What's the difference between the Content Brief and Signals? Which one should I use?

The Content Brief in POP Pro is an easy to understand guide to effective SEO. There are often many judgment calls to make in SEO and the Content Brief makes those calls for you. It’s like having a high level SEO looking over your shoulder. The Content Brief will help you write content that is great for your visitors as well as Google.

The Signals in the Advanced Analysis', Compare Data sub-tab provides specific optimization recommendations for the most important SEO factors. The Signals strategy is for SEOs that are comfortable making their own judgment calls and need the nitty gritty details to gain an advantage over their competitors. 

Additionally, the Compare Data sub-tab gives you more options on choosing your strategy and approach so that you can customize your On Page SEO to meet your current needs.

Often a good approach is to start with the Content Brief and get to a score above 80%. Watch the movement of your page. Once you have completed all the recommendations in the Content Brief and gotten the score to 100% you can then move into the Compare Data sub-tab to find specific signals that may need optimization to give you more of an edge on your competitors.

Scoring in each system:

POP Pro Content Brief

The Content Brief is scored based on following the recommendations of the Content Brief. When using the Content Brief the best score is 100%. The Content Brief is designed in a way that you can reach the score of 100%. Most people start seeing good movement in rank once they hit 80%.

Signals

The Signals score is calculated in a slightly different way than the Content Brief. It is not always possible to get to a score of 100%. The Signals is based on what your competitors have done. It is not always the best idea to follow your competitors exactly because they may have done some things incorrectly. This is where judgment calls come in. Most people will see positive movement when they hit somewhere between 60-70%. Often a good score that will be in the 80-85% range. From time to time it is possible to get above 90% but a score that high often isn’t necessary to rank well. The performance metrics of your target page are more important than a specific score in POP.

Important to note, you can also see the recommendations that impact your Signals score. Inside of the Custom Strategy tab, where you will see a To-Do list detailing high impact changes you can implement on your page.

You can also sign up for the weekly POP workshop. Kyle, or our head of support, does a weekly POP workshop where they show how to use POP to help you do effective SEO. He also answers any questions that you might have, live. The workshop is recorded and you will get a copy of the recording. You can register for the workshop here.