Content strategy is one of the most overused terms in marketing and one of the most underspecified in practice. When I give this talk, I start by asking the room to set aside the idea that content strategy means ‘publishing more content’ or ‘building a content calendar.’ Those are tactics. Strategy is about deciding what you are trying to build authority on, who the content is for, and how each piece connects to something larger — a coherent topic coverage plan that compounds over time.

What Has Changed About Content and Search

The content strategy that worked in 2018 — lots of posts targeting long-tail keywords, relatively thin, updated occasionally — is not the content strategy that works in 2025. Several things have changed that make the old approach less effective and in some cases actively counterproductive:

  • Search engines have gotten much better at evaluating depth and demonstrated expertise. Thin content that answers a surface-level question does not rank the same way it used to, and in some cases it actively hurts a site’s overall authority signal.
  • AI-generated content has flooded every topic area, making it harder to differentiate on volume or coverage. The differentiator is now genuine expertise and demonstrated experience — things AI cannot replicate at the same quality level, especially in specialized domains.
  • AI search systems that generate answers pull from content that is clearly authoritative on specific topics, not from sites that cover everything at a shallow level. Topical authority matters more than it ever has.
  • The Knowledge Graph has made entity-level authority more important than page-level optimization. A site that is clearly about a specific domain, authored by identifiable people with real expertise, is in a better structural position than a generalist site that keyword-optimizes page by page without building coherent authority.

The Content Strategy Framework I Use

I teach content strategy in the SEO University cohorts, and the framework I use there is what I bring to this talk. It has four components:

  • Topic authority definition: What are you trying to be the clearest, most useful source on? This is a narrow question, not a broad one. ‘Digital marketing’ is not a topic authority. ‘Schema markup implementation for healthcare providers’ is a topic authority. The narrower the definition, the easier it is to actually achieve authority and the more meaningful that authority is.
  • Content architecture: How do the pages on your site relate to each other? Pillar pages and cluster content is one model; silo architecture is another. The specific model matters less than having one and building toward it deliberately rather than accumulating content randomly without a structural plan.
  • Depth and format decisions: What does a genuinely useful piece of content on each topic look like? What format does the audience need — a step-by-step guide, a reference resource, a comparison, a case study? Length should be driven by what the content actually needs to cover, not by a word count target derived from a competitor analysis tool.
  • Entity and authorship signals: Who is publishing this content, and why should search engines and readers trust them? Structured author data, consistent authorship, credential signals, and demonstrated experience are part of content strategy now, not just SEO hygiene that gets checked off separately.

Content for AI Search Specifically

A meaningful portion of this talk is on content optimized for AI-generated answer systems. This is different from traditional search optimization in specific ways: AI systems synthesize rather than rank, they often do not cite sources directly, and the signals that make content citeable in AI answers are not identical to the signals that produce a top-five ranking in traditional results.

What tends to get cited in AI answers: content that is clearly structured with headings and logical organization, that makes factual claims with supporting evidence, that is published on sites with strong entity authority on the topic, and that uses structured data to make the content’s attributes machine-readable. Schema markup is part of this story in specific ways, and I cover the schema types that matter most for content discoverability in AI systems.

The Audit Before the Strategy

One of the most useful things I do before writing a content strategy for a client — and one of the most useful things I cover in this talk — is auditing what the site already has. Most sites have more content than they are getting credit for. The problem is usually that the existing content is scattered, thin, or structured in a way that prevents the site from building coherent topical authority. A good audit often reveals that the answer is not to produce more content but to consolidate, deepen, or restructure what exists. That is almost always cheaper and faster than starting fresh.

What This Talk Does Not Cover

I do not cover editorial workflows, content management systems, or production tools. Those are operations questions, not strategy questions, and they deserve separate treatment. I also do not tell people to publish more — the room almost always has more content published than they are getting credit for. The problem is usually architecture, depth, and entity signals, not volume.

Who This Session Is For

Content leads, editorial directors, marketing managers with content responsibility, and agency practitioners who build content strategies for clients. Related: SEO Speaker for Gilbert, AZ Events. The session works for both B2B and B2C contexts — the principles are the same, though the specific examples I use are calibrated to the audience. For events in the Phoenix metro, I also present as a Tempe-based SEO speaker.

What Practitioners Walk Away With

After this session, a practitioner should be able to articulate their site’s topic authority definition clearly — narrowly enough to actually build it — and identify the three or four changes to their current content approach that would have the most impact. The intent is not a complete content strategy built in the session, but a clear framework and a realistic sense of where to start.

I also want practitioners to leave with a more accurate sense of what content strategy is not — it is not a publishing calendar, it is not a keyword list, and it is not whatever your analytics tool calls ‘content performance.’ Related: SEO Speaker for Chandler, AZ Events. Getting clarity on what it actually is turns out to be half the battle for most teams, because the lack of a shared definition is usually what is preventing the strategy from existing in the first place. Related: SEO Speaker for Mesa, AZ Events.

For teams where WordPress is the content platform, the WordPress SEO talk covers how to implement this strategy technically on a WordPress site. The SEO speaker overview covers the full range of sessions I offer and how they fit together for an event program where you want complementary sessions rather than overlapping coverage.