Content Strategy
Good content strategy starts with the user, not the business.
Most content strategy starts in the wrong place. It starts with the business asking "what do we want to say about ourselves", and works outward from there. That's backwards. In my experience, outside ecommerce, around 99% of businesses only publish what their products are. They don't publish what the person searching actually needs to know at the point they're searching for it. Those are two different documents, and most sites have only ever written the first one.
So I start with the user. What does someone in this market actually need to know, at each stage of their own real-life problem, before they're ready to buy anything from anyone? Map that first. Then work out what the search behaviour actually looks like at each of those stages. Only after that do I look at what the business can credibly say about it - because a business claiming expertise it doesn't have is worse than saying nothing at all.
Start with the person, not the product
Every business thinks its content strategy is about its products or services. It usually isn't, or shouldn't be. A buyer doesn't wake up thinking about your product category. They wake up with a problem, and they search around that problem long before they search around your specific solution. If your content only exists at the point where someone's already decided what to buy, you've skipped every earlier stage where you could have been the source they trusted first.
Map the real-life stages, then map the searches onto them
Before I write a single keyword list, I map what the user is actually going through, stage by stage, in plain terms a person would use to describe their own situation. Then I map real search behaviour onto each of those stages. That order matters. Do it the other way round, starting from keyword volume, and you end up building content around what's searchable rather than what's actually useful - and it shows.
Then, and only then, what the business can credibly say
Once the user side is mapped, the question becomes what this specific business can honestly claim at each stage. Not what would look good - what's actually true. A business with real expertise in one narrow area should say a lot there and very little anywhere else. Overclaiming is the fastest way to publish content that reads like everyone else's, because it isn't grounded in anything the business actually knows.
Quick wins first
I sequence delivery around quick wins first - pages already sitting near the top of page 2, where Google's already decided the page is relevant and it's just being out-optimised. That's the fastest return available, because the hardest part, getting Google to understand what the page is about, is already done. That's around five optimised pages a week to start, and I teach the client's own team the method as I go, so it doesn't stop when the engagement does.
Entity-based briefs, not rewrites
Once the user-need map exists, entity gap analysis against top-ranking competitor pages shows exactly what's missing from your own. The output is surgical - a maximum of two to three additions per page, not a rewrite. And before recommending anything new, a cannibalisation check comes first: if an existing page already covers it, the fix is an internal link, not another page competing with it.
One way I get real expertise out of a founder's head and onto the page
Some of the best content a business could publish never gets written, because it's sitting in the head of whoever actually does the work, and it doesn't survive a normal copywriting process. One way I solve that: I interview the client with a structured set of questions, and they answer as recorded voice notes, in their own time, in their own words. I turn that into landing pages that sound like the person who actually answers the phone. It's a method for getting content out of someone's head onto the page - not the strategy itself. It only works once the user-need mapping already tells us where that expertise actually fits.
Report on categories, not keyword positions
I report on category-level performance, not individual keyword rankings. A single keyword can move fifty-plus times a day, and reporting on that is reporting on noise. Category-level movement is the signal that actually tells you whether the strategy's working, because it filters out the daily noise and shows the trend underneath it.
Most content strategy treats the business as the source of the thinking and the user as an afterthought. I run it the other way round. Work out what the person actually needs first, map where they search for it, then decide what your business can honestly say about it. Get that order right and the content earns its rankings instead of just filling a page. Get it wrong and you're just another business talking about its own products to people who were never asking about them.