Most agencies publish content consistently, by three articles per week or occasional landing pages during campaigns, yet the commercial effect remains stagnant. This is when a web content strategist should step into the room holding a blueprint. What is a web content strategist? Simply, it’s someone who creates a strategy for planning website content, so every piece has purpose.
She decides what content must exist in a website, why it matters to the audience, and where it belongs across channels. The strategist’s job description revolves around orchestrating sequencing, depth, hierarchy, and relevance before the first draft even emerges.
I’m one of those web content strategists who’ve ever helped an SEO agency to create suitable content for brands. I architected an ecosystem before a single sentence gets typed. Rather than publishing based on hunches, I structured first, so users didn’t wander in digital fog.
Web Content Strategist Role
Strategic thinking drives this role, so the content achieves a coherent purpose. This purpose could be conversion, brand authority, or search visibility.
To begin, I mapped audience journeys from awareness to decision. Each touchpoint had to advance them logically, eliminating dead ends where visitors disappeared into the analytics black holes.
Clark’s 2016 explanation summarised this role with surgical clarity. Strategy sits across the content lifecycle, integrated with technical limitations, aligned with business intents, and responds to evolving information needs. Strategist work begins deliberately, and operational efficiency surfaces later.
During my early phase, I examined brand goals and researched keywords. Next, I analysed audience intent depth beneath each phrase.
For instance,
- “best activities around Bogor for corporate gatherings” vs
- “outbound Sentul vs rafting Cisadane pricing comparison”
These don’t belong in the same structural level, content type, or funnel stage.
After identifying intern patterns, I audited existing materials to uncover gaps where competitors were silently dominating search results. Once exposed, I built frameworks to determine which content belonged to which audience segments and at which journey milestones.
(Turns out competitors ain’t more innovative, just annoyingly deliberate.)
Further along, collaboration with the SEO team shapes the information architecture. We grouped the content clusters, so both humans and search engine crawlers could consume information without intellectual gymnastics. When clusters aligned, topical authority improved.
People occasionally confuse content strategists with content marketers. What is the difference between a content marketer and a content strategist? Click here to find out.
While marketers execute channels, strategists determine whether those campaigns serve business objectives in the first place. The strategy aims at educating and informing target markets about products, while providing customers with helpful information that helps with purchase decisions.
Marketers magnify distribution; strategists determine whether those campaigns drive actual movement. Before marketers distribute the content, content strategists ensure the messaging and structure lead to something measurable.
Like building a house, strategists lay the architecture, while marketers furnish the rooms.
Once I the strategic plan matured, I produced editorial briefs specifying keywords and angles. After defining those, the baton moved to writers. Their draft returned to me for layered strengthening and aligning tone.
After publication, ongoing evaluations mattered. I uncovered which content drove movement to the next journey stage, or even just evaporated.
Few agencies track this with rigour. Agencies that skip this process often end up with fifty pages that nobody reads.
It’s like pushing a stroller uphill using your elbows. Technically possible, but comically regrettable.
The Three C’s Build Relevance
Strategists operationalise a framework that many agencies forget exists. It’s a framework known as the 3 C’s.
3 C’s is the short form of Creation, Curation, and Conversation. These elements prevent brands from producing directionless material.
Creation governs formats, narrative angle, and complexity level.
As the strategist for this website you’re reading now, I decide which content needs explanatory bridges to connect concepts. Some other content performs better as single-page visuals. Because digital content turns into long-form in those cases, exit rates skyrocket.
Meanwhile, Curation ensures external references are filtered to prevent recycled opinions disguised as insight.
This happened during my work in agency, when it handled several websites for the health sector, but the team lacked authority in this topic. So I navigated research libraries and academic journals. This prevented marketing content from sounding like folklore disguised as expertise.
Conversation examines behavioural signals and interaction patterns. I listen to scroll depth and watch journey continuation. These indicate whether curiosity grows or dissolves.
