How to Use Content Scoring to Engage Your Audience can transform your content strategy. Discover how it helps boost your engagement and drive results.
From short social posts to comprehensive digital guides, I’ve crafted thousands of content pieces. These range across SaaS companies, small businesses, government offices, major nonprofits, and my own websites.
To measure their success, I used a tailored content scoring process. Creating your own content scorecard can help you gauge your content marketing success. Here, I share examples from my websites and brands across industries. Plus, I offer tips to help you create a powerful content scoring system.
Excited to dive in? Let’s get scoring!
What is Content Scoring?
Content scoring measures the success of your content marketing. Metrics such as views, engagement, shares, and backlinks are tracked. This analysis helps gauge content quality and performance. The resulting scorecard guides future content creation.
Why is Content Scoring Important?
Content scoring offers three big benefits. First, it helps create a single source of truth.
Single Source of Truth
93% of marketers with a single source of truth for data find it beneficial. However, only 65% of marketers actually have one. Lack of communication and alignment between departments is a top concern. A scoring system unifies teams and improves communication.
Pro tip: Involve both your sales and marketing teams in creating the scoring system. This maximises its potential.
Leverage Expertise
I’m not an expert in social listening and TikTok content performance. I use Later to help with that. The tools you use to score your content will leverage incredible expertise. They put data-driven insights at your fingertips.
While you can use generic tools, specialised tools deepen your understanding of your content.
Prove ROI
Return on investment is a priority for marketing teams. Yet, much data falls through the cracks. Over half of marketing decisions are influenced by marketing analytics. Yet, 87% of marketers report that data is their company’s most underutilised asset.
Given that 50% of marketers plan on increasing their content marketing investment, quantifying content’s performance is crucial.
How to Score Content
Let’s walk through the steps to score your content. I’ll use an example from my website, Walk The Camino Portugués.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution for content scoring. Find a system that works for you and use it. Use this as your starting point.
Step 1: Choose Which Content You’ll Score
Not all content can be scored the same way. Social media content differs from email, which differs from website content. Start by choosing which content you’ll score. Options include:
- Social media posts
- Email marketing
- Landing pages
- Product pages
- Blog posts
- Videos
I’ll be analysing blog content for my travel site. Let’s look at which metrics belong on the scorecard.
Step 2: Choose Your Metrics
Consider key metrics related to content quality and performance. There are many numbers to choose from. They don’t all need to be included on every scorecard. Choose what matters most to your target audience and business objectives. Here are some suggestions:
- Video percentage watched
- Reader satisfaction
- Impressions/views
- Optimisation score
- Follows/unfollows
- Video view rate
- Time on page
- Conversions
- Bounce rate
- Scroll depth
- Readability
- Comments
- Backlinks
- Exit rate
- Shares
- Clicks
- Saves
The metrics that matter most to me are SEO score, website traffic, readability, and Pinterest saves. I’ll track SEO score and readability upfront. I’ll measure traffic and saves over six months.
Step 3: Choose Tools to Score Content
The numbers you’ll get from tools aren’t all the same. Some tools will score content by assigning an objective number. Others will gather analytical data.
For example, SurferSEO might assign a blog post an optimisation score of 72. This number reflects how my content performed against benchmarks. An engagement tool may share that content’s engagement rate is up 5%.
The 72 and 5% aren’t directly comparable. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Keep this in mind as you parse your data.
Consider these tools to score your content:
- Google Search Console (search visibility)
- Google Analytics 4 (website traffic)
- Hemingway App (content readability)
- SurferSEO (website optimisation)
- SharedCount (social shares)
- ChatGPT (content analysis)
- Later (social analytics)
- Semrush (readability)
Some insights won’t be discoverable using a content scoring method. Some valuable insights can only be gathered through manual review of top-performing content. This is ideally done over a period with significant data.
I’ll be using GA4, SurferSEO, the Hemingway App, and SharedCount to create my content scoring model.
Step 4: Create a Scorecard
Once you’ve established your scoring criteria, store all of your scored content in one place. This can be done in a spreadsheet, Notion, or within a tool’s analytics interface.
For those who’d like to create their own scorecard, input data into a simple table. The numbers you’ve collected all have different values. For example, a blog post’s SEO score of 78 isn’t directly comparable to getting 245 social shares.
Some marketers resolve this by ranking all of their data points on a scale of 10, then adding these up at the end. Personally, I choose to list the original numbers and evaluate them individually.
Step 5: Use to Inform Content Strategy
Use the insights from your content scoring strategy to help you create high-quality content. When you have more than 12 months of data, you can look at seasonal trends. Use these insights to guide the creation of your marketing calendar for the year.
As a content manager for businesses, these insights guide 80% of my content creation for the year. Looking at my own scorecard, I know that I need to improve the readability of all of my pieces. The data on rankings and traffic will prioritise which pieces need to be updated first.
Content Scoring Best Practices
Let’s look at some of the best practices for your content scoring process.
