An audit tells you what's on your site and what each page needs. A content strategist helps you turn that into a site that works. The handover between the two is where projects speed up or stall, so it's worth doing deliberately.
Before the first call
Send your strategist three things before you meet:
- The audit itself, as a read-only link or export, so they can see every page and verdict.
- Your goals in a sentence or two: what the site needs to do better in the next year.
- Any constraints: launch dates, platforms you're tied to, pages that legally must stay.
The first two weeks
Expect your strategist to check the audit's calls against your goals rather than redo it. They'll question some verdicts, especially pages marked cut that a team cares about, and confirm the ones that are clear.
Then they'll usually agree a target structure with you: the main sections, what lives in each, and where every page you're keeping will go. If your audit already proposes a structure, that's their starting draft.
Doing the work in the right order
Good strategists sequence the work so the site keeps improving instead of breaking. A typical order:
- Cut and redirect first: removing dead pages is quick, lowers noise and rarely needs approval.
- Merge next: combine overlapping pages into one stronger page, with redirects from the old ones.
- Improve the pages that matter most: rewrite the high-traffic and high-value pages marked improve.
- Restructure last, or alongside a redesign: move the remaining pages into the new sections.
Keep decisions moving
The biggest delays are usually internal: waiting on sign-off for a cut or a rewrite. Agree up front who decides what, and how fast. A weekly half-hour review of the next batch of pages keeps things moving far better than a big review at the end.
Measure what changed
Re-run the audit after the main work is done. Comparing the two shows the pages removed, the duplicates gone and the sections that now make sense, which is the clearest way to show the work paid off and to spot what's left.