Every week, we’ll deliver some of our thoughts, share our learning, curate some articles (from the legal industry and otherwise), and tell you what we’ve been up to.

1 in 302,575,350: those are the odds of taking home the largest Mega Millions lottery prize in history—$1 billion—in tonight’s drawing. The lottery might be a tax on people who can’t do math, but we have it on good authority that you can’t win if you don’t play.

The odds are somewhat better that someone will (a) read and (b) be impressed by content that you’ve slapped together on your website without any overarching strategy, but why play those odds? Don’t just pepper your web copy and blogs with keywords that searchers might use. There’s a better way to take control of the game and get more engaged, productive traffic.

While content quantity may improve your visibility, the quality of that content is what determines whether visitors explore your site past the first sentence or two. And high-quality content demands that you strategically target your copy to your desired audience and use that content as efficiently as possible.

For a quick-and-dirty version of a strategic content assessment, ask these 10 questions:

Who is your audience, and what questions do they have?
Does your content coherently answer those questions?
How is your current content performing according to your analytics?
Is your audience engaging with your calls to action?
Are you using strong headlines to attract attention?
Are you using images and other visual cues to appeal to your audience?
Have you optimized your content for search engines?
Does your writing have the weight of authority behind it, with evidence, statistics, or influential quotes backing it up?
Is your writing as clear and readable as it can be? (Pro tip: You are not a good judge of this. Ask a friend to read it for you.)
How much mileage are you getting out of your content?

Is even a quick-and-dirty assessment frustrating or overwhelming? Or are you appalled by the results? If so, we know some people who can help.

What’s new this week in the legal industry?

Looking for some (more) tips to improve your content marketing?

Making the most of your company’s accolades (Forbes)
Long-form content can yield amazing results (SEMrush)
Twitter is flagging tweets that violate its terms of service (Mashable)

Need something to talk about at tonight’s cocktail party?

Why have lottery prizes grown so much? (Washington Post)
Do Megan Markle’s shoes really matter? (Yahoo!)
Why are tornado hot spots shifting? (Washington Post)

So, what has Scribe been up to this week?

Drop us a line and let us know what you’re up to—we’d love to see how we can help!

Friday scribbles: a quick-and-dirty content assessment