How I use content scoring to create posts my audience loves

How I use content scoring to create posts my audience loves

From short social media posts to in-depth digital guides, I’ve written thousands of pieces of content for SaaS companies, small businesses, government agencies, large nonprofits, and my own websites.

This content was tracked and analyzed to measure its success, but all using unique metrics. How? Using a tailored content scoring process.

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Using your custom content scorecard, you can create a data-driven process for measuring your individual content marketing success. I’ve compiled examples from my own websites and brands across various industries, as well as tips to help you create a powerful content scoring system.

I even have a metric that one business owner says can impact conversions by 50% when measured using a free tool. Upset? Let’s score!

Table of contents

What is content scoring?

Content scoring is the process of measuring the success of your content marketing. Metrics such as views, engagement, shares, and backlinks are tracked to analyze content quality and performance.

The resulting scorecard helps guide future content creation.

Why is content scoring important?

Let’s take a closer look at the three big benefits of content scoring, starting with the term every marketer loves to hate: only source of truth.

Content scoring helps with creationa single source of truth.

93% of marketers who have a single source of truth for data say it is beneficial to their business, but only 65% ​​of marketers actually have one.

Lack of communication and alignment between departments is a top concern for marketers, according to our State of Marketing 2024 survey. A rating system unites teams and enables better communication while also serving as a roadmap for filling your editorial calendar.

Pro tip: Both your sales and marketing teams need to be involved in creating the rating system to maximize its potential.

Content Rating allows you to leverage expertise.

I am not an expert on social listening and TikTok content performance.

Guess what? I use Later to help me with this, which means I don’t have to do that. The tools you use to rank your content leverage incredible expertise and provide you with data-driven insights.

While you can use generic tools like ChatGPT (and I’ll give a prompt to do so in a moment), a big benefit of the content scoring process is choosing specific tools that deepen your understanding of your content.

Content scoring helps you prove ROI.

Return on investment is always a priority for marketing teams and organizations as a whole. But why then does so much data go unnoticed?

The numbers are important: Over half of marketing decisions are influenced by marketing analysis.

Nevertheless, the data falls through the cracks. 87% of marketers reported that data was their company’s most underused asset.

Given that 50% of marketers As marketing teams plan to increase their content marketing investments in 2025, they need to quantify content performance and demonstrate ROI in as much detail as possible.

How to rate content

Let’s go through the steps to evaluate your content. After explaining each step, I’ll show you what it looks like using a blog post from my website as an example. Walk along the Camino Portugués.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for content assessment. What’s important for you is to find a system that works and you will – wait for it – actually use it (hopefully happily). Use this as a starting point.

Step 1: Choose which content you want to rate.

Not all content can be evaluated in the same way. Social media content is different from email, which has different metrics than website content. Begin this process by choosing what content you want to rate. Options include:

  • Social media posts.
  • Email marketing.
  • Landing pages.
  • Product pages.
  • Blog posts.
  • videos.

As an example, I will analyze blog content for my travel site. Let’s take a look at which key figures belong on the scorecard.

Step 2: Choose your metrics.

You should consider important metrics Content quality AND Content performance. There are many numbers to choose from, and they don’t all need to be included on every scorecard (your marketing team will give you a sympathetic ear if you try).

Choose what is most important to you Target group and yours Business goals. Here are some suggestions – note that these are both positive And negative key figures (more on this in a moment).

  1. Percentage of videos viewed.
  2. Reader satisfaction.
  3. Impressions/views.
  4. Optimization value.
  5. Follows/unfollows.
  6. Video view rate.
  7. Time on the page.
  8. Conversions.
  9. Bounce rate.
  10. Scroll depth.
  11. Readability.
  12. Comments.
  13. Backlinks.
  14. Exit rate.
  15. Shares.
  16. Clicks.
  17. Saves.

What I measure: The metrics that matter most to me for my new travel website are SEO score, website traffic, readability, and Pinterest savings. Since this is a new website, I track SEO score and readability upfront and measure traffic and savings over a six-month period.

Step 3: Select content assessment tools.

The numbers you get from tools are not all the same. Some tools rate content by assigning an objective number, while others collect analytical data.

For example, SurferSEO might assign an optimization score of 72 to a blog post. This number reflects how my content performs compared to platform or industry benchmarks. An engagement tool, on the other hand, can report that the content’s engagement rate increased by 5%.

The 72 and 5% are both important, but not directly comparable. It’s like comparing apples and oranges – keep that in mind when analyzing your data.

Consider these tools to rank your content:

It should be noted that some insights cannot be determined using a content assessment method. Some extremely valuable insights can only be gained by manually reviewing the top-performing content and looking for trends. This is ideally done over a period of time with meaningful data, such as an annual review.

