What is My Blog Score?

Scoring a blog can seem like an impossible task especially if you are looking to score your own blog and trying desperately to be as objective as possible (without giving yourself bonus points for effort) but there are independent factors that you can use to give yourself a blog score or blog rating and to use as a measurable for monitoring and improving your blog month by month.

Everything from here on out is not ordered in priority as I would argue that they all contribute equally to a high rating blog but they can form a good checklist for you and when applying a 0-10 rating can give you a blog quality score (Excel wizards will be able to achieve amazing things with this I’m sure).

The following can be applied to individual blog posts as well as cumulatively to the blog as an entity (it is easier on a blog by blog basis but I’m sure there’s a few mavericks out there ready for a cumulative blog review).

Blog content quality

The actual quality of the content itself and the value that you see this as adding to the target audience who you want to be engaged with the blog. These two points can be seen as separate but I see them as intrinsically linked. You can give yourself a blog content quality score between 0-10 for all of the following (50 points available here);

  • Spelling and grammar
  • Sentence Construction
  • How well researched the content is
  • Uniqueness of Content
  • Entertainment value (you could replace this with Authority perception but I like the idea of adding value by means of entertaining your audience)

Blog engagement

This gives you the opportunity to be completely objective and look at statistics alone. At this point I hear some people calling out with joy and others groaning at the mention of statistics but please bear with me.

  • Number of Twitter tweets
  • Number of LinkedIn shares
  • Number of Google +1
  • Number of Facebook likes

You could collate the above into a single “10 points available” grouping or mark them individually as there are more statistics to come and you don’t want to apply weighting towards one content ranking area over another. I would recommend giving them 0-5 scores each (this will make sense as you read on).

You could take the above a step further and go into your Google Analytics account and run through your “Social” sources, conversions and more but I think the previously highlighted areas are enough for what we are trying to achieve here.

The next logical step is to measure the following:

  • Number of backlinks
  • Number of direct landing page entries
  • Number of comments

From these seven engagement parameters I would look to give a total blog points score of 50 (cumulative 20 points for the share, likes, tweets and plus 1’s and 10 points each for the backlinks, landing page entries to the site and comments).

So you now have a rating out of 100 to find for comparing your blog posts and/or to measure your blog as an entity.

So what next?

Get your Excel spreadsheet out, put in columns for all of the above rating areas plus; date, comments and a ratings breakdown (for consistency) and don’t forget to add in a calendar reminder to complete this task regularly. A one off exercise is interesting for sure but a timeline for measuring development areas and improvement is great.

The idea of this is to give you a quick means to measure your blog over time and compare results in a logical and somewhat objective way to keep track of what blog posts are working and which ones could be improved on.

I’m sure you have additional thoughts on other areas that can be used in conjunction with or instead of my own and I would love to hear them so comment at will!