How to Create a Content Strategy: The Ultimate Guide

A thoughtful approach to content strategy supports your wider business goals, improves your site visitors’ experience, and shifts you out of a cycle of massive content overhauls. It also doesn’t have to cost you the earth or take up your team’s time—using content strategy services and automating tedious tasks can give you a cohesive approach that supports both you and your customers.

At Palantir, we have decades of experience helping businesses transform their content management processes into consistent workflows that keep their content fresh, relevant, and tailored to tackle wider organizational challenges. In this guide, we’ll share our insights into how to make the most of your content strategy as you build governance and structure that lasts—and we can help you make a new plan for auditing, implementation, and persistent oversight.

Learn more about our content services here.

What is the value of a content strategy? 

A content strategy doesn’t just refresh and retire existing content: it adds value by improving visitor experience, site performance, content workflows—and strengthening compliance and accessibility at every stage.

When approached holistically, a content strategy provides a concrete, step-by-step plan to turn your content library from an unwieldy burden into a useful tool that supports internal teams and site visitors. We work with many organizations that have vast and complex content libraries: they’re managing hundreds or thousands of content assets across websites, blogs, intranets, mailing lists, and other media. Over time, their brands evolve and their visitors’ needs shift, leaving them with huge backlogs of tasks to get their content back under control.

With no clear path forward and more pressing demands on their time, teams can view a content refresh as a “nice to have” without any clear value proposition. But an updated, strategic content library boosts your branding and increases trust.

The key is to lay a strong foundation: we start with a strategic direction, not a to-do list. 

Setting your north star: prioritizing outcomes over outputs

We take an agile approach to our work, and content strategy is no exception. Take the time to understand visitor needs so you can work incrementally to satisfy them at each stage of the project. Our first goal isn’t “create X new blog posts”, or “make sure all pages are WCAG compliant”. It’s to understand your organizational needs and how your content strategy can support them.

For example, let’s say your organization has a directory of all the health services in your local jurisdiction. The north star: providing your site visitors with clear, accurate, and up-to-date information on the vital resources available to them. To be accessible to as broad a user base as possible, your content should be written in plain language, formatted for ease of reading and screen reader compatibility, and performant on low-bandwidth devices. If your visitors stumble across conflicting information or can’t find the resources they’re looking for, it decreases trust and places additional burden on customer support teams.

Starting with site visitor needs gives us a clear list of targets for our content strategy and audit: structure, reading level, WROT (weak, redundant, outdated, and trivial) analysis, and page load times. These are no longer “nice-to-haves”—they’re opportunities that, if met, can support local citizens, reduce internal team workloads, and inspire trust and confidence. 

Laying the groundwork for a successful content strategy

After setting a clear guiding goal, it’s time to consider the team responsible for designing, planning, and carrying out your strategy:

• Which teams/individuals will be impacted?
• Who is responsible for ensuring consistent maintenance and implementation?
• Do you have the capacity and expertise to successfully complete your strategy in-house, or do you need to seek support from external service providers?

Content strategy services: are they worth it for your team? 

A comprehensive content strategy can be daunting and time-consuming. Many organizations turn to external content services for the more tedious tasks or to boost specific content competencies within their team. Deciding whether to leverage external services isn’t an all-or-nothing problem: to balance cost and value, focus on the phases where your team would most benefit from support.

If you’re put off by the tedium and time-sink of manually auditing all of your existing content, you could purchase an automated content audit. This tooling can reduce lead time for audits from months to weeks; services that blend automated tech and expert oversight offer uniform, trustworthy results—so you don’t have to compromise on quality to guarantee speed.

If your team has previously attempted content strategy but struggled to glean meaningful value, a more comprehensive end-to-end service might be a better fit. We can help you identify your unique business goals and make sure every step of your audit is tailored to your needs. 

Establishing a content governance committee

A one-time audit can help you address your organization’s current and most pressing concerns. But setting up an ongoing strategy and content governance framework helps you solve your challenges today and tomorrow. A content governance committee determines:

• Policies for content creation, maintenance, and archiving/deletion
• Who is responsible for creating, maintaining, and curating each piece of content 
• A mechanism for changes and updates to these policies

This means that keeping content up-to-date, relevant, and in line with accessibility and brand policies becomes an iterative part of your content workflows.  

If you already have a content governance committee, your content strategy should start with a review of existing policies and workflows. If you’re starting governance for the first time, we advise setting up these frameworks and appointing a committee as part of your content strategy.

