Content Strategy & SEO
Content that ranks is good. Content that ranks and converts is the goal. Here's how I approach content strategy and SEO as an integrated acquisition tool — not a separate workstream.
Content Isn't a Channel. It's Infrastructure.
A lot of organizations treat content as a channel — something you activate when you have something to say, then pause when the budget tightens or the priorities shift. The output is a steady stream of one-off articles, social posts, and newsletters that each live and die on their own, with no structural connection to each other or to the business goals they're supposed to support.
That approach produces content. It rarely produces results.
The organizations I've seen get real value from content treat it differently. They think of it as infrastructure — a system of interconnected assets, organized around the topics their customers actually care about, built to be discoverable by search engines and useful enough to earn time and attention once someone arrives.
Building that kind of system requires more upfront work than publishing a blog post. It also compounds in ways that a single campaign never can.
The Content Work I've Done
Building a Content Hub From Scratch
When I was leading small business marketing at M&T Bank, our content situation was a common one: a mix of white-labeled material, recycled assets, and a blog that lived off the primary domain with no metadata structure and no connection to our SEO strategy. We were publishing content. We weren't building anything.
We set out to change that. Starting with customer research that defined the topics our segments cared most about we built an SEO-enhanced content hub on the bank's primary domain, organized around eight themes that mattered to small business owners: writing a business plan, raising capital, managing cash flow, preparing taxes, fraud prevention, and more.
Rather than flood the hub with owned content from day one, we seeded it with white-labeled material and let organic traffic tell us what was resonating. The signal was clear: Planning and Funding a Business were the topics driving the most engagement. We built owned short-form assets around those themes first, then used SEO tools to expand the content tree around high-volume search queries within each topic.
We put paid support — Google Discovery, social, native — behind the highest-performing organic content to amplify what was already working rather than guessing at what might. In the final months of the program, the hub drove 87,000 unique visitors, 23 directly attributed appointments, and more than two minutes of average time on page.
Those learnings then fed directly into how we personalized the 90-day onboarding experience for new customers — connecting the content strategy to the broader acquisition and retention program rather than letting it sit as a standalone initiative.
Content in Service of Member Acquisition
At SAE International, content strategy played a different but equally important role. The challenge wasn't building a hub from scratch — it was ensuring that the content being produced was connected to the membership acquisition journey in a meaningful way.
Working across product and content teams, I helped define and test multi-touch journeys that mapped content touchpoints to stages in the member decision process. That work informed how we sequenced outreach, which themes we emphasized at which stages, and how we used Demandbase and Salesforce data to personalize the experience for different audience segments.
The goal was the same as at M&T, even if the context was different: content should be doing specific work in the customer journey, not just existing.
Online Account Opening
One of the more meaningful content challenges I contributed to was at SAE Foundation, the nonprofit arm focused on STEM education. Donors are a different audience from customers or members — they're not buying a product or joining a community. They're investing in an outcome. And the content that moves them to give, and give again, is almost never the content that describes the organization. It's the content that shows them what their donation actually did.
As part of a broader team, I helped source and develop member and student stories for the Foundation's content program. That meant conducting interviews with scholarship recipients, program participants, and educators — and translating those conversations into narratives that were specific enough to feel real and resonant enough to travel.
The strategy behind it was deliberate: rather than concentrating all of that storytelling in a single annual report, we planned a drip of impact stories throughout the year — timed to reinforce the Foundation's mission at moments when donors were most likely to be considering their next gift. Each story was a standalone piece, but together they built a cumulative picture of impact that no single campaign could replicate.
The result was a content program that worked on two timelines simultaneously: individual stories that created immediate emotional connection, and a year-long narrative arc that deepened donor trust and loyalty over time. That approach contributed to a 36% increase in first-time donors and 11% year-over-year growth in total donations — a reflection of what happens when content is built around the audience's motivation rather than the organization's agenda.
How I Approach Content Strategy
Organize around topics, not publishing schedules
The most common content strategy mistake is planning by cadence — we publish two posts a week, one newsletter a month — without a clear architecture underneath it. Topic-based content strategy starts with the subjects your audience cares about most and builds a hierarchy of content around them: pillar pages that cover a topic comprehensively, cluster posts that go deep on specific subtopics, and internal linking structures that connect everything together. That architecture is what makes content discoverable and what signals topical authority to search engines.
Let research inform the editorial plan.
The best editorial decisions I've made have come from research — customer interviews that surfaced the questions people were actually asking, SEO tools that revealed the search queries with the highest volume and clearest intent, behavioral data from existing content that showed what was earning attention and what wasn't. An editorial plan built on evidence is more defensible and more effective than one built on intuition alone.
Connect content to pipeline.
Content that generates traffic is a vanity metric if it doesn't connect to business outcomes. I build content programs with conversion in mind from the start — defining what a successful content interaction looks like beyond a pageview, creating clear pathways from content to conversion, and instrumenting the journey to understand which assets are contributing to pipeline and which aren't.
Measure the right things.
Pageviews and time-on-page are useful signals. They're not the whole story. I track content performance against metrics that connect to business goals — appointment requests, form completions, product page visits, and downstream conversion data where attribution allows. The goal is to build a case for content investment that goes beyond traffic reports.
lets work together
If your content program is producing output but not producing results — or if you're starting from scratch and want to build something with real structure and search value — I can help. I work with teams on content architecture, editorial planning, SEO strategy, and connecting content performance to business outcomes.