A Roadmap for Quickly Refreshing Your Content Strategy

If your content has become unwieldy, you’re not alone. For teams managing hundreds or thousands of pages, content libraries can easily overflow with outdated and repetitive pages—meaning grammar, SEO, and accessibility issues slip through the cracks. A solid strategy gives you a roadmap to get your content back on track—a great one will even make your content work harder to support your wider aims.

But content audits can take your team months, if they get finished at all. Once the issues are identified, fixing them falls by the wayside without a solid plan in place. And how do you justify the time, budget, and effort it’s going to take? 

Content strategy services can help you get your content cleaned up fast, and make sure it stays that way well into the future. We’ll walk you through what these services are, how they can help, and how to balance cost and value. A systematic approach can yield results quickly and efficiently, and set you up to continue reaping the benefits on future projects.

If you’re looking to make the most of the content you’ve already created, we can help. Explore our ultimate guide to content strategy creation, or find a tailored approach that’s right for your organization.

Why is having a content strategy important?

Many organizations have a content strategy refresh somewhere on their to-do list—but it’s often looked over in favor of more time- and mission-critical tasks. But content strategy is worth prioritizing—it can be a huge boost to your mission and goals, and save you time on each subsequent project.

Making content strategy a short-term priority can lead to long term results:

• Identifying and fixing underperforming, outdated, and duplicated pages improves user experience and increases trust.
• Ensuring compliance to relevant accessibility standards by surfacing issues across your site
• Enabling visitors to “self-service” by locating relevant content in your information architecture relieves workload burdens on your internal staff.
• A clean library free of duplicates and deprecated content boosts site performance and cuts hosting and maintenance costs.
• Auditing and making the most of the content you already have saves significant costs, compared to starting from scratch with a full redesign.
• Setting up governance structures makes rolling out future changes and improvements (like changes to your brand voice and tone) much faster and easier.

Why organizations delay content strategy projects

Even with so many potential benefits, there are two very valid reasons you might be deprioritizing your overhaul.

First, developing a comprehensive content strategy can be a mammoth undertaking. If you undertake a manual audit, you commit members of your team to spending months combing through every single piece of existing content by hand to assess it against all relevant criteria. It’s not uncommon for this task to prove so unwieldy that audits go unfinished, with team members pulled off the project to deal with other tasks—and, frankly, reluctant to return to this tedium of manual auditing afterwards.

Those who do complete that daunting task face the second hurdle: an audit is not a strategy. A spreadsheet providing data points on your whole repository is great to have, but the data alone doesn’t provide value. You need to know how to use those insights to create a plan of action before you can actually start seeing the benefits of your hard work.

This is where content strategy services come in.

The Benefits of Content Strategy Services

Content strategy services refers to any professional service that helps you devise, conduct, and optimize your content strategy. This could be as simple as a tool or software, or as in-depth as a team of consultants running you through the entire process. 

Reducing labor and time

Content strategy services help alleviate the mammoth workload of a manual audit:

• Outsourcing your audit takes a huge amount of time and labor off your teams’ plate—and avoids the pitfall of leaving an audit half-finished.
• Automated auditing tools can save you even more time and money.
• Ensuring uniform results across thousands of pages—the combination of automated analysis and human oversight offers double scrutiny, and safeguards against errors slipping through the cracks.

Turning audit data into action

If you’re more concerned about turning audit data into an actionable plan, content strategy services provide several benefits:

• Tailoring each step of the process to your organizational goals means you get more than just a to-do list at the end of the process—a service can help you decide which metrics your audit targets, and devise a plan for content clean-up.
• Seeking targeted expertise can plug internal knowledge gaps and educate your team. Maybe your team members are UX hotshots, but out of their depth with SEO. Perhaps they’re experienced in creating accessible content, but not in designing information architecture that allows visitors to find it. Your strategy will only be as good as the knowledge base behind it—you can leverage external services to provide a solid foundation.
• A digital governance structure designed by external strategists ensures your content stays in great shape. Once your content is back under control, you also need a plan for how to keep it that way—and your strategists can help you create, establish, and get internal buy-in for new systems and digital governance structures.

Balancing cost and value

Content strategies can be as wide-ranging or as pinpointed as you need. The best way to balance cost and value is to honestly assess your individual strengths and pain points.

Perhaps you’re confident about the steps you need to take, but daunted by the sheer workload and wary of the time and cost for your already busy team. You could opt for a service focused on speeding up the auditing part of the process. Leveraging outside help here means your team can flex their skills to action the insights and improve your content.

If you’ve attempted content strategy and maintenance before but struggled to keep the project on-track or glean tangible results, a more comprehensive end-to-end service might be a better fit. Bringing in external expertise to identify specific goals and keep you focused could make all the difference. 

Palantir.net’s approach to content strategy

We’ve accrued nearly three decades of experience helping organizations with every phase of their digital transformation processes—so we know content strategy doesn’t benefit from a one-size-fits-all approach. We offer both tools and hands-on support to support organizations where they need it most.

Content improvement audit

Our content audits give you a holistic view and page-specific insights across your entire repository, no matter the size. It analyzes every page to find weak, redundant, outdated, and trivial (WROT) content, and identifies compliance issues such as inconsistent reading levels. Built on the latest large language learning model (LLM) technology, our tooling gives you a full overview of your content health in weeks, not months—and at a 30-50% cost savings compared to traditional manual audits. We’ll also provide an action plan  to boost SEO, site performance, and team efficiency.

Expert-guided strategy and training

When you need more tailored support, our content strategy experts can help turn your audit report into a plan that supports your mission-critical goals, as determined in the workshops and interviews we conduct at the start of the process. We shape our approach to the metrics that matter most to you, delivering a bespoke plan of action to make the most out of your content. If your team needs support or training with any of the facets of digital content production—whether that’s governance, UX, SEO, accessibility, or information architecture—we can support you with custom training.

We also offer content strategy services as part of our wider digital transformation and modernization services. Regardless of the scope of your project, we can find the service that works for your team rather than adding work to your team.

Cleaning up your content with  strategy services

Content strategy services are designed to help you get your content back under control in a manageable timeframe. Getting the most out of these services involves knowing your teams’ individual needs—do you just need better data to make informed decisions? Or are there skill gaps within your team preventing you from strategizing most effectively? Once you’ve identified current issues, do you already have the tools and structures to keep your content clean and performant?

If you’d like a fresh perspective on your content health, we’re here to help. Get in touch, and let’s find a strategy that works for you.