A few days ago, Ryan Law — Director at Ahrefs — posted what he'd do on his first day as Head of Content.
It's brilliant. It's also written entirely in developer.
Static site generators. Vector embeddings. Cron jobs. Ahrefs MCP.
I read it twice and felt two things at once: this is exactly the right way to think about content operations — and — most of us will close this tab and move on because it doesn't feel like it's for us.
If you're a content person who has never written a line of code in your life, you probably did close the tab. I get it.
But here's the thing I figured out on the third read: the technology is not the point. Strip away every technical term and what Ryan is actually describing is a content operation that doesn't depend on memory, gut feel, or someone staying up late to catch what slipped through. That's not a developer skill. That's a leadership skill.
And if you're stepping into your first senior content role — or trying to prove you're ready for one — this is the framework hiding inside that post. Let me show you what it actually means.
Own your infrastructure
Ryan said
"Build your blog on a static site generator and deploy with Netlify."
What he means
Own your infrastructure. Don't build your house on rented land.
Know how your content is published, where it lives, and who controls it. If your company's site goes down, if the CMS changes, if your agency relationship ends — do you have your content? Do you have your data?
On day one at any senior content role, your first question should be: where does our content actually live, and who has the keys?
Listen before you write
Ryan said
"Extract common entities and n-grams from Gong, Intercom, and Slack."
What he means
Listen to your customers before you write a single word.
Pull the last 20 support tickets. Read the sales call notes. Sit in a customer success Slack channel for a week. What words do customers use to describe their problem? What phrases come up again and again?
Those are your keywords. Those are your headlines. Those are the words your content should be built around — not the words you assume they use.
Build your source of truth documents
Ryan said
"Build source of truth files in markdown you can reference across workflows."
What he means
Stop reinventing the wheel every time you brief a writer or prompt an AI tool.
Create three documents and protect them like your life depends on it:
- Your brand voice. What you sound like, what you don't sound like, with examples of both.
- Your audience profile. Who you're writing for, what they already believe, what they're trying to achieve.
- Your content pillars. The four or five topics your brand has the right to own. Everything you publish should map to one of them.
If you're doing this for the first time and it feels like a lot — it is. But these three documents will save you hundreds of hours over the next twelve months.
Go deep, not wide
Ryan said
"Crawl your sitemap and generate vector embeddings to analyse topical authority."
What he means
Make sure your content is actually about something.
Open a spreadsheet. List every article, every page, every piece of content you've inherited. Group them by theme. Now ask yourself honestly: if a stranger landed on this site, what would they say this brand is an expert in?
If the answer is "a bit of everything," that's your first problem to solve. Topical authority is just a fancy way of saying: go deep on fewer things instead of shallow on everything.
Pick your lane. Publish relentlessly inside it.
Treat your archive like a product
Ryan said
"Schedule a recurring automated content audit using the Ahrefs MCP."
What he means
Old content is either an asset or a liability. You need to know which.
Once a quarter, go through your top 20 pieces. Check rankings if you have Search Console access. Check if the information is still accurate. Check if the CTAs still make sense.
Most content teams publish and forget. The ones that win treat their archive like a product that needs maintenance. You don't need automation to do this on day one. You need a calendar reminder and two hours.
Your best content should never go stale
Ryan said
"Set up a daily cron job to refresh your highest priority articles."
What he means
Assign human ownership to your most important content.
Identify your five highest-traffic or highest-converting pages. Put them in a doc. Every month, one person on your team is responsible for reviewing them. Stats updated. Links checked. Relevance confirmed.
That's it. That's the cron job. A human with a recurring task and a sense of ownership.
Find the questions you haven't answered yet
Ryan said
"Run a content gap analysis using the Ahrefs MCP."
What he means
Find the questions your audience is asking that you haven't answered yet.
Go to your community — your WhatsApp group, your comment section, your DMs, your customer calls. What do people keep asking that you don't have a good answer for?
That list is your content gap analysis. No tool required.
Build a system, not a memory
Ryan said
"Build a Content OS: a centralised dashboard that pulls all reports and workflows into one place."
What he means
Stop running a content operation from memory and scattered Google Docs.
One Notion page. Your content calendar. Your pillar map. Your brand voice block. Your audit tracker. Your performance snapshots.
Not glamorous. Completely transformative.
When everything lives in one place, you stop being the person who remembers things and start being the person who built the system. That's the shift that makes you indispensable at scale.
What I want you to take from this
The most technical-sounding content leaders aren't doing something fundamentally different from the rest of us. They've just built systems around the instincts you already have.
You already know you should listen to customers before you write. You already know old content needs updating. You already know your brand needs a clear lane.
The difference between a good content manager and a great Head of Content isn't access to Ahrefs MCP or vector embeddings. It's the discipline to build the infrastructure that makes good work repeatable — even when you're new, even when you're overwhelmed, even when it's only day one.
You already know what to do.
Now learn how to build the system around it.
She Leads Content is a platform and community for women stepping into senior content roles. If this translated something that felt out of reach, you're exactly who this site is for.