Your governance efforts will help determine what your strategy should look like, and your committee should already be in place to ensure the strategy recommendations are carried out. Use our guide to the seven steps of content governance to kickstart your efforts. 

Content auditing: the backbone of your content strategy

When backlogs of outdated content start to pile up, it’s tempting to consider a full redesign. But every library contains hidden opportunities—even your outdated and underperforming content contains valuable data you can use to inform your strategy.

A content audit creates a list of every piece of existing content and scores it against the metrics relevant to your goals. Most contain generic measures such as page views, URL, and subdomain; others to consider include content quality, relevance, accessibility, and SEO/AEO/GEO.

Content audit data is used to determine your next steps: which content to keep, edit, or archive, and which new resources need to be created. The audit can also surface patterns across your content—turning an unwieldy pile into a strategic information source. If you notice, for instance, that the majority of your content isn’t using your most recent brand voice and tone guidelines, you can feed this information back to your content governance committee so they can devise new policies to prevent this in the future.  

The five key steps to a successful content audit

Regardless of your wider objectives, most audits broadly follow a five-point structure.

1. Setting goals and identifying scope. Get clear on your purpose before you start auditing to help you tailor each subsequent phase of the process.
2. Creating an inventory. Gather an overview of every piece of content—its format, location, URL, and when it was created and modified.
3. Analysis. Determine how your content stacks up against metrics aligned with your goals—content quality, relevance, structure, and accessibility, for example.
4. Evaluation. Use your data to answer key organizational questions. Why aren’t visitors finding the information they need? What tweaks to your information architecture or new resources can support better user journeys?
5. Create your content strategy. Use your insights and evaluation to create your new strategy. Focus on concrete, actionable steps: what should be improved? What should be archived? What new resources do you need to create?

You can find more information on each individual phase in our step-by-step content auditing guide. 

Choosing the right tools

If manually cataloging and analyzing every single piece of content your organization oversees sounds like a hassle, you’re not alone. A fully manual approach can take months—it’s tedious work for your team, and many audits get abandoned partway through as more pressing work emerges.

The right tooling can help with this. Our AI-assisted content auditing tool provides a host of benefits:

• An overview of every content asset on your site
• A score for each page to detect weak, redundant, outdated, and trivial content
• Identifying grammar, spelling, and unexplained jargon issues across your whole site
• A full view of your content’s performance—no half-finished audits left by the wayside
• A report in weeks, not months—saving you valuable time and energy

This gives you a clear overview and detailed insights into every piece of content—for a fraction of the cost of a manual audit. When it comes to using automated tools, we always recommend a human-in-the-loop approach, where human oversight and expertise are used to put the data into context. For more insights into how to balance expert input with the time and cost savings, explore our guide on how to use AI tools to supercharge your audit. 

Choosing your goals and metrics

We recommend building on the agile approaches set out at the beginning of the strategy to select the goal most relevant to your organization and specific needs. Having a tidy content library is great—but maximizing your content to meet your site visitors' needs should always be the guiding principle. Here are some common metrics that can help you get there.

WROT analysis

Our content audits start with a WROT analysis, scoring each page to identify content that’s weak, redundant, outdated, and trivial. This allows you to pinpoint content that:

• Conflicts with your most recent brand guidelines on tone, style, and reading level
• Provides information that’s out of date or irrelevant
• Doesn’t provide a direct answer to site visitors’ questions
• Duplicates information that visitors can already find elsewhere on your site

We pair this with metrics such as page views, user journeys, and bounce rate to inform decisions on which actions to take. If a page is weak (poorly structured or providing unclear answers) but is getting a lot of views, we opt to keep the page and edit the content. If two pages deliver the same information but one gets vastly more views than the other, we can archive the page that fewer people visit.

Accessibility

Accessibility isn’t just about box-ticking or hitting federal requirements; it’s about usability. An accessible content strategy, paired with ongoing maintenance through governance, makes your content work for all site visitors across all devices. Some metrics you might want to bake into your strategy:

• Plain language, and ensuring all your content adheres to a consistent reading level (lower secondary reading level is required for WCAG 2.2 AAA)
• Multiple ways to access media, such as making sure images and video have alt text and captions, and tables include a data format that’s parsable by screen readers
• Clear content structures, both in terms of on-page elements (headings) and code (semantic HTML)

Our guide to building accessibility best practices into your content governance has more specific recommendations and approaches. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO)

To make the most of your existing content, it has to be findable—which means it’s discoverable and well-ranked by search engines and generative LLMs. Although traditional search engines are currently still used more than generative search engines, GEO presents a significant opportunity. According to ahrefs, conversion rates from AI search engines are 23 times higher than traffic from traditional search.

