A content strategy decides which information deserves attention, who will maintain it and how the team will know it helps. Start with a small inventory and a few reader tasks. The result should be a set of decisions that guides everyday publishing.
Start with the task a reader needs to complete
For a small service website, a practical starting team is a content owner, someone who answers customer questions and someone who can publish changes. Bring the page list, recent support questions and any available search or analytics evidence. Keep assumptions labeled until you can check them.
Write each need as a person, an action and a reason: a prospective customer needs to check service coverage before requesting an appointment. This approach follows the GOV.UK guidance on identifying user needs. Its government context differs from a business website, but the emphasis on evidence and tasks is useful.
Define a successful answer: the customer can identify their location, determine whether it is covered and find the correct next step. That gives an editor something concrete to test. A page's popularity alone cannot show whether that task succeeds.
Record enough to make a decision
Give each page a stable identifier and record its URL, reader task, owner, evidence of a problem, proposed action and next review. Include important PDFs and externally hosted forms if the journey depends on them. A large crawl can reveal files; a person still needs to judge purpose and accuracy.
| Page | Observed problem | Decision and owner |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | Support staff repeatedly clarify boundary towns. | Rewrite the boundary explanation; operations owns the facts. |
| Booking instructions | Two pages give different preparation steps. | Combine into one approved guide; service manager owns it. |
| Current opening hours | Hours match the operating schedule. | Keep and assign a change trigger; office manager owns it. |
| Expired event | Event has ended and has no continuing reader task. | Review retirement and incoming links; editor owns the action. |
Use keep, rewrite, combine or retire as proposed actions. Combining pages requires checking which destination should remain and where old links should lead. Retirement requires reviewing records obligations and any continuing historical value. Keep a decision reason so the next editor can understand the choice.
Choose a queue the team can finish
First address content that causes consequential errors or blocks a common task. Then consider how many readers are affected, how strong the evidence is and how much coordinated work is required. An unknown impact calls for a small investigation. It does not deserve an invented numerical confidence score.
Small corrections and inventory maintenance still need time in the regular publishing workload. Avoid assigning all available hours to new writing while leaving review and verification unstaffed.
Turn priorities into a 90-day plan
- Days 1–15: confirm the main reader tasks, inventory the 30 pages and assign a named owner to each.
- Days 16–45: repair the highest-impact journeys. Review facts with the responsible team and check the published result.
- Days 46–75: combine duplicated guidance, update navigation and use what the first changes taught you to revise effort estimates.
- Days 76–90: test the improved journeys with readers, review unresolved work and agree the next manageable queue.
For every work item, record the owner, reviewer, publication dependency and evidence needed to call it complete. A draft is ready for factual review; a published page is complete only after its public links, downloads and next steps have been checked.
Check whether the content helped
Pick measures related to the task: whether readers find coverage information, whether they choose the correct booking route, and which questions still reach support. Record the period and denominator alongside every percentage. Compare similar circumstances and note changes in audience or service availability.
For example, 16 of 20 recruited test participants finding the correct route is 80% in that test. It is useful diagnostic evidence, not an estimate of every visitor's success. Capture where the other four became confused and use that observation to revise the page.
Download the content inventory CSV and its instructions. The sample rows are fictional. Replace them, keep one row per page, and record your evidence and review triggers. The next step is to define the states and approvals that will maintain the content.