(Data speaks louder than editorial intuition.)
On my own website, I design mechanisms to listen as part of my job as a content strategist, by filtering which comments matter to future readers. Publishing irrelevant comments may increase confusion, and confusion reduces conversion.
Of course! Comment is a part of the content.
So, implementing these 3Cs by a content strategist will help the agencies escape sameness. Because generic industry content almost always reads like every competitor wrote it using the same template.
Quality content creates good reputation, building trust in products and services that eventually transforms visitors into loyal clients.
Vicky Laurentina, 2025
Career Level Qualifications
No, absolutely not. A content strategist is a multi-disciplinary function combining editorial judgement, UX-aligned thinking, and analytical literacy.
These are the reasons why during execution for the brands’ website, I had to examine the keywords that the brands’ competitors owned the keyword, and decoded why they ranked. This judgment can only grow after years of editing, diagnosing intent, and negotiating interpretive nuance. It ain’t acquired through weekend webinars.
As the content went live, I monitored how visitors interacted with it, especially the link leading to the next journey stage. The link was usually at the bottom of the article, so counting clicks seemed straightforward enough.
But sometimes the link was hidden within body copy, so understanding UX behaviour was crucial. Without thinking in UX-aligned patterns, I wouldn’t be able to make the engaged visitors recognise the link and move to the next journey.
Analytical literacy became daily mandatory for strategists. My routine work as a strategist involves interpreting Google Search Console reports, engagement heatmaps, attrition patterns, and conversion bottlenecks.
Hiring a fresh graduate to fill this role rarely works. Unless they’ve understood traffic-to-conversion sequencing, the pattern of return on investment behind content, and strategic positioning. (I seldom found this kinda fresh graduate, and when I did, they weren’t entry-level anymore!)
My career as a content strategist started with becoming a strategist on my own website. Beyond just crafting blog content, I focus on optimising the site to improve its visibility in search engines. I also amplify my content on socials and craft the copy to drive traffic from socials to my website.
So, do you need a degree to be a content strategist? Please find the answer by clicking here.
Actually, there hasn’t been a specific degree for a content strategist role. Professionals from any educational background can fill this position.
But while formal education helps, field-proven reasoning outperforms theoretical memory every time. Developing an enterprise content strategy requires specific skill sets spanning content assessment through audits, framework design, strategic intent definition, content type specification, and lifecycle workflow creation.
All of this experience built operational fluency long before the agency paid me to repeat the model for their clients at scale.
Colleagues of mine who are also content strategists can come from writing roles or editorial operations. They all shared something in common: they understood how messaging and business outcomes correlate beyond superficial metrics like pageviews and bounce rates.
Strategic Work Drives Revenue
Without a strategy, agencies invoice by keyword volume. The more keywords, the higher the bill.
But when I did my job as a content strategist, the client’s bloated cost could be eliminated. I could cover the client’s topic more deeply rather than shallow pieces.
My work also strengthened the brand perception. When I took unique angles that ain’t industry echoes, the brand position shifted from “just another choice” to “the industry reference“.
The following table summarises the impact difference between avoiding a strategist and using one on revenue.
| Without Strategist | With Strategist |
| Keyword volume billing | Topic depth billing |
| Content overlap | Designed sequencing |
| Confusing journey | Directed navigation |
| Low return-on-investment content output | Optimised asset conversion |
| Fragmented angles | Clear editorial positioning |
Strategic work integrates organisational systems, roles, workflows, and expectations into a profitable machine. So when agencies adopt strategic planning, optimism finally becomes revenue.
If your agency keeps publishing interchangeable content, that’s strategic absence disguised as activity. Let me craft the framework that turns inert attention into commercial movement.
Get in touch with me. Your content shouldn’t wander when it can guide passive audiences into committed buyers who actually convert.
I am a content strategist who loves blogging about planning and optimising content for marketing insights. Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram below.