Every project starts with a kickoff meeting to discuss needs, challenges, and opportunities. For Downtown Writers and Emily, our first call focused on understanding what was working and what wasn’t with their content and marketing strategies.

It became clear we could make Downtown Writers’ and Emily’s websites more intuitive for site visitors — and more appealing in search results.

Both co-founders are professional writers, so they weren’t versed in marketing strategy or familiar with content strategy and SEO best practices.

We worked together to find the middle ground between story and selling via a series of stakeholder interviews, drafts, and collaborative revisions. The resulting site copy is steeped in data, SEO keywords, and research and also aligned with their voices & philosophies.

Both websites needed to tell stories that felt inclusive and welcoming to multiple groups: aspiring writers (for both Downtown Writers and Emily’s book coaching services), parents of college-bound teens, potential partners and co-hosts for writing courses, and literary agents and book editors.

They also needed to speak to target organic search terms without feeling forced.

Above all, the sites needed to tell their founders' stories authentically in a voice and tone that felt like them.

Before launching both sites, we ensured that every piece of content had value, followed the same throughline, and aligned with the clients’ goals.

This step included other content formats: a lead magnet for Downtown Writers to passively build a list of potential clients over time, and talking points that Emily and Downtown Writers could reuse across platforms. We also ensured we were tracking results to continue refining SEO over time.