Art of Authority - Lesson 7
The Coherence Test
The failure no other score sees: a strong page about a different subject from the feed that sent the visitor
You can pass every element in the last lesson and still lose the visitor. The headline names an audience, the About runs long, the shelf is full. Then they read the page, and it is about something else.
Topic coherence is 6 of the profile pillar's 100 points. The smallest weight on the page, and the idea this track cares most about.
Your own number is not computed yet. The method is fixed and the scorer is written, and the element on your report says so rather than guessing. You can run the test by hand today, which is why it is here now.
The Mismatch Problem
Nobody reads a profile cold. They read it straight after something else, still holding the question that thing raised. Coherence is whether your page answers that question or a different one.
It goes wrong two ways. The generalist page under a specialist feed: the posts have found their subject, and the page has not moved since the last job title changed. The specialist page under a wandering feed: the promise is sharp, and the week decides what gets posted.
Both leave the visitor unable to say what following you would sign them up for. Neither is a failure of effort. Drift is what happens to people who are working.
Declared Against Observed
There are two comparisons, not one. Declared is your page against the anchor topics you named when you joined, which is your intention. Observed is your page against what you have actually been posting about, which is your behaviour.
We blend them with observed counting twice: two parts what you did, one part what you said, over three. Where only one exists, that one stands alone. Where neither exists, the element does not score, and it says so.
Observed counts double because your audience has been reading the posts, not the declaration. Weighting them equally would let you improve a number by changing your mind on a form. Anyone who has set an intention in January knows which of the two a stranger can see.
What the Corpus Shows, and What We Cannot Tell You
The measurement compares two pieces of text and reports how close they sit, on a scale from nought to one. One would mean the page and the feed are about the same thing, and nought would mean no relationship at all.
It is a comparison and not a judgement. A brilliant page and a dull page about the same subject score the same. Across the top of our index that comparison has been run, and the close below shows how those pages are spread.
Your own number has not been run. The element on your report says coherence is not measured and contributes nought of its 6 points. It is not scoring you as zero. It is not scoring you at all.
The Fix Is a Decision
When the page and the feed disagree there are two moves. Move the page, which is right when the posts have found the subject and the page has not caught up. It is the cheaper of the two and usually the correct one.
Or move the posts, which is right when the page describes where the business is going and the feed has drifted somewhere more comfortable. That one is slower and sometimes the only honest answer. There is no third move that is a compromise between them.
Doing neither is also a decision, and it is the decision to keep spending reach on visitors who arrive somewhere they were not expecting. A reader who leaves this a quarter has chosen. They should know they chose.
Do This Once a Quarter
Write your three anchor topics from memory, without looking them up. Then list the subject of each of your last ten posts in three words or fewer. Count how many of the ten fall inside your anchors, and keep the count.
Then take your best post from the last month and read your headline straight after it. Ask whether the page looks like it was written by the person who wrote that post. Then write one sentence, dated, saying which of the two moves you are making.
Everything else on your profile you fix once. This one does not hold still, because it is a relationship between a page and a feed that keeps moving. A page that was coherent in January can be incoherent by June with nobody touching it.