If you have already run a content gap analysis and found the topics you are missing, you are only halfway done. A full SEO gap analysis also looks at whether your pages can be crawled, whether they load fast enough, whether your structured data actually matches what is on the page, and whether your titles and internal links are doing their job. This guide walks you through a technical SEO gap analysis, plus an on-page gap analysis vs competitors, one comparable page at a time, so you end up with a short repair list instead of a vague feeling that something is off.
By the end you will have a worksheet of real findings, each one tied to a specific page, a specific signal, and a specific fix. Nothing here asks you to guess. You will pair your pages against real competitor pages, check what can actually be observed in public, and leave a clear "unknown" wherever the data does not exist yet.
Step 1: Pick comparable pages before you measure anything
Start by choosing the competitors a buyer actually runs into on the pages you care about, which is not always the same list you'd name as your commercial rivals. For each of your important pages or page templates, pick one or more competitor pages with the same intent. A product page compares against a product page. A how-to guide compares against a how-to guide. Group your own URLs by template so you are working with a manageable, deliberately matched set rather than trying to average a whole site.
Write down the device (mobile or desktop) and the date you are testing, because both change over time and you will want to know what conditions produced each finding. A small set of well-matched pairs gives you more useful signal than a sitewide crawl that mixes your homepage, your product pages, and your blog into one blurry number.
How to tell it's done: every priority page or template on your side has a named competitor page, a stated intent, a device, and a row started in your worksheet.
Common mistake: comparing a lightweight landing page against a competitor's image-heavy guide and calling the load-time difference a site-speed problem. The pages were never doing the same job, so the comparison tells you nothing.
Step 2: Check whether each page can actually be crawled and indexed
Before you touch wording or design, confirm the page is reachable at all. Crawl your own domain, and crawl the publicly reachable competitor pages where that's permitted. A free crawler like Screaming Frog SEO Spider will get you started: enter the homepage in the Enter URL to Spider field, hit Start, and then work through the Issues panel and the URL tabs it produces. The free tier caps out at 500 URLs per crawl, which is plenty for a focused, comparable set of pages, and it flags a wide range of crawl issues automatically. A paid license removes that cap if you need it for a larger site.
For each important page, check its response status, whether it carries an unintended noindex tag, and whether the main content is actually indexable. Google's own technical requirements are simple at the core: a page has to be accessible to its crawler, it has to return a working page rather than an error, and its content has to be indexable. Meeting those three things makes a page eligible to be indexed, not guaranteed to show up in results, so don't treat "passes the technical check" as "will rank."
Look at canonicals separately from redirects and sitemap inclusion, because they are three different signals doing three different jobs. A canonical tag states your preferred version of a page, but Google doesn't have to honor it. If an important page's canonical quietly points somewhere else, that's worth investigating before you assume every duplicate URL you find is a real defect. A sitemap helps a page get discovered, but it is not a substitute for a page being reachable through your actual navigation.
On your own pages, Search Console's URL Inspection tool will show you what Google has indexed and let you run a live test against the current version. On a competitor's page, you only get to observe what's publicly visible, so record that and nothing more.
How to tell it's done: every important owned page has a documented status, index directive, and canonical outcome, with a short separate list of anything that needs a developer to confirm.
Common mistake: treating robots.txt and a noindex tag as interchangeable. If a crawler is blocked by robots.txt, it may never even see the noindex directive sitting on that page, so the two controls need to be checked on their own terms.
Step 3: Compare real-user site speed on matched devices
Run your paired pages through PageSpeed Insights on mobile first, then desktop if that audience matters to you. Pay attention to whether the real-user data you're looking at describes that specific URL or falls back to the whole origin. When a single page doesn't have enough visits to generate its own field data, PageSpeed Insights can show origin-wide numbers instead, and if the origin doesn't have enough data either, real-user metrics may not be available at all. Don't present origin-level numbers as if they measured one competitor's page.
Google evaluates three Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile of real visits: Largest Contentful Paint at 2.5 seconds or less for a good loading experience, Interaction to Next Paint at 200 milliseconds or less for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift at 0.1 or less for visual stability. Check mobile and desktop separately rather than blending them into one score, and write down the actual numbers and whether you're looking at URL-level or origin-level data, not just a pass or fail badge.
Lighthouse is useful here too, but as a diagnostic tool rather than a stand-in for field data. It runs a simulated load, and it can't directly measure Interaction to Next Paint the way real visitor interactions can. If you spot a slow hero image, heavy script execution, or elements that shift as the page loads, that's a lead worth testing on the actual template, not a confirmed cause until you've checked it.
How to tell it's done: the worksheet has each available metric, whether it's URL-level or origin-level, and a separate note on what you'd investigate next. Where field data doesn't exist yet, write "insufficient public field data" instead of guessing at a pass or fail.
Pro tip: rank pages by their actual Core Web Vitals numbers, not by a single Lighthouse score. A lab score can move around between runs in ways a real user's experience never does.
Step 4: Test structured data against what the page actually is
Work out what kind of page you're looking at first, then compare its structured data against the specific requirements for that page type. Run both your page and the competitor's paired page through Google's Rich Results Test. It will tell you which Google-supported rich result types it detects, along with any parsing errors or missing required properties. Check that the markup describes something a visitor can actually see on the page, since markup describing content that isn't there is a problem you don't want to inherit from a competitor.
Fix required-property errors on your own pages first, then retest the live URL once the fix ships. Adding a competitor's schema type to a page where it doesn't apply is not a shortcut. Valid structured data makes a page eligible for a feature, it doesn't guarantee that feature will display, and if the tool finds nothing to flag, that doesn't automatically mean your page has invalid or missing markup either. It might just mean nothing on that page qualifies for a supported result type yet.
