Content Strategy

This page is the whole picture: what we do, what it costs in the US, how long it takes, what we need from you, and every article we have written on the subject. If you already know what you want, ask for a quote or try us on a couple of files first — both are free and neither involves a sales call.

What Content Strategy covers here

Fourteen disciplines sounds like a lot until you notice how often one job needs three of them. Within Content Strategy specifically, this is the work:

Content Strategy Fundamentals: Deciding what content a business needs, who maintains it, and how it is judged — before anything is written.
Editorial Calendars: A plan of what will be published, when, by whom, and why.
Topic Clusters and Content Hubs: Organizing content as a hub page on a broad subject supported by linked pages covering its parts.
Writing for the Web: Writing that accommodates how people actually read online: scanning, skipping and leaving.
Content Governance: Who may publish, who approves, who owns which area, and what happens when content goes out of date.
Content Audits: An inventory of what exists, how it performs, and whether it is still accurate.
Content Localization: Adapting content for another market — not only translating the words, but changing examples, references and sometimes the argument.
Case Studies and Proof Content: Content that shows what a business has actually done, with enough specificity to be believed.
Content Repurposing: Deriving several assets from one substantial piece of work, in the formats each channel needs.
Content and Search Intent Alignment: Making sure each piece of content is the kind of thing that satisfies the query it targets.
Subject Matter Expert Interviews: Extracting what an expert knows and turning it into publishable content, when the expert has no time to write.
Content Performance Measurement: Judging whether content achieved what it was published to achieve.

That is twelve of 133. The full index is further down this page.

What it costs in the US

Let's do the part everyone scrolls for. The ranges below are US market ranges, not our quote for your job — we haven't seen your files. They're here so you can tell a reasonable number from an unreasonable one.

Typical US market ranges for Content Strategy
Type of work	Typical range	What that buys
Content audit and strategy	$5,000 – $25,000	Full audit, topic map, governance model and a plan your team can run.
Ongoing production	$0.25 – $1.00 per word	Researched, sourced, written by a named person, edited and fact-checked.
Retained content program	$3,000 – $20,000 per month	Planning, production, publishing, internal linking and reporting.

Those are wide ranges, and they're wide for a reason. Here's what moves a job from one end to the other.

What actually drives the price

Size of the existing estate: Auditing fifty pages is an afternoon. Auditing five thousand is a project.
Subject complexity: Content that needs subject-matter expert time, legal review or citation checking costs more and takes longer.
Publishing volume: The ongoing cost is production. Everything else is setup.
Original research: Surveys, data analysis and interviews cost real money and are the only reliable way to earn references.
Number of formats: The same research as an article, a video script and a sales deck is three pieces of work.
Translation and localization: Real localization is rewriting for a market, not running the English through a translator.

How the money is usually structured

Separately from how much, there's the question of how. Five models cover almost everything in this industry, and the right one depends on how well the job can be described before it starts.

Per unit: A fixed price per image, per minute, per page, per asset. Best when the work is genuinely repeatable and you can describe one unit precisely. It is the easiest model to budget and the easiest to argue about, because everything hinges on whether your idea of one unit matches ours. Settle that on a sample before you settle it on an invoice.
Hourly or day rate: You buy time, and the output is whatever that time produces. Honest when nobody can scope the job yet — a rescue, an unknown archive, an exploratory phase. Ask for a not-to-exceed number anyway. An open hourly arrangement with no ceiling is a budget with no floor.
Fixed project fee: One number for a defined scope, usually with a stated number of revision rounds. The model most clients prefer and the one that punishes a vague brief hardest. The fee is only fixed if the scope is, so expect the scope document to be more specific than feels comfortable. That specificity is what protects you.
Monthly retainer: A set amount of capacity reserved for you every month. Worth it once the work is continuous rather than occasional — a catalog that refreshes, a channel that publishes weekly, a site that keeps changing. Below roughly ten to fifteen hours a month it usually costs more than buying the work as it comes.
Value or outcome based: Pricing tied to a business result rather than to effort. Rare, and rarely as clean as it sounds. It works where the outcome is unambiguous and attributable, and falls apart where it is neither. Treat an outcome-based proposal with the same scrutiny you would give any other claim about attribution.

If you want a real number rather than a range, the fastest route is to send us the actual brief — scope, volume, deadline, and a couple of sample files if you have them. That's usually enough for a fixed price rather than an estimate.

How long it takes

Here's roughly how long each phase runs. The totals are less useful than the shape, because the phases overlap and one of them is almost always the bottleneck.

Typical phase durations
Phase	Usual duration
Audit	2–5 weeks depending on estate size
Strategy and topic map	2–3 weeks
First pieces published	Week 6–8
Measurable movement	3–6 months
Full compounding	9–18 months

One thing worth saying plainly: the most common cause of a late project isn't production. It's waiting — for content, for a decision, for one person to look at something. If you want a project to move quickly, the highest-leverage thing you can do is name one person who can say yes and make sure they're available. That single change is worth more than any amount of chasing.

