Website Strategy & Discovery

Not necessarily. Every project includes our senior team’s strategic expertise, which drives a good website. This includes a sitemap, information architecture, content recommendations, and UX design based on the goals and audiences you present to us.

The Strategy and Discovery package is for organizations that want to challenge their assumptions with research, rather than having the project guided by your team’s experience and instinct. It’s most valuable when you’re rethinking what your website should be about rather than rebuilding what it already is, when your content needs a serious reassessment, or when internal opinions about the audience are conflicted and someone needs to settle it with evidence.

Plenty of clients arrive having done this work themselves, and that’s genuinely better. If you have a content audit and a clear picture of your audience, bring those to the table.

Yes. It’s a standalone engagement and often the most useful place to start.

Some organizations use it to shape an RFP, so the agencies bidding are responding to a real strategy rather than a wish list. Some have a website that isn’t performing and need to know what to fix before committing to a rebuild. Some aren’t rebuilding at all, and want a content and search plan for the site they already have.

You own the report. Use it with us, take it to another agency, or run it internally.

At the conclusion of this work you get a comprehensive, documented strategy with specific action items, not just a deck of observations.

Depending on the package, it covers how your existing content performs and where the gaps sit, where you stand against competitors in the market and in search, the topic areas worth pursuing over the next year, and how your content should be structured and navigated.

Every finding connects to something you can act on, whether that’s a decision about your site structure, a content plan, or an argument you need to make internally.

The Strategy & Discovery process runs first, and everything else in our regular project process follows from it.

For a website project, the strategy shapes the information architecture and the UX design. It answers the questions we’d otherwise be making reasonable assumptions about based on your input, which is why we run it before the sitemap rather than alongside it.

If you engage us for content marketing or social media management services, this work establishes the topics worth pursuing and the gaps worth filling, so the first month of a retainer can hit the ground running.

We use AI tools for research and data analysis, and we’re deliberate about where that line sits.

AI is good at processing volume: pulling patterns from search data, analyzing large content sets, and identifying things worth a closer look. It’s poor at judgment. For example, it wouldn’t know if your top-ranking keywords are for a one-off blog post you did that has nothing to do with your target audience, or that a competitor’s approach would be wrong for your site.

We’ve tested this on our own work. AI’s ‘strategic’ output looked confident and was wrong in ways that took an expert to catch. The research is faster with AI. The decisions about what to do and how to do it are only successful if they come from people.