Content-Strategy Gap
A gap calculator for published content. Enter the share of recent posts that reinforce your core differentiator and the share that dilute it. Output: a gap score plus the publication pace adjustment most likely to close it.
Who it’s for: Content leads and CMOs who suspect the publishing calendar has drifted from the positioning but cannot point at a specific problem.
- 01
10 = nearly all of them point at the same idea. 1 = the feed is scattered across unrelated themes.
Scattered5Aligned - 02
Inverted: 10 = many pieces describe your category in a way that makes a competitor sound default. 1 = your frame is the one that carries.
Your frame wins5Competitor frame wins - 03
10 = nearly every piece is unmistakably for the ICP. 1 = content aimed at an audience you do not sell to.
Off-ICP5ICP-specific - 04
10 = a healthy mix with opinionated depth. 1 = everything is SEO-surface with no real point of view.
All surface5Real depth - 05
10 = consistent drumbeat every week. 1 = sporadic, months between pieces.
Sporadic5Drumbeat
Content is producing traffic without pull. Buyers read three pieces and cannot tell you what you believe. A content cull is the move, not more volume.
Read it honestly, not charitably.
Pull the last 20 pieces. Read them as a stranger would — one after the other, without the internal context. The rating is easier to do honestly when you make yourself the test audience.
The dilution input is the most valuable and the most uncomfortable. If your pieces describe your category using your biggest competitor’s preferred framing, you are paying to amplify their story. That shows up here as a high dilution score, which penalizes the total.
Throughput is weighted lowest on purpose. A sparse, sharp feed beats a dense, generic one. Do not let a low throughput score push you toward volume — it will tank reinforcement faster than it lifts the total.
Three moves you can make this week.
- Move 01
Run the Content-to-Positioning Alignment checklist next — it surfaces the specific pieces driving the lowest scores.
- Move 02
Retire the bottom five pieces before you publish the next one. Keep, rewrite, or kill — no fourth option. Dilution cleanup returns faster than new production.
- Move 03
Brief the next five pieces from your positioning brief, not from a keyword list. Keyword-first briefs are the largest single source of dilution on most feeds.
Why these questions, in this order.
Five inputs because content drift happens in five places: reinforcement (are pieces pointing at the same idea), dilution (are you accidentally helping competitors), audience fit (are pieces for your ICP), depth (is there a point of view), and throughput (is the drumbeat real).
Weighting favors reinforcement and dilution because both compound fastest. A scattered feed is a six-month problem; an actively-dilutive feed is a twelve-month problem. Throughput gets the lowest weight because adding volume without fixing the first two makes everything worse.
What this calculator is not: a traffic assessment. High-alignment content can have low traffic; viral content can dilute the positioning. Separate the traffic conversation from this one. This is a positioning-contribution read, measured in story consistency, not sessions.
Run the full Message Consistency.
Catches drift between your site, your reps, and your content.