Content Analysis for Customer Focus & Readability

By Herb Firestone
Marketing Coordinator

Starting today I’ve added two content analysis tests to the Directory One SEO client website analysis process.

Customer Focus Test

The first is a customer focus test created by Bryan Eisenberg, a leading conversion optimization expert. Eisenberg’s test analyzes whether your content emphasizes customer benefits and needs versus emphasizing you and your company. It accomplishes this by comparing the number of customer focused words in your text, such as you, your company, or your business with self-focused words, for example, I, my, me, our, us and your company name.

Originally I was planning to run the tests on the Directory One home page, but I quickly realized that would have been a perfect example of exactly what I’m advising clients not to do, namely company focused content. So instead I randomly chose two sites from Technorati’s top 100 blog list: #2 Techcrunch and #10 Mashable.

The following are the Customer Focus test results for the Techcrunch homepage today:

Customer Focus Rate: 53.57%
Instances of customer-focused words: 15
Self Focus Rate: 46.43%
Instances of self-focused words: 13
Instances of the Company Name: 0

Apparently they write about themselves almost as often as they write about their readers.

And the Customer Focus test results for Mashable:
Customer Focus Rate: 49.47%
Instances of customer-focused words: 47
Self Focus Rate: 50.53%
Instances of self-focused words: 33
Instances of the Company Name: 15

Mashable also writes about themselves almost as often as they write about their readers.

Readability Test

The second test is a readability test, created by Juicy Studio.

The test provides a Gunning-Fog Index, “a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand their content. The lower the number, the more understandable the content will be to their visitors.”

It also provides a Flesch Reading Ease Number that “rates your text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the document. Writers are encouraged to aim for a score of approximately 60 to 70.”

And last but not least, the test provides a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, which, like the Gunning-Fox index, is “a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand their content.”

The following are the reading level results for TechCrunch:

Gunning Fog Index: 10.24
Flesch Reading Ease: 58.45
Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 7.45

And the reading level results for Mashable:
Gunning Fog Index: 9.98
Flesch Reading Ease: 58.55
Flesch-Kincaid Grade: 6.70

Maybe these aren’t the best sites to illustrate either of the tests, simply because both sites report tech news made by other companies and both home pages change daily.

Even with that in mind, however, Mashable managed to slip15 instances of their company name onto their home page. Suprisingly, the readability levels for both are pretty reasonable.

Feel free to try either or both tests on your homepage or blog or suggest any others you are familiar with in the comments.