Do Higher Content Scores Mean Higher Google Rankings? Our Data Says It’s Unlikely.

I studied the correlation between rankings and content material scores from 4 well-liked content material optimization instruments: Clearscope, Surfer, MarketMuse, and Frase. The consequence? Weak correlations throughout.

This implies (correlation doesn’t essentially indicate causation!) that obsessing over your content material rating is unlikely to result in considerably larger Google rankings.

Does that imply content material optimization scores are pointless?

No. You simply must understand how finest to make use of them and perceive their flaws.

Most instruments’ content material scores are primarily based on key phrases. If top-ranking pages point out key phrases your web page doesn’t, your rating might be low. If it does, your rating might be excessive.

Whereas this has its apparent flaws (having extra key phrase mentions doesn’t at all times imply higher subject protection), content material scores can not less than give some indication of how comprehensively you’re overlaying the subject. That is something Google is looking for.

In case your web page’s rating is considerably decrease than the scores of competing pages, you’re in all probability lacking vital subtopics that searchers care about. Filling these “content material gaps” would possibly assist enhance your rankings.

Nonetheless, there’s nuance to this. If competing pages rating within the 80-85 vary whereas your web page scores 79, it seemingly isn’t price worrying about. But when it’s 95 vs. 20 then yeah, you need to in all probability attempt to cowl the subject higher.

There are not less than two downsides you have to be conscious of with regards to content material scores.

They’re straightforward to cheat

Content material scores are typically largely primarily based on what number of instances you employ the beneficial set of key phrases. In some instruments, you possibly can actually copy-paste all the listing, draft nothing else, and get an virtually good rating.

That is one thing we intention to unravel with our upcoming content material optimization software: Content material Grasp.

I can’t reveal an excessive amount of about this but, nevertheless it has an enormous USP in comparison with most present content material optimization instruments: its content material rating relies on subject protection—not simply key phrases.

For instance, it tells us that our SEO strategy template ought to higher cowl subtopics like key phrase analysis, on-page web optimization, and measuring and monitoring web optimization success.

However, not like different content material optimization instruments, lazily copying and pasting associated key phrases into the doc received’t essentially improve our content material rating. It’s sensible sufficient to grasp that key phrase protection and subject protection are various things.

They encourage copycat content material

Content material scores inform you how nicely you’re overlaying the subject primarily based on what’s already on the market. Should you cowl all vital key phrases and subtopics from the top-ranking pages and create the last word copycat content, you’ll rating full marks.

This can be a drawback as a result of high quality content material ought to deliver one thing new to the desk, not simply rehash present info. Google actually says this in their helpful content guidelines.

In truth, Google even filed a patent some years again to determine ‘information gain’: a measurement of the brand new info supplied by a given article, over and above the knowledge current in different articles on the identical subject.

You’ll be able to’t depend on content material optimization instruments or scores to create one thing distinctive. Making one thing that stands out from the remainder of the search outcomes would require experience, experimentation, or effort—one thing solely people can have/do.

Massive because of my colleagues Si Quan and Calvinn who did the heavy lifting for this research. Nerd notes beneath. 😉

• For the research, we chosen 20 random key phrases and pulled the highest 20 rating pages.
• We pulled the SERPs earlier than the March 2024 update was rolled out.
• Among the instruments had points pulling the highest 20 pages, which we suspect was as a consequence of SERP options.
• Clearscope didn’t give numerical scores; they opted for grades. We used ChatGPT to transform these grades into numbers.
• Regardless of their rising prominence within the SERPs, a lot of the instruments had bother analyzing Reddit, Quora, and YouTube. They sometimes gave a zero or no rating for these outcomes. In the event that they gave no scores, we excluded them from the evaluation.
• The explanation why we calculated each Spearman and Kendall correlations (and took the typical) is as a result of in keeping with Calvinn (our Information Scientist), Spearman correlations are extra delicate and due to this fact extra liable to being swayed by small pattern dimension and outliers. However, the Kendall rank correlation coefficient solely takes order under consideration. So, it’s extra strong for small pattern sizes and fewer delicate to outliers.

Last ideas

Enhancing your content material rating is unlikely to harm Google rankings. In spite of everything, though the correlation between scores and rankings is weak, it’s nonetheless constructive. Simply don’t obsess and spend hours making an attempt to get an ideal rating; scoring in the identical ballpark as top-ranking pages is sufficient.

You additionally want to concentrate on their downsides, most notably that they’ll’t allow you to craft distinctive content material. That requires human creativity and energy.

Any questions or feedback? Ping me on X or LinkedIn.