For many businesses, the biggest struggle with content marketing is building a prevailing system to evaluate the quality of content produced. That is where the content scoring system comes in.
Imagine having to write 20 blog posts a month but not knowing which ones are better or worse. Content chaos is a problem faced by many businesses, especially in the B2B world. At some point, marketers became fed up with untrackable and unstable pieces of content. In return, a new system quietly crept into the content marketing game — content scores.
What is a Content Score
A SEO content score is an aggregated predictor for the competitiveness of online content. It is a data-based system that determines the quality of writing, optimization, and relevance of a piece of content.
The content score is not a fixed system. Instead, each business and industry has its unique ways of evaluating content quality. To develop a content score system, use the following process:
- Build a quality control (QC) team
- Standardize themes and formats
- Audit existing content
- Develop a scoring system
- Evolve the scoring system as your business grows with regular audit and reviews
How to Score Your Content
There are a few popular approaches to content scoring. As long as your system allows you to evaluate the relevance, optimization, and effectiveness of your content, feel free to get creative and build a process that best suits you and your team.
Traffic Score
The traffic score or volume scoring measures the traffic driven by a piece of content. Focusing on awareness and influence, the traffic score shows how many people have seen, reacted, or engaged with a specific asset compared to other assets.
Conversion Score
The conversion score, also known as the completion score occasionally, tracks how many visitors completed a process. For example, if you have a landing page with downloadable content, the completion score reflects the percentage of visitors who submitted the information and downloaded the content.
This score is critical to your overall content marketing efficiency evaluation. Often, it is used with other KPIs related to campaign conversion rate and cost-per-conversion calculations.
Trajectory Score
The trajectory score reflects content trends. For example, if one page had 1200 visitors in the first month but only 600 visitors in the second month, the page displayed a decreasing trend or a downward trajectory.
You can either use a 0 for any decrease in popularity or build a negative-positive scoring system for increased accuracies.
Relevance Score
A relevance score is usually a cumulative number tracking the content performance over some time. It helps you to evaluate if a piece of content is still relevant or if you need to create new items to drive traffic and engagement.
The relevance score uses a benchmark number as its standard. For accuracy, the most recent month has the heaviest weight and the furthest month has the lowest weight. If a piece published in May hit the benchmark in May and July, the total score should be 10 (May) + 30 (July) = 40.
Why Content Scoring is the Key to Effective Content Marketing
A content score allows your team to have a consistent method to assess content performance and content quality. It provides you with actionable insights and thus enables you to increase the quality of your content.
With content scoring, your content marketing become directed and targeted. You will know exactly what needs improvement and will never waste another minute on outdated content and inefficient campaigns.
In other words, the content score is the number one secret behind achieving high content marketing ROI.
Learn more about the new approach to content marketing strategy, here.