How to tell it's done: every sampled page has a recorded structured data type, a test result, a note on any missing or invalid properties, and a decision: fix it, leave it, or investigate further.
Common mistake: publishing schema for information that isn't visible on the page, or assuming a rich result is guaranteed once the markup validates.
Step 5: Trace how your priority pages are actually reached
For every page you care about, find at least one other page on your site that links to it, and check the real, rendered link rather than assuming it's there. A standard HTML anchor tag with a working href is what gets discovered reliably. A click handler or a link-like element with no real href behind it is much less dependable, even though JavaScript-generated links can work fine when they render as proper markup.
Google's own guidance is that every page you care about should get a link from at least one other page on your site, with anchor text that's descriptive and reads naturally rather than mechanically repeating the same exact phrase. Look for priority pages with no useful path leading to them, navigation that takes too many clicks to reach a page that matters, links pointing at broken destinations, and link text that doesn't tell a reader what they'll find on the other end. You can look at how a competitor structures their own internal paths as a design comparison, but that tells you nothing about their actual crawl depth or indexing, since you can't see their private data.
Fixing the sitemap and the relationships between pages comes before automating anything. If your site's structure is already confusing, automated linking will just place technically correct links in the wrong sentences faster. DeepSmith's writing workflow uses your existing site pages to place relevant internal links as it writes new articles, which helps you execute approved linking decisions on new content going forward. It doesn't replace the work of auditing every URL you already have or fixing navigation and redirects that are already broken.
How to tell it's done: every priority page has a checked incoming path, and the worksheet names which page should link to it, why that placement actually helps a reader, and who's implementing it.
Pro tip: fix your page relationships before you automate anything. A confusing taxonomy just gets amplified once links start getting placed at scale.
Step 6: Compare titles, headings, and descriptions side by side
This step is the core of an on-page gap analysis vs competitors: the words and tags a reader and a search engine actually see on the page, separate from whether the page loads fast or carries the right schema.
For each paired page, write down the HTML title element, the visible headline, and the meta description. Ask a simple question for each one: does the title uniquely and clearly say what this page is, and does the main heading match what the page is actually about? Look for repeated boilerplate, vague titles that could belong to any page on the site, headings that don't match the page's real purpose, empty descriptions, and image alt text that's missing where an image is carrying information or acting as a link.
Google can and does rewrite what actually displays as your search title, sometimes pulling from your title element, sometimes from visible headings or other page text. It also builds most snippets straight from page content, occasionally reaching for your meta description when that describes the page better. There's no fixed character limit for either one; Google simply truncates the display to fit the device, so don't chase a supposed universal character count as if it were a hard rule. What matters more is whether the title and description are accurate and specific to that page.
How to tell it's done: every priority page has an explicit keep-or-edit decision on its title, headline, and description, with proposed wording that actually matches what's on the page.
Common mistake: seeing Google display a rewritten title in search results and assuming your stored title tag must be missing, when it's just as likely Google chose a different source for that particular query.
Step 7: Turn your findings into a prioritized repair queue
Sort your worksheet with indexing and access blockers on important pages first, shared template problems second, and individual page-level edits last. For each item, note how much it matters to the business, how many pages it touches, how confident you are in the diagnosis, how much effort the fix takes, and who owns it. A single template defect affecting fifty pages is worth fixing before you rewrite fifty individual headlines one at a time.
Keep a separate column for anything you couldn't verify, whether that's a competitor page with too little public performance data or a cause you haven't confirmed yet. Resist the urge to add up unrelated metrics into one proprietary-sounding score, and resist assigning a specific ranking improvement to any single fix. A well-scoped finding looks something like this: your matched mobile product page misses the loading speed target in real-user data, the competitor's matched page meets it, and the next step is investigating your product image and how it's delivered, not declaring victory or defeat.
How to tell it's done: every high-priority row states what was observed, which page or template it affects, the proposed next step, who owns it, and how you'll confirm the fix worked.
Common mistake: copying whatever a competitor implemented without checking whether it applies to your page at all, or summing disconnected signals into a single gap score that sounds more precise than it is.
Step 8: Fix the issues, then rerun the same checks
Once a fix ships, recrawl the changed pages and look at the deployed result rather than trusting a staging screenshot. Recheck the status code, the index directive, the canonical, the actual rendered links, the title and heading, and the structured data test. For your own URLs, check both the live version and, once it's had time to get indexed, the version Search Console reports. Rerun PageSpeed Insights on the same device you tested before, and remember that real-user data takes time to reflect a new release, so don't expect it to update the same day you ship.
Keep your original baseline dates alongside the new ones so a later comparison actually means something. A ticket marked "done" because a template deployed, without anyone checking the live page, isn't actually done.
How to tell it's done: every repaired item has a post-release observation, and it's marked either verified, still open, or still waiting on enough data to judge.
Common mistake: expecting Google's displayed search title or indexed view to update the moment you publish a change. Both can lag behind your release.
What to do next
Start with whichever indexing or access blocker sits on your most important page and assign it first. Agree on how you'll measure before and after, then fold your approved title, heading, and internal-linking changes into your next production brief so the fixes actually reach the page. The technical items (rendering, redirects, server performance) belong with an engineer or a technical SEO specialist. The on-page wording and internal-link placement can move with marketing, as long as someone reviews the changes before they ship.
If you'd rather not run the on-page half of this by hand every time you publish or update an article, DeepSmith's content production pipeline builds internal linking, keyword structure, and publishing metadata into every article it writes, using the same map of your existing pages you'd otherwise be cross-referencing manually. It won't crawl a competitor's site, measure their page speed, or fix a broken canonical for you. What it does is make sure every new piece of content you publish starts with the on-page groundwork already in place, so your repair queue gets shorter with every article instead of longer. You can try it with a free trial and see how it handles your own site's structure.
