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Marketing

What is Content Scoring? [+ Tools to Rate the Effectiveness of your Content]

MM
Matt Montenegro Founder & CEO
09/09/2021 5 min
TL;DR

Content scoring grades each marketing asset against business goals so teams can see what earns attention and what wastes production time. Progress calls it a quantitative matrix with criteria; Mailchimp frames the output as a report card for the library.

  • Why it matters: Without a score, teams keep publishing while weak posts quietly drain capacity.
  • How it works: Set format-specific criteria, assign weights, then rank assets on a shared scale.
  • Zoom in: Blogs may use time on page and scroll depth; videos use views; ebooks use downloads.
  • Reality check: Tool scores help only after your team owns the criteria and the review owners.
  • The bottom line: Score to decide what to refresh, promote, or stop rewriting from scratch.

Content Marketing is undoubtedly one of the most effective strategies for attracting and reaching out to consumers. 

There are many benefits to it, but that doesn’t mean that just any material will be helpful or relevant to your audience.

So, in practice, how can you evaluate what works and what is not so efficient? Content scoring was created to do precisely that.

If your team can, for example, score leads by measuring how likely a user is to finish a purchase, why not do the same with your content?

The gains in productivity can be immense. 

The challenge of defining a score for your content, however, is not so simple. You need to evaluate many factors to develop objective criteria.

For this reason, we will cover the following topics in this article about content scoring and content scoring tools:

2. Define a team

It is also necessary to define who on your team is responsible for creating and monitoring everything related to content scoring. 

Those are the professionals who will, for example, define the criteria for determining the quality and efficiency of content.

3. Establish the criteria

Next, it is time to establish the criteria for your content scoring. 

At this stage, remember, it is also important to define different metrics for each format.

For example, for a blog post, it may be interesting to evaluate the average time spent on the page or the scroll percentage. 

Videos can be assessed according to total views, while the success of an ebook can be measured by the total number of downloads.

Also, you should have in mind a value or total score, which will be the combination of these different criteria that you have established. 

So, a score of 10 (if that is the highest) will occur when all the requirements reach their highest values.

In this context, a blog post that scores a 10 will be one that gets above-average page time and beats your established share goals, for example.

Sometimes it’s tempting to lump all content into a single evaluation bucket, but honestly, not all types of content serve the same purpose or attract the same level of engagement. You might have blog posts that serve as evergreen resources, while a video explainer could spike quickly and then fade just as fast. Treating them the same way is a recipe for blurred insights. It’s worth looping in your analytics or data folks at this point, if you have them—having an extra set of eyes never hurts when you’re assigning weight to different KPIs.

It’s also easy to get caught up in chasing numbers that look good on paper but don’t really move the needle for your core goals. Maybe a certain post gets a ton of clicks but no real conversions, or maybe your “high engagement” video is mostly being watched by accidental visitors. The practical side of content scoring is figuring out which metrics actually map to your strategy, not just grabbing what’s trending or what feels impressive at first glance. It’s a bit messier than it sounds—honestly, you’ll tweak and re-tweak these values over time.

4. Analyze the content

After the above steps are complete, it’s time to analyze and monitor your content. 

This work must be performed with a certain periodicity to find the necessary improvements and prevent your content from staying with a low content score for too long, for example.

5. Create quality content

Finally, it is essential to use content scoring as a basis for improving your team’s production capacity. 

Evaluate the reports and metrics generated by your analysis and use them to define the improvements needed for the following series of content.

After all, there is no point in coming up with a content score and not using it as a learning tool.

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What Content Scoring Tools Should be Used?

With Digital Transformation, the good news is that measurement work can become even more efficient with the help of some content scoring tools. Let’s take a look.

Moz

Staying updated on your site’s performance is also fundamental, and that’s what Moz offers.

The paid solution carries out regular scans to evaluate the performance of your pages. The tool helps you find aspects that can be fixed and improved upon — from duplicate content to formatting errors or slow loading.

SEMrush

When we talk about content auditing for your SEO strategy, SEMrush is one of the most common tools.

It can also be quite helpful for your content scoring work.

After all, the tool supports your business in keyword usage, backlinks and even competitor analysis, presenting clues of what is working and possible mistakes.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a SaaS that, among many other features, offers the possibility to perform an audit on your pages regularly.

Everything that is part of your domain is analyzed, avoiding harmful backlinks affecting the quality of the content. 

Even the posts that did not receive links are evaluated, ensuring that your strategy is on the right track.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another platform that should be explored to improve your content scoring.

With numerous tools and reports available, it is much easier to find errors on your pages and correct them.

From tips to improve SEO to fixing HTML errors, everything is designed to enhance the quality of your content.

Google Analytics

During the audit work, Google Analytics can make the task even simpler and more precise. 

This is because content scoring also needs to assess issues such as bounce rate, average time spent on your pages, and metrics that will contribute to the understanding of whether each content is, in fact, achieving a satisfactory performance.

Wrap Up

To continue improving your work and ensuring that the content offered by your company is attractive to your audience, content scoring tools can be an excellent ally.

By defining the most appropriate criteria and creating a ranking, you and your team can act more strategically when it comes to making decisions and, thus, obtaining good results.

In addition to the quality of the content produced by your Digital Marketing team, you should improve your content strategy constantly, seeking to identify gaps in your knowledge.

Want to know how to do that? 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

How is content scoring different from lead scoring?

Lead scoring estimates how likely a person is to buy; content scoring grades the asset itself against performance goals. Mailchimp describes content scoring as a grading system that flags stronger and weaker pieces across a library. Use both: content scores show which assets deserve distribution, while lead scores show who is ready for sales follow-up.

Which criteria should a team put in a content scorecard?

Progress recommends a matrix with predefined criteria such as keyword usage, relevance, readability, scannability, and visual attractiveness for blog posts. This article adds format examples: time on page or scroll percentage for posts, views for video, and downloads for ebooks. Keep the list short enough that reviewers can score weekly without inventing new rules each time.

Which tools help operationalize content scoring?

This guide points to Moz, SEMrush, and Ahrefs for search visibility signals, plus Google Search Console and Google Analytics for query, click, and on-site behavior data. Those platforms supply inputs; your scorecard still has to combine them into one comparable grade. Assign owners who update scores on a fixed cadence rather than after every publish panic.

What should a team do after a piece scores poorly?

Treat a low score as a repair queue that points to fixes instead of blame. Mailchimp notes scoring connects metrics to objectives so you can spot fixable gaps such as weak calls to action or poor conversion despite traffic. Refresh the underperforming asset, change distribution, or retire it if the topic no longer matches demand.

MM Matt Montenegro

Matt Montenegro

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