Find the Silent Data
Engage with your silent data in addition to the typical data points. Listening to the loud and silent data in your business can look like:
- Engagement and disengagement
- Purchases and abandoned carts
- Clicks and hovers
Don’t just focus on the obvious metrics like clicks or open rates. Pay attention to the data that isn’t making noise.
Choose Metrics Intentionally
Key metrics for judging a new brand are sometimes different from those you’d use for an established brand. Established websites can see results for some key metrics much faster, like:
- Search rankings
- Social shares
- Backlinks
A new website might need to wait months before it sees these numbers start to build momentum. As a result, pay more attention to metrics, like:
- Time on page
- Readability
- Comments
Don’t Ignore Readability
Improving readability can have a significant impact. Simplify your language to the third-grade level using the Hemingway App. This can lead to a permanent boost in engagement.
I was surprised to discover that my article was given a grade 6 readability score. It required edits to 84 sentences to maximise readability.
Leverage Positive Metrics
Having content that performs well should be leveraged as social proof. This is often overlooked on many websites. Engagement begets more engagement. Displaying positive metrics on your website can tap into this self-fulfilling prophecy.
Here are some ways to feature your positive metrics:
- Webpage backlinks: “As featured in” section
- Blog post views: Share total number of views
- Blog engagement: Display comment count
- Product downloads: Share the number of lifetime purchases or downloads
- Page shares: Display shared count
- Video views: Pin high-performing videos
- Social followers: “Join X followers” website widget
Content Scoring Tools
There are many tools available for content scoring. Here are a few powerful tools that can solve most content scoring needs.
Important note: Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console are non-negotiable tracking tools that every website must have set up.
WordPress
With a few standard plugins, WordPress users can customise their dashboard to include important scoring metrics. This enables you to analyse your website content right within your site dashboard.
Your entire team will already have access to the website. This avoids extra costs of having to pay for “seats” on subscription-based platforms.
You can even sort content based on certain metrics, like shares or comments. WordPress does have limitations. Data can’t be separated and analysed by date, which can make finding specific relevant information difficult.
SEO Writing Assistant by Semrush
This tool focuses on written website content, like articles, landing pages, and product listings. SEO Writing Assistant has a document-like interface where you can write content from scratch or paste in existing text. This tool has a scoring system that evaluates your content’s:
- Readability
- SEO
- Originality
- Tone of voice
It gathers data for those four metrics and assigns a single score to your website content. This allows content assets to be easily compared and ranked.
Later
Later analyses social media content. This is an incredibly robust social scheduling platform that pulls huge amounts of data for you to sift through and analyse your content’s performance.
Here are a few features I love:
- Content sorting based on whichever metric you value most
- Finding your audience’s most active times online
- Social listening
ChatGPT For Scoring
Would I rely on ChatGPT for my entire content scoring process? No, I would choose tools that are specialised and store my data for me in a more convenient way.
But maybe you’ll find ChatGPT to be a fast and convenient way to evaluate your content. Note that ChatGPT can’t scrape content from social media. It’s best used on your own website or XLS files.
Here is a prompt for scoring website content:
You’re a content marketer trying to score the below [blog URLs/pages/product listings] based on readability, SEO, and ability to retain readers. Please generate a score on a scale of 1-10 for each of the above key metrics, then evaluate and score each piece of content below. Provide your data in a table.
Scoring AI-generated Content
AI content can be valuable for your brand, but it needs to be leveraged carefully. Here are a few insightful statistics:
- Only 6% of marketers report using AI to produce entire pieces of content
- 95% of marketers who use generative AI to write copy have to edit the text
- 60% of marketers fear that AI can harm their brand’s reputation through plagiarism or bias
When you’re ranking AI-generated content, assess it upfront for inaccuracies and plagiarism. When you’re gauging its performance, assess time spent on page, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Let content intelligence be your GPS.
If you’re going to choose AI tools, go for reputable tools that prioritise high-quality content, like the HubSpot AI Content Writer tool.
What’s a Good Content Score?
There are mountains of data available on content performance. Identifying above or below-average content performance can only come from having month-over-month, year-over-year analytics and comparing your own datasets.
My Scoring Example
A good example is my Portuguese Camino luggage transfer guide. My article received a score of 6.9 out of 10 with Semrush’s tool, which earned it the label of “good.” However, when I looked at why it was given that score, I disagreed with it for a few reasons.
I chose to write a more in-depth guide. My article is 1,975 words long, while this tool is telling me to trim it back to 617 words. I’m a thorough writer, not a brief one.
The tool also automatically assigned keyword targets from my article, many of which were incorrect. When I manually edited the keywords, my content’s score automatically went up to 7.7 out of 10.
Tools can be powerful, but keep prompting and tweaking them to personalise and tailor the results.
Final Thoughts on How to Use Content Scoring
When I check on the content’s performance, I’m excited. I’ll either discover cause for celebration or an opportunity to improve.
Speaking of improvement, I have my work cut out for me by simplifying my vocabulary and shortening my sentences to improve my readability score. I hope that these tools provide that same enthusiasm and direction for you.
For more insights, visit our blog or contact us via email at info@07hm.co.uk or telephone 01702 410663.