My scorecard: I will be using GA4, SurferSEO, Hemingway app and SharedCount to build my content scoring model.

Step 4: Create a scorecard.

Once you’ve established your rating criteria, you’ll need to save all of your rated content in one place for easy review. This can be done in a spreadsheet, Notion, within a tool’s analytics interface – I share options for this below.

For those who want to create their own scorecard for their unique rating system, you can enter data into a simple table.

note: The numbers you collected all have different values. For example, a blog post’s SEO score of 78 is not directly comparable to 245 social shares.

Some marketers solve this problem by ranking all of their data points on a scale of 10 and adding them up at the end. I’m about to show you a screenshot of this type of table created with ChatGPT.

Personally, I choose to just list the original numbers and evaluate them individually, as I think it dilutes the data too much to convert everything to a scale of 1 to 10.

I did this below with my website data:

*This is a new website and no data is available for these items yet. Therefore, these values ​​are used as fill values.

Step 5: Use to inform content strategy.

Use the insights from your content scoring strategy to create high-quality content. If you have more than 12 months of data, you can look at seasonal trends and use those insights to guide you in creating your marketing calendar for the year (free template here).

As an enterprise content manager, these insights guide 80% of my content creation for the year.

When I look at my own scorecard, I know that I need to improve the readability of all my pieces (see Best Practices for more on this). Rankings and traffic data is used to prioritize which parts need to be updated first.

Best practices for content evaluation

Let’s look at some of the best practices for your content scoring process.

Find the silent data.

Jake WardFounder of Kleosuggests that you look into yours silent Data in addition to the typical (noisy) data points. Listen to the loud And Silent data in your company can look like this:

  • Commitment + detachment.
  • Purchases + abandoned carts.
  • Clicks + hovers.

“Don’t just focus on the obvious metrics like clicks or open rates, but also the data that doesn’t make a splash,” Jake shared.

Choose metrics consciously (new brand vs. established).

Important key figures for assessing a new Brand is sometimes different than what you would use for one founded Brand. Established websites can see results much faster for some important metrics, such as:

  • Search rankings.
  • Social Shares.
  • Backlinks.

A new website may have to wait months for these numbers to gain momentum. Therefore, I would pay more attention to metrics such as:

  • Time on the page.
  • Readability.
  • Comments.

One of these metrics is much more important than most people (even marketers) realize: readability.

Don’t ignore readability.

Alex Hormozi, founder of acquisitionreported on ways to improve readability in one of his “Mozi Money Minute” email blasts. He recommends simplifying your language to a third grade level (age 8 or 9) using Hemingway app.

“I once ran this process through all of my emails and websites and got a sustained 50% increase,” Hormozi told his email subscribers. “There are very few things that always work. But this tactic is as close as it gets.”

I had never used the Hemingway app before and thought my article’s content rating would be fine. I was surprised to find out that my article received a grade 6 readability rating and that Hormozi’s advice would require changes to 84 sentences to maximize readability.

Content readability assessment

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Use these positive metrics.

Content that performs well shouldn’t just create buzz in the marketing department – it should also be used as social proof. I spend a lot of time reviewing marketing materials online and find that this is overlooked on 90% of websites.

Here’s an example of how Forbes leverages its positive metrics by publicly sharing article views:

Example of positive social proof on a website

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Why is it important? Engagement breeds more engagement. Take advantage of this self-fulfilling prophecy by displaying positive metrics on your website. Here are some ways to highlight your positive metrics:

  • Backlinks from websites: “As presented” section.
  • Views of blog posts: Share total views (Tutorial)
  • Blog engagement: Show number of comments
  • Product Downloads: Share the number of lifetime purchases or downloads
  • Page releases: Show shared count (Social Warfare Pro plugin)
  • Video views: Pin high-performing videos (TikTok tutorial, Instagram tutorial)
  • Social followers: “Join X Followers” ​​website widget.

Content assessment tools

I’ve introduced many individual tools above and know that the number of options can be overwhelming for beginners. To simplify it, below I will highlight some powerful tools that can solve most content assessment needs.

Important NOTE: Although I don’t spend time on it, Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console are non-negotiable tracking tools that every website must have set up.

WordPress

Price: Free, with a paid tool listed below (Social Warfare Pro, $29 per year).

With a few standard plugins, WordPress users can customize their dashboard to include a range of important evaluation metrics. This allows you to analyze your website content directly in your website dashboard without throwing a dozen more steps into your dashboard Workflow.

Here you can see five meaningful metrics at a glance right on the “Posts” page of my WordPress dashboard:

WordPress as a content scoring tool

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Here is a key for the boxed symbols above:

  • statistics: Jetpack (free).
  • Comments: WordPress (free).
  • Social Shares: Social Warfare Pro (paid).
  • Traffic light: SEO score from Yoast (free).
  • Feather: Readability score from Yoast (free).

