Finding content gaps in the maritime SERP

Maritime SERPs (search engine results pages) are unusual. For commercial queries the competition is light, but for head terms the SERP is often dominated by Wikipedia, IMO, classification society pages or large trade publications you can’t realistically outrank. The opportunity is between those two extremes: queries with genuine buyer intent where the existing top ten is weak.

Finding those gaps is a deliberate research process, not a Semrush export.

What a content gap actually looks like

Three signals together suggest a real gap:

• Commercial intent. Someone searching “EEXI verification cost” is closer to a buying decision than someone searching “what is EEXI”. Gaps with commercial language (cost, provider, services, supplier, near me) are higher value.
• Weak top-ten. Open the SERP. If positions 1-10 are mostly forum threads, abandoned blog posts, Wikipedia or pages that don’t actually answer the query, you can rank by being meaningfully better.
• Buyer-side demand. Search Console data on related queries, customer interview transcripts and sales-call recordings will tell you whether buyers are asking variants of this question even if the volume tools don’t show it.

A query missing one of those three signals usually isn’t worth a page.

Five places to look for gaps

1. Search Console queries with high impressions and zero clicks. Pull queries from the last 90 days where your site was impressed for but never clicked. Some of those are queries you nearly answered but not well enough. The fix is often a section on an existing page rather than a new page.

2. Competitor backlink profiles. Pull the top fifteen ranking pages for your priority topics. What pages on competitor sites are pulling links? What queries are those pages targeting? Often the link-attracting page is the one with a content angle nobody else covered.

3. Trade press search behaviour. TradeWinds, Lloyd’s List and Splash all have on-site search. Their analytics aren’t public, but you can infer what readers care about by what gets covered repeatedly. A topic the trade press has covered ten times in a year is one buyers think about.

4. Sales call transcripts. Run Otter.ai or Gong over your sales team’s calls. The questions buyers ask before they commit are content gaps. Most maritime sales teams hear the same five questions on every call; those five questions deserve five pages.

5. AI search responses. Ask Perplexity, ChatGPT and Gemini ten variations of your priority queries. What sources do they cite? Where are the citations weak or generic? Those are gaps where your content could end up cited if it’s better than what’s currently being pulled.

A worked example

Take “ballast water management system retrofit”. The SERP for that query is a mix of equipment manufacturer product pages, IMO regulatory documents and a couple of generic “what is BWMS” articles. Buyer intent is high (someone searching that has a vessel in scope and a regulatory clock). Existing pages are weak (mostly product brochures or compliance summaries). Demand is real (every fleet with vessels above the threshold is making this decision).

A content gap. The page that fills it should cover decision criteria (system types, ballast volume thresholds, retrofit windows, classification society approvals), real cost ranges and a process for shortlisting suppliers. Not a brochure for one manufacturer; a buyer’s guide.

Pages like that, written for the actual decision a buyer is making, are what fill maritime content gaps. They’re rare, which is exactly why they rank.

What to do once you’ve found gaps

Score them. Not on volume; on commercial fit, SERP weakness and your ability to write something genuinely better than what exists. Pick the top three for the next quarter, build them properly, link them into your topic clusters and measure for nine months.

Three good gap-fillers will move more pipeline than thirty thin posts ever will.