Studies have shown that content marketing generates leads more cost-effectively than traditional marketing. But, the complex task of calculating the ROI of these efforts is often challenging.
With so many tools available for tracking user activity, it’s not hard for managers to see which URLs perform well on a surface level.
Metrics such as visitors, time spent per session, and conversions have been used for years to steer content creation and marketing campaigns toward further success.
The problem is, these traditional analytics only provide half of the story—they don’t explain exactly why the content is performing well, or how a specific type of content may influence the journey of marketing qualified leads (MQLs).
That’s where content scoring comes into play. Creating a scoring system for your marketing content allows you to evaluate quality, discover trends across MQLs, and streamline content creation to meet your goals.
3 Different Ways to Score Content
Every marketing team handles content scoring differently depending on their unique objectives.
When building your comprehensive scoring system, ensure it incorporates important sales data and competitor analysis to fit your end goal.
Scoring Content Type & Position in Sales Funnel
The journey of a prospective customer becoming an MQL involves multiple interactions or “touchpoints” with your content, whether it’s reading a blog post, watching a video, or listening to a podcast.
Each touchpoint brings the prospect closer to making a conversion. Therefore, each type of content can be given a score to reflect its value in the journey. A typical score sheet may look like this:
|
Touchpoint |
Content Type |
Score |
|
1 |
Blog Post |
.30 |
|
2 |
Podcast |
.20 |
|
3 |
Infographic |
.20 |
|
4 |
Webinar |
.30 |
In this type of scoring model, it’s become standard practice to place higher value on a prospect’s first and last touchpoints. The reason being that the first piece of content caused them to return and the final piece caused them to become a lead.
The score of one funnel doesn’t create a clear picture. But, as data grows, you can gain actionable insights to shift your strategies moving forward.
Determining an overall score for the content across a buyer’s journey helps you understand which content is more relevant for a first-time visitor versus a qualified prospect. In addition, content scores help identify which pieces of marketing content are not contributing toward conversions.
Scoring Content for Readability
With so many aspects of content optimization to consider, one of the easiest to overlook is readability.
Generally, the clearer and more readable a piece of content is, the more time viewers will spend on a page and the better it will perform in the SERPs.
Calculating scores for readability on a given page may include assigning values to:
- Sentence structure
- Vocabulary choices
- Speaking time
- Use of active voice
- Spelling and grammar
Developing a scoring system for readability reveals which pages are ready to publish and which ones have issues that you need to address. These scores also help locate gaps in user accessibility.
Scoring Content for SEO
When it comes to optimizing content for search visibility, many marketers have created their own guidelines.
Often, marketers base these standards on the best practices of authoritative voices in the industry combined with data they’ve collected over time.
At the end of the day, we don’t know exactly what Google wants from an SEO perspective.
However, we do know what works when it comes to ranking higher in search results.
Through competitor analysis, you can create an SEO content scoring system that reveals the ranking potential of each page when weighed against what’s currently ranking in the SERPs.
Such a model would assign value to aspects such as content length, relevancy, keyword usage across the page, meta description, and title. The sum total of these factors serves as your benchmark standard for publication.
But, for enterprise brands looking to simplify and scale their content scoring process, seoClarity offers Content Fusion.
After generating insights on recommended keywords and suggested word count for your topic, Content Fusion provides an overall score for each piece of content that you create.
As you build relevance in your content based on the AI-driven insights that Content Fusion provides, the score updates in real time.
Ultimately, Content Fusion takes the guesswork out of content scoring so that content teams can easily confirm content quality and relevance to a target audience before it’s published on a site.
Integrating Your Content Scoring System
No matter how you choose to integrate content scoring into your marketing strategy, it’s important to keep in mind the value of these insights for your sales team.
Over time, content scoring will help you understand which steps in the sales funnel are most valuable so that you can strengthen your marketing campaigns in the future!
Like any other marketing technique, content scoring is an ongoing process that requires review to ensure your system remains effective and sustainable.
To improve the performance of their content, marketing teams should consider adopting content scoring as a method to measure content quality, understand their consumers, and increase their ROI.
Simplify and scale this process by using seoClarity’s Content Fusion solution which offers content scoring as well as the ability to download detailed content briefs within seconds, analyze content globally, and leverage content insights via an API.
