Content Strategist job description

Content and SEO — Content Strategist
Owns strategy, briefs and organic performance for a topic area.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Search Strategy
- Keyword and Search Intent Research — You can prioritise keyword opportunities across a whole content programme by intent, difficulty and business value, and defend the calls you did not chase.
- Search Competitor Analysis — You can run competitor analysis across a content programme, spot where a whole category under-serves a search intent, and direct the team to it.
- Content Strategy and Briefing — You can set content strategy across several topic areas, aligning it to a business goal, and coach others to write briefs to your standard.
- Content Gap Analysis — You can run a gap analysis across a whole content area, rank the gaps by opportunity, and turn the top ones into briefs.
- Editorial Calendar Management — You can build and run the calendar for a topic area, balancing writer capacity against publishing goals, and resequence it when priorities shift.

Search Optimisation
- On-Page SEO Optimisation — You can set the on-page standard your team writes to, and diagnose why a well-written page still is not ranking.
- SEO Metadata and Title Writing — You can set metadata standards and templates for the team, and diagnose a page with strong rankings but weak click-through.
- Internal Linking and Architecture — You can design the internal linking for a topic cluster so authority flows to the pages meant to rank, and audit an existing cluster for gaps.
- Technical SEO Auditing — You can diagnose technical issues that only show up at scale, such as crawl budget waste or rendering problems, and get them onto the engineering roadmap.
- Site Speed and Core Web Vitals — You can diagnose which specific Core Web Vitals metric is failing and why, and specify the fix in terms a developer can implement.
- Structured Data Markup — You can choose the right schema types for a new page type and ship the markup without review. You spot when the markup and the visible page disagree, and you fix the mismatch rather than only the warning.
- Crawl and Indexation Management — You can work out why a page is missing from the index and fix it, and keep crawling on the pages that matter. You handle pagination, URL parameters and faceted pages without needing a second opinion.

Editorial Craft
- Long-Form Editorial Writing — You can write the pieces the rest of the team finds hardest, and edit others' drafts so the structure, not just the sentences, improves.
- Editorial Style Governance — You can own the style guide, train writers and editors on it, and decide when an exception is warranted.
- Copyediting and Proofreading — You can edit difficult or sensitive copy where the argument itself is the problem, and you set the style rules the team edits to. Writers get better because of your notes, not just their drafts.
- Content Localisation — You can localise a whole content set for a market on your own, using the terms people there actually search for rather than a translation of the English ones. You know when to rewrite instead of translate.

Digital PR
- Digital PR Campaign Development — You can develop a newsworthy campaign concept from scratch, from a data story to a creative asset, and brief the team executing it.
- Link Prospecting and Outreach — You can run an outreach campaign end to end and land links from sites that matter, and you drop weak prospects early. You judge a site by whether its audience is real, not by a tool's score for it.
- Backlink Profile Analysis — You can audit a backlink profile on your own and turn it into work: links to chase, links to reclaim, risks to watch. You can explain your call on a borderline link rather than pointing at a metric.

Performance Analysis
- Content Performance Analysis — You can build the reporting that shows how content performance ties to business goals, and use it to redirect the team's effort.
- Search Ranking and Traffic Reporting — You can explain why traffic moved, whether it was an algorithm update, a site change or a competitor, and say what to do next. Your reports answer the question the stakeholder was about to ask.
- Content Audit and Pruning — You can run a full audit and carry out the pruning yourself, redirects included, so nothing of value is lost. You know which low-traffic pages to keep because of the job they do rather than the visits they earn.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run a multi-person project end to end: you set the scope, track the dependencies between the people involved, and re-plan when reality moves.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into milestones, and hold the estimate up under challenge.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and refuse a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- HubSpot Content Marketing Certification (required from Content Marketing Specialist)