02 ——
The Craft
Content Strategy
Content without strategy is just publishing. Research comes first — understanding what your audience is actually asking, where your expertise genuinely answers it, and how to build something that earns its position rather than occupying it temporarily.
Content strategy is the discipline of deciding what to say, to whom, in what form, and in what order — before anyone writes a word. It's research-led planning that maps your expertise against what your audience is searching for, identifies the gaps and builds a structure that compounds over time.
Done properly it's the difference between a site that ranks because it's useful and a site that publishes because it has a content calendar. Volume without intent is noise. The work is finding the intersection of what you know and what people need to know — and building the content that sits there.
Everything starts with data. GSC shows what's already ranking and where clicks are being lost. GA4 shows what content converts and what doesn't. SEMrush and Ahrefs give a view of the wider competitive landscape — what competitors are doing, where the gaps are, and where the real opportunity sits. The strategy is built on that, not assumptions.
Intent distribution also varies significantly by platform. The chart below shows how search intent differs between Google and ChatGPT — transactional queries dominate on ChatGPT in a way they don't on Google. Understanding not just what people are searching for, but where they're searching and what mode they're in when they do, shapes the entire content strategy.
Source: SEMrush — US clickstream data, October & November 2024
The work covers the full content strategy cycle — from initial research through to structure, optimisation and ongoing development. This list isn't exhaustive; every site presents different content challenges and the approach is shaped accordingly.
Understanding what your audience is actually searching for — informational, navigational, commercial, transactional — and mapping content to match the right intent at the right stage. Built from GSC query data, SEMrush and SERP analysis rather than volume figures alone.
Intent distribution also differs significantly depending on where people are searching. Understanding that mix — and how it's shifting as AI search grows — is central to building a content strategy that works across platforms, not just Google.
Source: SEMrush — US clickstream data, October & November 2024
A systematic review of existing content using GSC and GA4 data — what's performing, what isn't, what's cannibalising other pages, what's thin and what should be removed or consolidated. The starting point for most content strategies.
Identifying where competitors are ranking that you aren't — and more importantly, where there's genuine search demand that nobody is answering well yet. The opportunity space that a good content strategy is built around.
Organising content into pillar pages and supporting clusters that build topical authority. Category architecture that makes sense to both users and search engines — and doesn't create cannibalisation problems as the site grows.
Title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, body copy, image alt text — the detail work that makes a well-written page a well-ranking one. Applied consistently across priority pages, informed by what GSC shows is underperforming.
Structured FAQ content that targets the specific questions sitting between a user and a conversion. Supports schema markup, surfaces in rich results, and proven effective at end-of-funnel across enterprise and e-commerce contexts.
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — building the signals that establish genuine credibility. Author pages, credentials, first-hand content and editorial standards that demonstrate real expertise rather than performing it.
What to publish and why — tied to search opportunity and GA4 performance data rather than the desire to look active. Priority-driven rather than frequency-driven. The difference between a content plan and a content calendar.
Literature covers strategy, planning and optimisation — not copywriting or content production. The deliverable is the framework, the brief and the direction: what to write, why and how it should be structured. The writing itself sits with whoever produces your content.
That said, briefs are written to be used rather than filed — specific enough that a writer can produce the right content from them, with the SEO intent already built in.
Start with what you're currently publishing and what it's achieving. We'll work out where the gap is from there.
