What Is a Content Score?
The content score is the measure of your content quality, relevance and the possibility of success in terms of ranking.
This score helps you make a better content strategy that performs well in SERPs and update the existing content on your website.
It depends on some parameters that tell you how Google will look at the content of your pages and rank them accordingly.
Although in pulling organic traffic, you do not need to worry about scoring, having an idea about perfectly optimised quality content can let you know what changes you can make to your content strategy.
Why Is It Important?
It is important for a couple of reasons:
It can make you create an even better plan about how to write content that can create a positive impact on search engines and the user. Also, it will let you know what necessary changes you can make in the content to increase the quality.
With the content score, you can compare your content with your competitors and improve your quality to compete well with them.
A good score means a better user experience, which is important because it can build trust between you and the users. Eventually, it will impact your site’s authority 一 the measure of the ability to rank in the organic search results.
How Is It Usually Calculated?
The content score is usually calculated by considering four main factors:
Word count
Word count refers to the total number of words in a piece of content. This factor serves as a general guideline for writers to create content with sufficient depth and breadth.
The suggested word count is usually based on an analysis of competitor content in the same niche, but it can be adjusted manually to suit the specific content type.
A higher word count typically indicates more comprehensive content, but it is important to strike a balance between depth and readability.
Sentence structure
This factor is used to measure how easy it is for a person to read and understand the content. A well-structured piece of writing will have an appropriate mix of short and long sentences, with clear and concise language.
Poor sentence structure can lead to confusion or difficulty in understanding the concept of the content for readers.
Repetitions
Repetitions means when content unnecessarily states the same phrases, words, or concepts more than once.
High-quality content should steer clear of too much repetition since it can make the writing feel boring and turn readers off. Having fewer repeated elements will lead to better overall content.
Keyword coverage
Keyword coverage is an important factor for search engine optimization and ensures that the content is relevant to the target audience.
This factor considers the inclusion of must-have keywords, additional keywords, and recommended keywords for the topic in the text.
A higher keyword coverage indicates that the content is more likely to rank well in search engine results and be discovered by readers interested in the topic.
What Does Google Say About the Content Score?
You will find plenty of tools to check the content score, but does Google really care about it?
Like other tools and scoring systems (SEO score, E-E-A-T score, site authority score) that SEOs have created to help them improve their marketing strategy, the content score is just another.
Getting higher scores (more than 75) does not guarantee that your pages will get ranked.
As Google’s John Mueller has already said, there is no “helpful content score” that determines its importance in SEO.
Ways to Improve Your Content Score
Google denies the existence of content scores, but that should not stop you from creating quality content. Here are a few ways that will help you improve the quality of your existing content or, let's say, its “content score”.
Wisely work on keywords
Keywords can determine the content quality, and if you use them in moderate quantity and wisely distribute them in the entire content, your score will be effectively high. The areas where you can distribute them are:
Subheadings
The rest of the content's body
Avoid stuffing
Keyword stuffing is indeed a controversial practice in the world of content creation and SEO. It involves the excessive and unnatural use of keywords within a piece of content, often with the sole intention of manipulating search engine rankings.
It is a bad practice that can also lead to penalties from search engines like Google. You should avoid doing this and keep the keyword usage natural.
Avoid duplication
Search engines and also users do not like duplication. If your website has duplicated content on its pages, it will affect content quality.
To avoid this, every page has to be unique in its content, and it must offer value to the readers.
Keep the content relevant
Content relevance is necessary to get a good content score. Relevant content means that your content is able to satisfy the searcher’s query and has covered all the aspects of a given topic.
Do not ignore the word count
Word count is the number of words for a given piece of content. It has to be within a specific limit to avoid disturbing the flow and diverting the reader’s attention.
For instance, if you can give a satisfactory answer to a query in 500 words, do not add extra words to reach a word count of 1000.
Also, it depends on the type of content. For instance, the length of a testimonial and blog post will differ.
Use plain language
Your style of writing should be communicative, and language must be understandable for an average reader. Avoid jargon and unnecessary technical terms!
Pay attention to page load time
Page load time can be a problem for the content score. Page load time is the time it takes the page to display its entire content. If your page takes too much time to display content, it can affect scoring.
Takeaway
Google does not support the content score or rank the pages based on any scoring system.
However, you may adopt various approaches to create well-researched quality content that answers the searcher's queries and is helpful for the readers.
In addition to creating quality content, you must focus on your entire content marketing strategy and fill the content gaps.