Content Marketing
Content strategy aligned to SEO and your funnel
A content strategy tells you what to publish, why, and in what order. We research what your buyers search for, map topics to funnel stages, and hand you a prioritised calendar with briefs ready to write.
Who it is for: Businesses that publish inconsistently, or publish plenty without knowing what it achieves.
Everything in this service
- Topic and keyword research built on real buyer questions
- Content mapped to funnel stage and service pages
- A prioritised editorial calendar
- Writer-ready briefs with structure and target queries
- Internal linking plan connecting content to money pages
What to expect
- A clear answer to what should we publish next
- Every piece tied to a search demand and a service page
- Publishing effort that compounds instead of scattering
How content strategy actually works
Audit what you already published before planning anything new
A content strategy should start with subtraction, not addition. Before we plan a single new article we inventory everything that already exists, because adding to a weak library rarely fixes it and usually makes the problem harder to see.
The inventory is a spreadsheet of every content URL with a small set of numbers against each one: organic sessions, search impressions, the queries it ranks for, how many other pages link to it internally, the date it was last touched, and whether anyone who read it went on to enquire. That is enough to sort every page into one of four decisions. Keep means it works and should be left alone. Improve means the topic is right but the execution is thin or dated. Merge means two or more pages are competing for the same intent and should become one stronger page. Remove means it has no traffic, no links and no business purpose, and it is diluting the rest of the site.
Merging is usually where the biggest gain sits. When four short posts all half-answer the same question, none of them earns the position, and writing a fifth makes it worse. Combining them into one page that answers the question properly, then redirecting the old URLs to it, concentrates the signals instead of splitting them. Removing pages feels wrong to most teams, but a smaller library where every page has a reason to exist is easier to maintain and easier for a search engine to make sense of.
- Keep: performing, current, leave it alone
- Improve: right topic, thin or dated execution
- Merge: several pages chasing one intent, combine and redirect
- Remove: no traffic, no links, no purpose
- Record the decision and the date, so the next audit starts from evidence
Map every topic to a funnel stage and to a page that earns money
A topic that cannot be traced to a commercial page is a hobby. Every item on the calendar gets two labels before it is approved: the stage of the buying journey it serves, and the service or product page it is meant to support.
The stages are simpler than most frameworks pretend. Problem aware is someone who knows they have a problem but not what to call it. They search in symptoms, and the content that serves them explains and diagnoses. Solution aware is someone comparing approaches. They search in categories and comparisons, and the content that serves them weighs options honestly, including the option of doing nothing. Provider aware is someone choosing who to hire. They search in brand names, pricing, alternatives and reviews, and the content that serves them is proof: how you work, what it costs, what happened for similar businesses.
The link between the article and the commercial page is the part teams skip. Each piece should carry at least one internal link into the relevant service page, with anchor text that describes the destination rather than saying read more. Done consistently across a topic cluster, this does two jobs at once. It gives readers an obvious next step, and it tells search engines which page you consider the authority on that subject.
- Problem aware: symptom searches, explain and diagnose
- Solution aware: comparison searches, weigh options honestly
- Provider aware: brand and pricing searches, show proof
- Every piece links to a commercial page with descriptive anchor text
- If a topic supports no commercial page, question why it is on the list
Set a cadence the team can actually hold
Cadence is a resourcing decision, not an ambition. The most common failure in content marketing is a calendar built on optimism that collapses in month three, leaving a blog with a visible six month gap in it.
The honest way to set it is arithmetic. Count the hours a finished piece really takes in your business, including research, interviews with the person who knows the subject, drafting, editing, images, publishing and promotion. Multiply by the number of pieces you want per month. Compare that to the hours the people involved actually have after their other work. Most teams discover they can sustain about half of what they planned. Two strong pieces a month, published for two years, will beat eight rushed pieces a month abandoned after a quarter.
Two habits protect the cadence once it is set. Build a buffer of finished pieces before you launch, so a sick week does not break the streak. And plan anything seasonal or event linked at least two months ahead, because those pieces need to be indexed and gathering links before the demand arrives, not published on the day.
- Measure real hours per piece, including review and promotion
- Halve the ambitious number, then commit to what remains
- Keep two or three finished pieces in reserve as a buffer
- Schedule seasonal content two months before the season
- Treat a missed slot as a process problem, not a personal one
Governance: who owns what, and how a piece gets from idea to live
Content dies in the handoffs. A named owner for each stage removes most of the delay, because nobody has to work out whose turn it is.
