add internal links from stronger pages.
Check whether the current page has the right intent, enough depth, a clear title, useful headings, and a path back to the commercial page it should support.
Prioritize the gaps
Prioritize pages where search demand, competitor coverage, and business relevance overlap. That is where new content has the clearest job.
A simple scoring model can use four questions: do buyers search this, do competitors answer it, is our current page missing or weak, and does the topic support a priority offer?
Turn findings into briefs
The final output should be a short briefing queue. Each item should name the article, the buyer question, the intended page format, the internal links, and the reason it should be written now.
This prevents the analysis from becoming a research artifact that never turns into published pages.