Content Consulting

What your content says, whether it persuades, and whether it earns the index.

Overview

How I approach this work

Most content problems arrive described as a volume problem — not enough posts, nothing ranking, the calendar always behind — and turn out to be a positioning problem underneath. A library can be technically clean, published on a sensible cadence, and still say nothing a reader could not get from any competitor. So the first job is working out which problem you actually have: whether the content says something only you could say, whether it moves the person reading it, and whether the structure lets search and retrieval systems find it at all. Those three are usually entangled, and treating one without the others is why content programmes stall after the first quarter.

The first pass is an inventory — every page and post, what it was for, which intent it serves, and what it is actually doing. That surfaces the usual pathologies quickly: pages competing against each other for the same query, thin pages diluting the ones that deserve to rank, and posts that read like they were written to fill a slot. From there the work follows whichever axis is weakest. On the editorial side that means voice and positioning — the claims only you can credibly make, the register that suits the reader, and the difference between copy that informs and copy that persuades. On the structural side it means intent mapping, topic clusters, internal linking, and metadata: the architecture that decides whether a good page is ever found. On the operational side it means the pipeline itself — who researches, who drafts, who has final say, what the review gate actually checks, and what cadence is honestly sustainable once I am not in the room. I would rather hand over a smaller library a team can maintain than a backlog they inherit and quietly abandon.

Deliverables

What a typical engagement produces

Concrete artifacts from this kind of work.

Content audit and inventory: A full accounting of what exists, mapped to intent and business value, with a keep, merge, rewrite, or remove decision on every item — including the cannibalisation and thin-content problems that suppress the pages worth keeping.
Voice and positioning guidelines: The brand tone written down in a form somebody else can actually follow: register, vocabulary, the claims you own, the ones you avoid, and worked before-and-after examples rather than adjectives.
Search intent and topic architecture: Keyword and intent mapping resolved into topic clusters, a pillar and supporting structure, an internal linking plan, and the metadata layer — so the library compounds instead of competing with itself.
Persuasion and conversion review: A read of the content as a reader experiences it — what it makes them feel, where it loses them, whether the argument earns the ask, and whether the call to action matches the stage of the journey it sits in.
Production pipeline and governance: The workflow from research to publish: roles, review gates, approval, and a definition of done. Human, hybrid, or AI-assisted — chosen against the cadence you can actually sustain, not the one that sounds ambitious.
Creative and asset direction: What the content looks like, not only what it says — imagery, thumbnails, diagrams, and video treatment held to the same standard as the copy, because the asset is usually what earns the click.
Measurement framework: The reporting that tells you whether content is working — engagement and scroll depth, assisted conversions, query and position movement, and increasingly whether retrieval systems cite you at all.
Programmatic content architecture: Where scale genuinely applies, the information hierarchy and templates get designed before anything generates. In that order the pages keep earning; done backwards you have published a liability at scale.
AI-assisted production with review gates: Where language models help and where they demonstrably do not, with the editorial checkpoints that keep output publishable — and an honest account of what still needs a person.

First deliverable: An audit, not a calendar
Editorial and technical: Diagnosed as one problem
What you keep: A pipeline the team can run

Related areas

Other parts of my practice that overlap with this one.

Brand Consulting

Positioning, voice, and visual systems that outlast a redesign cycle.