Most sites don't need a content strategist all the time. They need one at a few specific moments: before a redesign, after years of publishing without a plan, or when the site has stopped doing its job and nobody can say why.
Here's how to tell whether you're at one of those moments, and what you can safely handle yourself.
Signs you need a content strategist
If two or more of these sound familiar, outside help will likely pay for itself:
- You're about to redesign or migrate the site, and nobody has decided which pages should come along.
- Your audit shows a large share of pages to cut or merge, and the decisions affect several teams.
- Search traffic has slid for months and the pages that used to rank have gone quiet.
- Different teams publish to the same site with no shared structure, so sections overlap and contradict each other.
- You've done an audit before, and the spreadsheet never turned into actual changes.
Jobs you can usually do yourself
Plenty of audit findings are straightforward once you can see them. Removing an expired event page, fixing a missing meta description, merging two near-identical posts or redirecting a dead link doesn't need a strategist. A good audit tells you exactly which pages these are, and your team can work through them in an afternoon.
The same goes for a small site. If you have fewer than a hundred pages and one person owns them, an audit plus a few focused days of work is often all you need.
What a strategist adds
A content strategist earns their fee on the decisions that are hard to make from the inside: what the site is for now, which audiences matter most, how sections should be organised, and which pages to let go even though someone is attached to them.
They also bring a process for getting those decisions agreed and done. That's usually the part that stalls. An audit can tell you what to keep, improve, merge or cut; a strategist helps your organisation actually do it, in the right order, without losing what's working.
Start with the audit either way
Whether or not you hire someone, start by knowing what you have. An audit that gives every page a verdict and a reason turns a vague worry ("the site's a mess") into a list you can act on, and it tells you how big the job really is.
If you do bring in a strategist, hand them the audit on day one. They'll skip weeks of inventory work and start where their judgment matters most.