How Using a Content Scorecard Can Help You Publish Better Content

There was once a time when publishing content was enough. You put some time into creating some good-enough content, published it and search engines ate it up. While that is still true to a certain extent, today, you must write for readers and not just search engines. And the truth is today’s readers are more discerning, demanding and time-conscious. If you publish good-enough content, they will gloss over it and move on. What stops readers in their tracks today is spectacular content. The kind of content they save to read later or excitedly share on their social media profiles. But how can you consistently create this level of content? Introducing the Content Scorecard.

What’s a Content Scorecard?

To explain this, we’ll need to go on a brief outing to your favorite restaurant. What is your favorite meal at that restaurant? What does it taste like? Is it perfectly salted? Now ask yourself this, how does the chef manage to recreate the same taste every time you go in and order the meal? He doubtless uses a recipe. Well, a content scorecard is a recipe for creating spectacular content every time. It’s a checklist of ingredients that when combined, create a content meal that your readers will love. So where can you find a content scorecard? The best way to get one is to create it yourself. This will ensure it is unique and differentiated from what others are doing. We explain how to create your content scorecard next.

Build a Foundation for your Content Scorecard

To start, log into your Google Analytics account and head over to the traffic stats tab. Under this tab, you will be able to see your best-performing pages. To get a better overview, adjust the data range from the default one month to twelve months. Now you will see the pages on your site that received the highest amount of organic traffic. Pick out the ones that are related to either blog posts, articles or evergreen content. Pick the top ten. Now go to these pages and analyze each. Why do you think they attracted so much traffic? What was different about these posts? How about the messaging, was it different from your other posts? These questions should give you a solid foundation on which to build your content scorecard.

Creating the Content Scorecard

Now that you have a foundation for your scorecard, you need to now define a checklist based on what you discovered about your top-performing content. For example, if your successful content was of a certain length, addressed a certain topic, had a certain tone, and others, these become your checklist items. Remember that these should all be common across the ten pages you picked earlier. Be careful not to include outliers, which are pieces of content with extraordinary performance linked to some external factor like a news article mentioning it. Focus on only those that brought in traffic organically. When complete, your checklist should look somewhat like this:

• How relevant is the topic to our niche market and business?

• Is the content optimized for high-quality keywords?

• Is the content at least one thousand words in length?

• Does the content provide a data-rich experience to the reader?

• Can the reader derive actionable insights from the content?

• Does the content upsell the reader on a content upgrade?

• Is there a single clear call to action in the content?

• Does the content have high-quality, relevant graphics and illustrations?

Putting your Content Scorecard to Work

Now that you have your content scorecard in place, it is time to implement it. This is perhaps the one area most marketers struggle with. While it is easy to set the bar high, it will take extra effort to hit this high bar each time. However, what should be comforting is that few other marketers are willing to go this extra mile. As such, you can be sure that if you stick it out, your content will stand head and shoulders above the rest of the content getting published by your competitors.