You are about to embark on a site redesign and you’re starting to feel that spine-chilling feeling that somehow, someplace the content is being ignored. Enter Content Strategy.

Any way you spin it, a good Content Strategy is about creating long-term solutions for producing useful content. These 6 signs will help you build your case:

1. The site is big and old. The older and bigger it is, generally the more need for content architecture work. This usually means that content lives in several databases and there is a high degree of outdated, irrelevant, and potentially off-brand content that is still live due to SEO reasons.

Big, old sites also have old content models that are primarily page-based. Since current design practice often offers more modular and flexible templates, the existing classification structure must be reexamined and reworked to maximize performance in the new design.

Enter taxonomy. Oftentimes, behemoth sites have rusty taxonomies that have grown in strange ways. Your taxonomy defines your areas of topical ownership. Cleaning this up and establishing how deep, how wide and how detailed your coverage establishes the back bone of your content program. Once this is established, you’ll get a much more focused idea of where you will need to produce content, where you can fill in with partner content and what differentiates you from competitors.

In addition to the overarching content structure, legacy content will need to be prioritized for migrating in order to preserve SEO traffic. Prioritization is a balance between what is performing well (getting traffic) against what fits the criteria for what you consider to be “quality” content worth migrating. This activity is a simple checklist that you run against a particular piece of content to make sure it adheres to your requirements. This includes: the new brand attributes, topical relevance (fits into the taxonomy) and level of effort to bring it up-to-date.

2. A New CMS will be Installed. New content management systems always have customization needs from a content perspective. Most likely the existing tag system and organizational structure needs an overhaul—and this new structure will need to be customized into the CMS. How effectively, accurately and detailed you describe your assets using metadata will directly impact how easy it is to find them both from a user perspective(SEO, semantic web) and content management perspective (no more assets lost to the digital void!).

3. The Site is Part of a Larger Family. Sister sites, parent sites, micro-sites, print, broadcast network –Figuring out the often complicated relationships between all brand properties is key for defining the content strategy vision. There may be an opportunity to share content between these sites and a plan for attacking this will need to be built into the project plan. You’ll also need to determine how content will be shared or related to one another. It should also define a strategy for how the various properties can market to one another.

4. There is a Demand for an Innovative Advertising Model. User experience professionals generally like to stay away from this aspect of the web and pretend it doesn’t exist. However, advertisements (especially advertorial, sponsored content areas and sponsored links) are indeed content your readers will glance at and interpret if they can trust what you are providing them with. Baking in a plan for the best execution of these content types is the only way to ensure alignment with overarching content goals and structure. It’s also a great way for UXers to communicate with marketers in order to sell advertising space most effectively – through accurate tagging that matches the taxonomy. This plan could also include pushing content away from the site (syndicating), partnering for content, and creating templates for special advertising needs.

5. The Online Brand is Tired, Old and/or Ineffective. Content is the verbal compliment to visual design. If your website is getting a new visual treatment, you’ll need to ensure that the tone, voice and key messages match visual branding. Aspects of this range from editorial style, marketing copy approaches to article and asset development. What and how you produce for your site are the determining factors for effectively fortifying your brand.

6. There’s a Community. Related to rebranding is the question of how to deal with an existing community. Oftentimes, the longer an online community is available, the more chance that community can totally separate from the brand. In redesign, these communities and message boards are often ignored aspects, but they call for a strategy around how to approach the delicate ecosystem.

Urban Baby is a great case study for how a thriving online community can quickly fizzle given a facelift. Once a go-to place to commiserate, get answers and reduce your anxiety about parenting issues quickly turned into a rogue group of loyalists who reformed on another site (created by former Urban Baby users), taking others with them. Without a thoughtful community migration strategy, the risk of this happening to your site increases.

When a new online brand and online experience is created, you’ll need to consider how you are approaching and communicating with the real people who are part of what keeps your online brand alive. If the community itself is being redesigned, the Content Strategist’s role is to work closely with stakeholders, community leaders and editorial staff to determine strategy around migration to new platform. One should also create a strategy which outlines how the business should staff, seed discussion and interact with the community. And if the community is on a separate platform and not scoped for a full redesign, it is the Content Strategist’s responsibility to develop a solution for how the brand can reengage with the community to reignite the spark in the relationship.