skills/content-strategy/references/content-frameworks.md

# Content strategy frameworks

Read this reference when synthesizing pillars, scoring candidate topics or building the roadmap.

## Evidence-to-portfolio mapping

Build candidates from evidence rather than a keyword dump:

| Evidence | Supports | Does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Customer interviews, tickets and sales notes | Jobs, language, objections and triggers in the observed sample | Segment prevalence or search demand |
| Keyword metrics | Approximate search demand, intent, competition and difficulty for the recorded locale/date | Business fit, conversion, causality or guaranteed ranking |
| Existing-content analytics/export | Measured performance under the export's definitions and window | Future performance or why a change occurred |
| Official competitor pages | Competitor claims, coverage and current page structure | Customer preference or market leadership |
| Search competitors/provider similarity | Overlapping visibility or provider-calculated affinity | Business competition or audience overlap |
| Public discussions | Questions, wording and disagreement in a self-selected sample | Representative demand or purchase intent |

State conflicts explicitly. Prefer dated first-party material for the user's own performance and dated primary pages for current product facts, but do not let source authority erase a real disagreement about interpretation.

## Pillars and clusters

A pillar is a durable territory where audience need, the business's credible value and a distribution or discovery path overlap. Keep 3–5 pillars so each can guide repeated choices. For each pillar specify:

- target audience and job/problem;
- business objective and conversion path;
- evidence for inclusion and evidence gaps;
- searchable, shareable or mixed role;
- topics that belong and explicit exclusions;
- credibility requirements such as subject-matter expertise, examples or original data.

A cluster groups related topics around one audience problem and intent, not merely lexical similarity. Avoid cannibalizing duplicate pages: reuse, update, consolidate or redirect an existing asset when its purpose substantially overlaps. A pillar page is optional; do not prescribe one when another format better serves the job.

Map content to awareness, consideration, decision or implementation only as a planning hypothesis. A query can span stages, and the recommended format should follow the user's evidence and channel constraints.

## Priority model

Start with these adjustable weights:

| Criterion | Default | Questions |
|---|---:|---|
| Customer impact | 40% | How intense, frequent or consequential is the evidenced job/problem for the target sample? |
| Content-market fit | 30% | Can this business add credible value and connect the topic to a relevant next step? |
| Search potential | 20% | Is there locale-specific demand or a defensible discoverability opportunity? |
| Resource feasibility | 10% | Can the team produce and maintain the asset with available expertise, time and dependencies? |

Change weights for explicit goals—for example, thought leadership may emphasize distinctiveness and credibility over search volume—and show the revised model. Use a 1–5 score only when each dimension has enough evidence and show the inputs. Otherwise use High/Medium/Low/Unknown, ranges, or separate evidence confidence. Never turn an unknown into zero or average it away.

Apply gates before weighted ranking:

- audience and business relevance must be defensible;
- required legal, brand, product or subject-matter review must be feasible;
- near-duplicate existing assets need a consolidation decision;
- claims that require unavailable evidence remain blocked or are reframed;
- a topic outside the target market/language does not inherit another locale's metrics.

## Roadmap and measurement

Sequence work by dependencies and learning value, not score alone. Early work can validate a risky pillar, refresh an asset with known demand, or create a reusable source asset before derivative formats. For each roadmap item include owner or role, effort band, evidence dependency, format/channel, reuse plan and success metric.

Connect measures to the objective:

- discovery: indexed/ranking query coverage, qualified impressions or target-audience reach;
- engagement: meaningful reads, completion, saves, replies or return visits under a declared definition;
- conversion: qualified signup, demo, subscriber or assisted pipeline under the user's attribution rules;
- authority: earned citations, links or expert reuse, without equating count with quality;
- learning: which pillar, message or format should be continued, changed or stopped.

Record the baseline, measurement source, window, cadence, owner and decision rule. Treat provider traffic as an estimate and user analytics as measured only under the supplied tracking definitions. Do not promise an outcome or infer causality from a before/after correlation.