If you are optimizing an existing blog post and are looking at the content grade in your Report Card, you may notice that it differs from the content grade for your site in the Competitive Analysis:
Why does this happen?
When a content brief is first created, Topic attempts to parse the contents of your page to assign it a grade. Due to the differing structures of every page, there are occasions where our system excludes content that should be rightfully included (such as a recipe card that it thinks is not part of the main body of the page) or include content that should be ignored (like a comments widget).
When you land on the Content Grader for the first time, it will ask you to confirm whether the imported content looks correct. If you make any changes to the content to improve its accuracy (such as removing comments or adding a recipe card) this will impact the content grade and cause it to differ from the grade shown in the Competitive Analysis table.
Which grade should I trust?
As long as you ensure that the content in the Content Grader accurately reflects the content of your post, the grade in the Content Grader will be the most accurate. The grade that shows up in the Competitive Analysis should only be seen as an estimate in comparison to the other top-ranking pages.
I'm optimizing my post in the Content Grader but the grade in the Competitive Analysis table isn't changing.
This is what is supposed to happen. The grade shown in the Competitive Analysis table is meant to be a fixed snapshot of the grade when the content brief was created and will not change. Any further enhancements made to the post will only affect the grade shown in the Content Grader and Report Card.