Your entire team already has access to the site, eliminating additional costs for “seats” on subscription-based platforms.

You can even sort content by specific metrics, such as shares or comments. You can see what that looks like here on my main page, where I’ve sorted my blog posts in order from most comments to least comments:

WordPress ranking content by number of comments

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However, WordPress has limitations. Data cannot be separated and analyzed by date, which can make it difficult to find specific relevant information. Google Analytics is much more powerful for these advanced features, but is overwhelming for beginners looking for at-a-glance data.

Semrush SEO Writing Assistant

Price: Free plan, then $139.95 per month.

This is another tool that focuses on written website content such as articles, landing pages, product listings, etc. SEO Writing Assistant has a document-like interface that allows you to write content from scratch or paste it into existing text. This tool has a rating system that evaluates:

  • Readability (free).
  • SEO (free).
  • Originality (paid).
  • Tone of voice (paid).

Semrush Content Rating Example

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It collects data for these four metrics and assigns a single score to your website content. This makes it easy to compare and rank content assets.

I don’t rely on this tool for my own content or my clients’ content, but I think it’s a great resource for people with clear needs who aren’t brand loyal to other, more specific tools.

Later

Price: Free plan, then $16.67 per month billed annually.

While the first two tools focused on your own content on your own website, Later analyzes social media content. It’s an incredibly robust social planning platform that pulls in massive amounts of data so you can search and analyze the performance of your content.

I’ve been using Later for years, but I can’t share analytics screenshots without revealing private customer information. Instead, here is a summary of the analytics features as described on Later’s website:

later content scoring tool

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A few features I love:

  • Sorting content based on the metric you care about most.
  • Find your audience’s most active times online.
  • Social listening.

I’ve worked on teams that use other planning tools – sometimes very expensive ones – but Later is my preferred platform. It has a fun interface and gives you a lot of analytics data (without being overwhelming).

ChatGPT for evaluation

Would I rely on ChatGPT for my entire content scoring process? No, personally I would choose special tools that store my data more conveniently for me.

But you may find ChatGPT to be a quick and convenient way to rank your content. Note that ChatGPT cannot remove content from social media and is therefore best used on your own website or in XLS files.

Here’s a prompt for rating website content:

You are a content marketer trying to evaluate the following (blog URLs/pages/product listings) based on readability, SEO, and ability to retain readers. Please generate a score for each of the key metrics above on a scale of 1 to 10 and then rate and review each piece of content listed below. Enter your data in a table.

chatgpt creates a content scoring system

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Evaluation of AI-generated content.

AI content can be valuable to your brand, but must be used carefully. Here are a few insightful statistics from our State of Marketing Trends report:

  • Only 6% of marketers say they use AI for production entire content for her.
  • 95% of marketers use generative AI for copywriting have to edit the text44% say they are making significant changes.
  • 60% of marketers fear the concern AI could cause damage the reputation of your brand through plagiarism or bias.

When evaluating AI-generated content, evaluate it in advance Inaccuracies And plagiarism. When measuring performance, evaluate time spent on page, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Make content intelligence your GPS.

When choosing AI tools, choose reputable tools that prioritize high-quality content, such as: E.g. HubSpot AI content writer Tool.

What is a good content score?

There are mountains of content performance data available. Want to know what the average X-Engagement Rate (formerly Twitter) is for the financial sector? Three percent. But finding and using this data for every single platform and industry would be tedious at best and impossible at worst.

Some software programs, like SEMrush’s SEO Writing Assistant, use their own rating system to combine multiple rating factors into one number. However, no single software provides a complete picture.

How to get the most value out of content assessment: Determining above or below average content performance can only be done through monthly and annual analysis and comparison of your own data sets.

My scoring example

A good example is mine Luggage transport on the Portuguese Way of St. James Guide. My article received a rating of 6.9 out of 10 using the SEMrush tool, which earned it a “good” rating. However, when I looked at why it received this rating, I didn’t agree with it for several reasons.

I decided to write a more detailed guide. My article is 1,975 words long, while this tool asks me to shorten it to 617 words. I’m a thorough writer, not a shorthand writer (did you notice that?).

The tool also automatically assigned keyword targets from my article, many of which were incorrect. When I edited the keywords manually, my content’s score automatically increased to 7.7 out of 10.

Tools can be powerful, but you need to keep asking and tweaking them to personalize and customize the results.

Final thoughts

When I check the performance of the content, I am thrilled. I will either discover a reason to celebrate or an opportunity to improve.

Speaking of improvement, I have to simplify my vocabulary and shorten my sentences to improve my readability score. I hope these tools give you the same enthusiasm and direction (even if that means, like me, you still have some work to do).

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