Six roles cover almost every setup, and one person can hold several of them. The strategist decides what gets written and writes the brief. The writer drafts. The editor checks structure, voice and clarity. The subject expert checks that the claims are true, which is the step most often skipped and the one that protects you. The publisher handles the upload, the internal links, the images and the metadata. The promoter puts it in front of people once it is live. Critically, there is one approver, not a committee. Approval by consensus is how a two week piece becomes a two month piece.
Governance also covers the rules the writing has to follow. A short style guide settles voice, formatting and the words you never use. A claims rule settles what evidence a statement needs before it can be published, which matters more than it sounds: a single invented statistic that gets quoted back at you costs more trust than a year of good posts earns. Finally, put every published piece on a review date, usually every six or twelve months, so the library stays current rather than quietly rotting.
- Name an owner for brief, draft, edit, expert review, publish and promote
- One approver, not a committee
- A short style guide covering voice, formatting and banned words
- A claims rule: no number gets published without a source you have read
- A review date on every piece, so old content is refreshed on schedule
Measuring content beyond pageviews
Pageviews is the weakest number that still gets reported first. It tells you something happened, not whether it was worth doing. Four measures give a much clearer picture, and all of them are available without extra tooling.
The first is search coverage: how many distinct queries a page appears for, and whether that number is growing. A page that ranks for one query is fragile. A page that ranks for two hundred related queries has become the reference on its subject. The second is assisted conversion: how often an enquiry involved reading a piece of content at some earlier point, rather than only counting the last click. The third is time to traction, which is how long a new piece takes to gather impressions. It sets realistic expectations, because content is slow and reporting monthly against a target it cannot hit yet damages support for the whole programme. The fourth is the only one that finally matters, which is enquiries and revenue attributable to the content library over time.
The practical trick for reporting is to group pieces by the month they were published and follow each group forward. Comparing all content from this month against all content from last month hides the fact that older pieces are still growing. Following a publishing cohort shows the compounding, which is the actual argument for doing this at all.
- Query coverage per page, and whether it is widening
- Assisted conversions, not just last click
- Time to first meaningful impressions, to set expectations
- Enquiries and revenue linked to the content library
- Report by publishing cohort so compounding is visible
Planning for AI answer engines as well as search results
People increasingly ask a question of an assistant instead of scanning ten blue links. That changes what a content plan should prioritise, and it is worth being precise about what is known and what is guessed.
What the evidence supports is directional and simple. Clear, answer-first pages that state the answer before the context are easier for these systems to read and lift. Covering the adjacent questions around a topic, not just the headline query, is our own reasoning about how these systems break a question into parts, and we present it as our reasoning rather than as an instruction from any platform. Keeping critical text in the raw HTML matters, because several major AI crawlers fetch pages without running the scripts. And independent third-party coverage tends to be favoured over your own marketing pages, which is why a content plan that only ever publishes on your own site is incomplete.
What we will not tell you is that any of this guarantees a citation. Nobody can attribute a specific mention in an AI answer to a specific piece of work, and no agency can promise one. We also will not sell you an llms.txt file as an AI visibility tactic, or claim that adding schema markup causes AI citations, because the available studies do not support either claim. Schema still earns its place for rich results and for making your entities unambiguous, and that is how we describe it.
- Answer first, then the detail and the caveats
- Cover the adjacent sub-questions around a topic, not only the headline query
- Keep the important text server rendered, not injected by script
- Pair on-site content with earned third-party coverage
- Treat any promise of guaranteed AI citation as a warning sign
A clear path, step by step
- 01
Audit and plan
We check the current state, find what is holding you back, and agree a prioritised plan.
- 02
Fix and build
We make the changes: technical fixes, content, structure and internal links.
- 03
Make it citable
We add the structure and signals that help search and AI engines trust and quote the page.
- 04
Track and improve
We measure rankings, visibility and enquiries each month, then refine.
Why choose us for this
Strategy grounded in search data, not brainstorm lists
Briefs detailed enough that any competent writer can execute
We plan for AI answer engines as well as Google
Common questions
What does a content strategy actually include?
A researched topic map, a prioritised calendar, writer briefs and an internal linking plan. You get documents your team can execute, not a slide deck of theory.
Can our in-house team do the writing?
Yes. Many clients keep writing in-house and use us for the strategy and briefs. Others hand us the whole loop. Both work.
Explore related work
Want this for your business?
Book a free visibility call and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
How this is delivered
One person leads every project. Where a job genuinely needs a specialist, I bring in people I have worked with before and manage them, so you get one point of contact and one invoice rather than three suppliers blaming each other.
- You talk to the person responsible for the work, not an account manager
- Specialists are briefed and managed by me, and their work is checked before it reaches you
- One contract, one invoice, one place to chase