The good news: early research suggests that SEO and GEO best practices go hand in hand and can be checked with a fairly straightforward list of items:

• On-page content structure offers clear, descriptive headings and subheadings
• Meta content and schema provide a consistent structure
• All links are active and use descriptive text like “view our services”, not “click here” 
• Page title and meta text are complete and within character limits
• Complete alt text for audio, visual, and video elements 
• Crucial information is at the start of each paragraph 
• Page links to other relevant resources, both on your own site and externally

Devising your content strategy

Your audit should give you a clearer picture of exactly what’s working and what isn’t; the rest of your content strategy is built on this data foundation. Ultimately, you need two prongs: an action plan for each existing asset and a larger-picture plan for changes informed by the insights you’ve gathered.

Your action plan assigns an action item to each existing piece of content. A typical set of options might include:

• Keep: Content that remains live with no edits or improvements
• Edit: Content that will continue to live on the site but requires changes; this might include subtasks based on the exact change required, such as “spellcheck”, “restructure”, “add brand voice”, et cetera
• Update: Editorially sound content that requires factual updates about your organization, services, or policies
• Add: Content that’s missing elements, such as SEO metadata or alt text for images 
• Merge: Two pieces of content that cover similar topics, which should be collated into one resource
• Delete and/or Archive: Content that will be removed from the site and can be deleted or stored elsewhere for reference

Wider patterns and trends in the data will point to more sweeping reforms. This is where the expertise of your team or external content service providers, as well as the audience your content serves, will really come into play. To get you started, here are some common data patterns and strategies you might want to incorporate:

Get in touch for tailored expertise to help you understand audit insights and best practices for putting your content to work for your specific organizational goals. 

Getting to work: content governance in practice

Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to get to work—which means identifying the person who is ultimately responsible for each action item in your strategy. 

Your content governance committee should decide and document who “owns” every facet of your content library: who is ultimately responsible for making sure they’re well-maintained according to your latest content policies. Ownership does not mean this person must carry out the work themselves, just that they’re ultimately accountable for the necessary changes being implemented, even if the work is delegated. 
For each site you manage, we recommend committees assign top-down ownership, starting with the highest level of website navigation and drilling down—our website governance guide has more information on how to carry this out. 

Keeping your strategy relevant

Your governance committee also plays a role in ensuring your strategy’s longevity. It’s easy for a content strategy to make a big splash on day one and then become less relevant and powerful as time goes on. By communicating key findings and designing policy changes with your committee, you ensure the most valuable data and approaches from your strategy continue to benefit you in the long run.

Communication within your wider organization is also crucial. Your strategy will naturally be most effective if all stakeholders are clear about their tasks and the tangible benefits of carrying them out. Share your strategy with all impacted staff members and make sure all relevant documentation is clear and accessible. Leadership also has a role to play here: vocal support from influential voices in your organization will encourage buy-in and active participation.

Organizing workshops and helping co-workers strengthen their digital skills helps people feel confident, knowledgeable, and empowered to make the most of your strategy, and can help alleviate potential confusion and skill gaps further down the road. If you’re interested in boosting your team’s skills and knowledge, get in touch. 

Signs your content strategy is working 

As you begin to implement your content strategy, be mindful of your websites’ stats (page views, clickthroughs, bounce rate) to see if there are quantitative improvements. Beyond the data, it’s also important to look out for qualitative signals that your strategy is—or isn’t—working. 

Some key signs content strategy has been effective include: 

• Reduced internal conflicts and confusion around content management 
• Decreased site visitor frustrations and more positive feedback
• Diminished customer service workloads, since more site visitors can self-service to find the information they need 
• Fewer open tickets about dead links, loading issues, and accessibility blind spots

Spot checks should also show sites and pages are relevant, up-to-date, and complying with your policies and guidelines—you don’t need to run another full audit to see that your content is working as intended.

Takeaways: Creating a strategy is more than a to-do list

Regardless of your organization’s sector, age, or current processes, it is possible for you to move out of cycles of content chaos and costly redesigns—but it takes a thoughtful approach. It’s a case of having clear goals, gleaning meaningful insights from your current content library, and supporting stakeholders as they put your findings into practice.

It can feel like a daunting task, but we’re here to help. With tailored expertise, smart automations, and a highly collaborative approach, we can design a strategy that makes the most of what you have, and sets you up with processes to support best-in-class content creation and maintenance well into the future. Reach out to us to discuss how we can best tailor our support to your team and site visitors.