Rush work is possible and it's genuinely more expensive, because it means real people working real overtime or a job jumping a queue somebody else is in. We'll always tell you what a rush actually costs before you commit to it.

How the work actually runs

Here's the sequence a content strategy job actually follows. It isn't a marketing diagram — it's the order things have to happen in, and most of the expensive problems in this field come from doing one of these steps out of order or skipping it entirely.

The 8 stages of a content strategy project, in order — The stages of a typical content strategy project. Content Strategy work sits inside this sequence rather than alongside it.

1. Audit

Everything you have already published, with a decision recorded against each page: keep, merge, rewrite, redirect or retire. Tedious, and the most valuable week of the engagement.

2. Understand the audience

What they are trying to find out, in their words, at each stage. Search data plus the questions your sales team answers every week.

3. Topic map

What should exist, grouped so related pages support rather than compete with each other.

4. Governance

Who owns what, who approves, and when each page gets reviewed. Without this, any content plan decays into a backlog within two quarters.

5. Briefs

A brief per piece: audience, intent, sources, and what the reader should be able to do afterward. Never a keyword and a word count.

6. Production

Research, writing, editing and fact-checking, with a named author who has actual relevant experience.

7. Publish and link

Into the right place in the structure, linked from and to the pages it relates to. Internal linking is where most content programs leave value on the table.

8. Review and retire

On a recorded schedule. An estate that only grows is judged on its weakest page.

Where does Content Strategy fit? Usually somewhere in the middle of that sequence, and it inherits every decision made before it. That's the argument for settling scope early: a change at stage two is a conversation, and the same change at stage seven is a rebuild.

What to send us

This is the part you control, and it matters more than most people expect. A good brief is worth a week.

What belongs in the brief

Who it is for: The audience, in one sentence, in your own words. Not a persona document — a sentence.
What it has to do: The action you want someone to take, or the decision you want them to be able to make.
Where it will live: Every placement, at every size. This is the single most common omission, and it is the one that causes reshoots and recrops.
What already exists: Brand guidelines, prior work, the files nobody likes. Especially the files nobody likes, and why.
What is fixed: Colors, typefaces, legal copy, platform requirements, anything that is not up for discussion.
What good looks like: Two or three references, plus one example of something you actively dislike. The dislike is more useful than the likes.
The real deadline: The date something has to be live, not the date you would like to see a draft. Say which one you are giving.
Who signs off: One name. A brief with four approvers and no decider is a brief that will cost you two extra revision rounds.

Two of those deserve emphasis, because they're the ones that cost money when they're missing. Where it will live — every placement, at every size — is the omission that causes reshoots and recrops. And who signs off is the one that quietly adds revision rounds: a project with four approvers and no decider will always cost more than one with a single name on it.

Specific to Content Strategy

On top of the general brief, this particular job benefits from you having settled the following before anyone starts:

A named author with stated, relevant experience on every piece
Claims cited to the body that published them, with a link somebody can follow
A review date recorded on every page, and an owner attached to it
Plain language checked rather than assumed — read it aloud, and fix what you stumble over

If you've got files ready now, you can send them straight over — they go to private storage rather than to an inbox, and nothing is public. If you'd rather see the standard before committing to anything, try us on a couple of files first. No card, no commitment, and if it's not what you need you've lost nothing but an afternoon.

How to check what comes back

You don't need technical expertise to review this well. You need a method, and it takes about ten minutes to learn.

Check it where it will live: Approve a web asset in a browser, a print asset on paper, an audio mix on a phone speaker. Approving a deliverable in the tool that made it is how problems reach the public.
Check the edges, not the middle: The middle is almost always fine. Look at the corners, the smallest size, the longest string, the darkest area, the last ten seconds.
Check one thing at a time: Color, then type, then spacing, then content. A review that tries to see everything at once sees the loudest thing and misses the rest.
Collect feedback before you send it: One consolidated list beats six emails. Contradictions inside your own organization are cheaper to resolve on your side than on ours.
Be specific about what is wrong: "Make it pop" costs a revision round. "The headline is hard to read against the sky, can we darken the area behind it" costs ten minutes.
Say what is right too: Not out of politeness. If you only flag problems, the next round can lose the thing you liked without anyone knowing it mattered.

The bar we hold ourselves to

So you know what you're measuring against, here's what gets checked on our side before anything reaches you. None of it is optional, and none of it is charged as an extra.

A named author with stated, relevant experience on every piece
Claims cited to the body that published them, with a link somebody can follow
A review date recorded on every page, and an owner attached to it
Plain language checked rather than assumed — read it aloud, and fix what you stumble over
Structured data used only where the page genuinely has that shape
Internal links placed inside sentences that explain why you would follow them

Red flags specific to Content Strategy

If you see any of these in what comes back, say so. They're all fixable, and they're all cheaper to fix now than after it's published.

