Content Strategy

Content strategy orchestrates the purposeful planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content. An effective content strategy ensures that your content works toward your business and user goals, remains valuable over time, and grows in a sustained, purposeful way.

I use research and analysis to help you understand where your content is and isn’t working to meet your business goals, then work with you to create a plan to bridge gaps and sustain growth over time.

Why Content Strategy Matters

Content is the core commodity of the digital economy. It is what draws users to your domain and, when orchestrated well, is what keeps them there—and keeps them coming back. Content today does not calmly sit on static pages, eagerly awaiting serendipitous visits from patient and attentive readers. Content today is crawled by algorithms and search agents, scraped and federated by hungry bots, and, when actually visited by a human, is ruthlessly scanned for whatever nuggets of value are worth lingering over before moving on to the next online temptation.

Content strategy prepares you to face the realities of the modern web with purpose, direction, and intent. It’s what makes the difference between publishing to the web, and being seen on the web.

Learn more: Stop Publishing Pages! – Content Strategy Meetup Talk Highlights »

Common Activities

Strategies for the effective planning, production, use, and maintenance of content depend heavily on the goals, resources, and maturity of the organization they are meant to guide. Here are a few of the activities and tools I use to help clients cut through the content strategy haze with precision and purpose.

Discovery

The purpose of discovery is to understand the goals of your organization and the consumers of your content. Discovery activities often include:

Interviewing stakeholders and subject matter experts
Reviewing and synthesizing existing user and market research
Assessing current analytics for insight into user behavior and key resources
User interviews, surveys, and polls
Assessing performance, usability, and accessibility of your current site
Competitive and peer site audits

Learn more: A Beginner’s Guide to Keyword Analysis with Natural Language Processing »

Content Analysis

Understanding what content you have—and how well it aligns with your goals—is a crucial step in developing results-focused content strategy. Effective content analysis requires the use of both automated tools and human eyeballs. It often includes:

Automated crawling of site content
Assessment and analysis of site structure
Correlation of analytics and other performance measures
Metadata and linked data auditing
Qualitative content auditing
Gap analysis

Modeling

The high level goal of most content strategy work is to deliberately influence how content functions as a system in order to achieve identified business and users goals. Content and metadata models are where we design, refine, and communicate system level interventions. Common tasks include:

Domain modeling
Metadata attribute specification
Linked data type & attribute mapping
Content modeling
Taxonomy design

Learn more: Site Maps & Connected Content »

Roadmapping

A content strategy roadmap (often called a “Content Strategy Brief”) details how you’ll implement and maintain your goal-oriented, systemic approach to content. The roadmap orchestrates the people, processes, and technology needed to bring the models to life. Roadmapping can include: