It's important to understand that those two tools will analyze different contents.
1. What is being analyzed in Content Editor?
In Content Editor, we do not see the actual website that the content will go to, so the score is calculated only for the piece of content or the article you are creating at the moment. Your guidelines (including the score) are only focused on what’s going on in the tool and what is actually written there; words, pictures, structure, etc. You should also keep in mind that Content Editor has a suggested word count set, so the terms to use ranges will be based on the currently set total word count suggestion.
So, the main difference between Content Editor and Audit is that in the Content Editor, we focus mainly on the article’s contents.
2. What is being analyzed in Audit?
In Audit, the analysis is a little bit more complex as it considers everything that is placed within the <body> tags of your source code, like the navigation bar, the footer, menus, and comments, which is why the data can vary and might affect your final score. It looks both at the content you wrote and at everything surrounding the article on your webpage.
Another key difference is in Audit, we would apply the suggestions based on your current word count on the page. The terms-to-use suggestions will be based on how many words we saw on your audited page and adjusted accordingly.
👇 As a result, in these two tools, the Content Score, terms to use, and content length will most likely vary. There is no approach that will eliminate their differences, but. . .
3. Here are tips to make sure that your Content Editor and Audit are as closely related as possible.
👉Disclaimer: We recommend these tips when running Content Editor and Audit analysis. However, please remember that differences between the scores and guidelines will most likely still occur as those are two different "grades" due to the fact they’re different tools that serve different needs. You got nothing to worry about when this happens.
So if your Audit Content Score is only slightly lower than your Content Editor one, in most cases, it's better to move on and work on optimizing other content pieces.
Choose the exact keyword(s) and location for both tools.
Choose the exact keyword(s) and location for both tools.
It’s great, especially for comparing their results. It's also important to understand that multi-keyword analysis will be different from the guidelines for a single keyword as the Audit also does not support multi-keyword analysis. If you have made a Content Editor query using a few keywords (or created one from topic clusters in Keyword Research), the Audit won't show you the same results in a query made for only one of them.
Choosing the same crawler type - mobile or desktop - in both tools
Choosing the same crawler type - mobile or desktop - in both tools
The SERPs may vary depending on if we are crawling it for mobile or desktop devices, so it's important to choose the same crawler for both tools.
Your Organic Competitors list.
Your Organic Competitors list.
Since Surfer's suggestions are based on top-performing pages, if the top results change - so would the score and terms to use. If you are running an Audit and a Content Editor, you must remember to check and select the same competitors to get comparable results.
How much time passed between one query and another
How much time passed between one query and another
SERPs are dynamic and are changing daily. Depending on the niche, those changes may not even be noticeable, and some may be very substantial. When you are running an Audit to optimize your article written in your Content Editor a few months ago, you will most likely see some differences, even if you will choose the same parameters to run both queries. And it's totally ok! That is the main purpose of our Audit tool - to let you stay relevant and keep your articles up to date.
Content changes within the article itself.
Content changes within the article itself.
If you add some changes to your Content Editor article outside of Surfer, Audit will be able to see those changes, but Content Editor will not. For example, let's say that you created your article using Content Editor but decided to add your hyperlinks directly to your website-building tool. That would cause Audit to ignore the hyperlinked terms in the published article, but Content Editor would still see those.
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