Four years of blogging and no leads
An estate nobody would prune
A content program that stopped when one person left

You can see how we present finished work — including the before and after — in the portfolio. Anything marked as a sample is our own demonstration piece rather than a client project, and it says so on the item.

In house, freelance, studio, or a model?

This is the decision underneath "how much does it cost", and it deserves a straight answer rather than a pitch. There are four ways to get content strategy work done, and we're only the right choice for some of them.

A comparison of handling this work in house against using an outside studio — The honest trade-off. Neither column is the right answer on its own — it depends on how spiky your demand is.

Keep it in house

Someone on your payroll does it.

What's good about it: Fastest feedback loop there is, deepest product knowledge, no briefing overhead for small changes.

What's not: You are buying a person, not a job: their vacation, their sick days, their ceiling, and the software. It stops making sense the moment demand is spiky, because you pay for the peak all year.

Hire a freelancer

One specialist, engaged directly.

What's good about it: Cheapest way to buy real expertise, and you get the actual person who does the work.

What's not: One person is one point of failure. No cover, limited throughput, and if they move on mid-project you inherit their files and their conventions.

Use a studio

A team with a process, a review layer and cover.

What's good about it: Handles volume and variety, carries the QC step, and does not disappear when one person is sick.

What's not: More expensive per hour than a freelancer, and you are one client among several. Worth it when consistency across a lot of output matters more than the lowest rate.

Use a model

Generative or automated tooling, with or without a person checking.

What's good about it: Genuinely fast and genuinely cheap on the parts it is good at, and it does not get tired on page four hundred.

What's not: It is confidently wrong in ways that are hard to spot at a glance, and the parts it fails at are the ones a client notices: hands, text, counts, edges, continuity. Nothing should ship without a person having looked at it, which is why our AI work is priced with the review included rather than as a discount.

The short version: if the work is constant and central to what you do, hire. If it's spiky, or it needs a range of skills you can't justify employing, use a studio. If it's one specialist thing and you've found the right specialist, use them. We'd rather tell you that up front than take on a job we're the wrong shape for.

Working with a studio you'll never meet

Most content strategy work now happens between people in different places and often different time zones. That's fine — it's been fine for years — but it rewards a few habits and punishes a few others.

Overlap, not coverage: What matters is not whether a supplier is awake at 2pm Eastern, but whether there is a predictable window when you can both talk. Ask for the window and put it in the calendar.
Batch your feedback: Across a time difference, three rounds of one comment cost three days. One round of twelve comments costs one. This is the single biggest lever you have on turnaround.
Send files once, properly: A clean handoff with originals, a written brief and named files saves more time than any amount of chasing. Half of all "slow" projects were slow at the start.
Agree what "urgent" means: Everyone says urgent. Agree in advance what a rush actually triggers — a different queue, a different price, a different set of hands — so the word keeps its meaning.
Keep one thread: A decision made in a direct message is a decision nobody else on either side can find. One channel, one thread per job.

Our hours overlap the US business day, and we'd rather agree a standing window with you than promise round-the-clock availability nobody can actually sustain. If you want to talk it through before committing to anything, get in touch — there's no pitch deck and nobody will chase you.

The US rules worth knowing

This isn't legal advice and we're not lawyers. It's a list of the American rules that come up often enough in this kind of work that not knowing about them gets expensive. If any of it applies to you, it's worth twenty minutes with someone who is a lawyer.

Plain language in the public sector

The plainlanguage.gov/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Plain Writing Act of 2010 requires US federal agencies to write public-facing documents clearly, and plainlanguage.gov publishes the federal guidelines. Any organization writing for a broad American audience can use the same standards, and most benefit from it.

FTC disclosure

Sponsored content, affiliate links and endorsements must be disclosed clearly and close to the claim under Federal Trade Commission guidance. A disclosure at the foot of a long page is not close to the claim.

Accessibility of published content

Headings used as structure rather than styling, meaningful link text, real alt text and captioned video are WCAG requirements. For US organizations subject to the ADA or Section 508, published content is squarely in scope.

And the general commercial stuff

Whatever the discipline, buying professional services in the United States raises the same handful of questions. These are the ones clients ask us most.

Contracts and statements of work: A statement of work that names the deliverables, the number of revision rounds, the ownership terms and the payment schedule is worth the hour it takes to read. Most disputes in this industry are not about quality; they are about two people having understood "done" differently.
Ownership and work made for hire: Under US copyright law, work created by an independent contractor generally belongs to the contractor unless there is a written assignment or it falls into one of the narrow statutory work-made-for-hire categories. That surprises a lot of buyers. Get the assignment in writing; any studio that hesitates is telling you something useful.
Paying an outside supplier: A US business paying a US contractor normally collects a Form W-9 and may need to file a 1099-NEC; paying a non-US supplier usually means a W-8BEN or W-8BEN-E instead. Your accountant will want these before the first invoice, not after the last one.
Sales tax on services: Whether a creative or digital service is taxable varies by state, and several states tax some digital deliverables and not others. It is worth one question to your accountant before a large engagement rather than one letter from a state revenue department after it.
Advertising claims: The Federal Trade Commission holds advertisers responsible for claims made in their marketing, including claims made in images. A retouched product photo that no longer represents the product is an advertising problem before it is a design one, and the liability sits with the advertiser rather than the retoucher.
Accessibility: Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act has been read by US courts to cover websites in many circumstances, and federal agencies and their contractors are bound by Section 508, which points at WCAG. Accessibility is cheaper designed in than litigated out.

Our own terms are published rather than sent on request: you can read the terms and conditions, the payment terms, the refund policy and the confidentiality and NDA position before you talk to anybody. If something in them doesn't work for you, say so early — most of it is negotiable and all of it is better settled before the work than after it.

Questions to ask anyone quoting for this

Including us. If a supplier gets cagey about any of these, that's the answer to the question you were actually asking.

Who is actually doing the work?: Ask whether it stays with the person you are talking to, moves to a team, or gets subcontracted. None of those is wrong. Not knowing is.
What exactly is a revision?: Ask what counts as a revision versus a new brief, and how many are included. This is the single most common source of a bill you did not expect.
Who owns the output?: Get it in writing, including the working files. "You own the final" and "you own everything" are very different positions, and the second one costs more for a reason.
What happens if it is wrong?: Ask what a redo costs and how fast it happens. A studio with a clear answer has had the conversation before.
Can I see work like mine?: Not a showreel — work in your category, at your volume, with the constraints you have. A beautiful portfolio in another category proves taste, not fit.
How do you handle my files?: Where they are stored, who can reach them, how long they are kept, and what happens at the end. If you are sending anything unreleased, get this in the contract.
What do you need from me?: A supplier who cannot answer this has not thought about your side of the job, and you will discover that at the deadline.

One more, and it's the one people are most embarrassed to ask: what would make you turn this job down? A studio that has never turned work away is a studio that takes everything, and that tells you something about how carefully it's going to be handled.

The words people will use at you

Every field has vocabulary that gets deployed as a shortcut and lands as a barrier. Here's what the common terms in content strategy actually mean, in plain English. You shouldn't need this to buy the work, but it makes the conversation shorter.

Content audit: A full inventory with a decision recorded against every page. The foundation of everything else.
Topic cluster: A group of related pages that link to each other and to a central page, so they support rather than compete.
Search intent: What someone wants when they search — to learn, to find, to compare, or to buy.
Content governance: Who owns what, who approves, and when it is reviewed. The difference between a program and a pile.
Editorial brief: The document a writer works from: audience, intent, sources, and the outcome for the reader.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. From Google's published rater guidelines. A description, not a score.
Cannibalization: Two of your own pages competing for the same query. Usually solved by merging them.
Content decay: Traffic falling as a page ages and the information stops being current. Preventable, with a review schedule.
Pillar page: A comprehensive page on a broad topic that links out to detailed pages beneath it.
Style guide: The rules for how your organization writes. What stops six writers sounding like six companies.

There's a fuller reference library if you want to go deeper on any of these, and everything in it is written the same way — plainly, with sources.

Three situations you might recognize

Abstract advice is easy to agree with and hard to use. These are the shapes this kind of problem actually arrives in, and what we'd do about each one.

Four years of blogging and no leads

Every post targeted an informational query and none of them connected to what the company sold. Adding commercial and comparison content — and linking the informational pieces to it — turned an audience into a pipeline.

An estate nobody would prune

Nine hundred pages, most from a previous strategy, most attracting nothing. Retiring four hundred and merging two hundred raised the average quality of what was left, and the survivors moved up.

A content program that stopped when one person left

No governance, no briefs, no owners. Documenting the process was worth more than any individual piece we wrote.

None of those needed heroics. They needed somebody to look at the right thing early, which is most of what experience buys you in this field.

Everything we have written about Content Strategy

One article per subject, each with the figures, what good looks like, what to avoid and where it all comes from.

Work with us on Content Strategy

Tell us what you are working on and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it — including when we are not. There is no pitch deck and nobody will chase you.

Try it free — we will do one 800-word piece, researched and sourced, no card and no commitment. It is a better test than any portfolio because it is your material.
See the prices — published rates and the US market ranges, so you can sanity-check any quote including ours.
Ask for a fixed price — send the brief and a sample and you get a number rather than a range.
Look at the work in this discipline specifically.
Ask a question. That is allowed too.