Trout Psychology

Contents

Start Here

Don't read this cover to cover. It isn't a report — it's a work-through. Open it, do the next thing, close it, go fishing.

Here's how it's put together. Everything is a task, and every task tells you four things in the same order: what to do, why it matters to your business, how long it will take, and what you need on hand before you start. If a task doesn't answer all four, that's a bug — tell us.

Every action starts with a checkbox: ☐. If a line has a checkbox, it's something you do. If it doesn't, it's something you read. That's the whole convention.

Time estimates are in bold at the top of each task, like 20 minutes. They're honest. Some of this work is genuinely tedious — rewriting page titles one at a time is forty-five minutes of clicking, and nobody has ever enjoyed it. Where something takes six hours, it says six hours, not "an afternoon."

You also have a zip file with 29 documents in it. That's the raw work — the site audit, the competitor analysis, five finished service pages, six blog posts, fifty FAQ answers, a month of social posts, twenty-one emails, video scripts. All written, all ready. This manual is the front door to that pile. When a task needs exact wording, the manual points you at the file and the section rather than reprinting it, because the version in the file is the one that got checked. Copy from there.

One more thing. There's a section below marked with ⚠️. Its deadline is set by the river, not by us. Read that one today.

Two things about how to use this document

Code blocks. Where you need to paste something into your website, the exact
thing to paste is printed right here in a grey monospaced block. You should never
have to go hunting through a technical file to find it. Every block is followed by
a plain-English note on what it does and what, if anything, you need to fill in first.

⚠️ Copy code from the plain-text pack, not from this document. There is a
companion file called Copy-Paste Pack.txt with all 46 code blocks in it. Formatted
documents — this one included — quietly turn straight quotes (") into curly quotes (")
when you copy out of them. Curly quotes break code silently: the page looks fine, and
search engines read nothing. So read the instructions here, but copy the actual code
from the plain-text pack. It takes two seconds and saves an afternoon.

Where You Stand Right Now

Let's start with what's real, because it's more than you probably think.

The Method is not marketing. It's an actual instructional system — skills broken into parts, taught with reinforcement, chained together until they hold — and you have a behavior analysis degree behind it. We looked hard at Red's Fly Shop, Orvis, Gink & Gasoline and Troutbitten. Nobody in fly fishing education has a credential in how learning works. Not one. Orvis says its teachers are "expert teachers." Red's says its instruction is "direct and practical." Those are claims about fishing, not teaching. Yours is the only claim in the category that someone could check.

Two more things competitors can't take. Your 3:1 student cap is a hard number, and nobody in this set publishes a ratio at all — they can't match it without printing a worse one. And you teach on the water, 100% of the time, while Red's Fly Fishing 101 says in its own copy that it's a land-based course. That's not a claim you have to make; it's a fact sitting on their website waiting for someone to point at it.

Your Instagram is the third asset — a real audience that already trusts you, built on content you're already making.

Now the hard part.

Your website is telling Google it belongs to a different company. A field in your site settings still says "SCco." — the old Streamside Coven Co. name — and Google is reading it. Your pages currently show up in search results as "The Methods — SCco." Your own brand name is missing from your own search results. That same field puts "SCco." on every link anyone shares to Facebook or a group text, and in the description on your booking page, asking customers to buy from a company they've never heard of.

There's a settings file on your site that tells AI tools whether they're allowed to read your pages. Yours currently says no — to ChatGPT, to Claude, to Google's AI system, and, for no reason at all, to Google's advertising crawler too. That last one would quietly make paid ads more expensive if you ever ran them. None of this was your decision; it's a Squarespace default that came switched on. But the goal is to be the person AI tools quote about how trout learn, and right now your site is the one site telling them not to look.

You have no Google Business Profile. That's the free listing that puts a business on Google Maps and in the little map box at the top of local searches. Yours has never been claimed. Until it is, you can't collect Google reviews, and you can't show up when someone in Ellensburg searches "fly fishing lessons near me."

There's also a public booking page still live under the old name, showing "Sample Service," "Puget Sound School - Test Class," and an old Gmail address. Anyone who finds it sees a business that looks half-built.

And the biggest one: the Method — the most valuable thing you own — lives in your head and in Instagram videos that fall off the feed in two days. On your website it's one page, 763 words, that never names it or uses the words "applied behavior analysis." Red's publishes several times a week. Gink & Gasoline publishes daily. Orvis has twenty-eight video chapters.

Here's the honest read, in one sentence: you do not have a traffic problem. You have a the best thing about this business is invisible to everyone who isn't already following you problem. Those need completely different fixes, and the second one is the one we're solving.

What We're Actually Trying To Do

The goal is narrow and specific: when someone goes looking for how to actually learn fly fishing — not where to book a float, not what rod to buy, but how a person gets good at this — the Trout Psychology Method should be what they find.

Not "Trout Psychology, a guide service in Cle Elum." There are a lot of those, and they compete on price, dates, and who has the nicest boat — a race you'd have to win again every year forever.

Here's why the Method is the right target for you specifically. It is the only thing on your list a competitor cannot copy. Red's could match your prices tomorrow. Anyone can buy a raft. Nobody can go get a behavior analysis degree and twenty years of water-based instruction by next season. When we mapped what competitors cover, one enormous hole sat in the middle of the field: how trout actually learn — habituation, discrimination, why a fish that ate that fly last week won't touch it now — and how people learn a physical skill. Orvis doesn't cover fish cognition anywhere in its navigation. Gink & Gasoline's best piece on the subject is 850 words of anecdote with no sources. Red's has no credentialed instructor. They aren't ignoring this territory because it's worthless. They're ignoring it because they can't write it.

The second reason: it's the only positioning that sells both halves of your business at once. A guide-service pitch sells trips to people who can drive to the Yakima. But "here's how learning actually works, and here's the evidence" sells a guided day to someone in Ellensburg and a $250-a-month virtual casting subscription to someone in Ohio who will never stand in your river. One body of work, two revenue lines.

Which brings us to the two audiences, because nearly every choice in this manual traces back to one of them.

Audience one: people near the Yakima who want a trip. They search "fly fishing guide Yakima River" or "fly fishing lessons near Cle Elum." They're ready to book and they decide fast, mostly on trust signals — reviews, a Maps listing, a site that looks like a real business. This audience is why the Google Business Profile and the reviews system matter. Most of what they need is cleanup, not creation.

Audience two: people anywhere who want to learn to cast. They search "why am I not improving at fly fishing," "how to practice casting," "why do trout refuse my fly." They're not ready to book — they're trying to understand something. You reach them by answering the question better than anyone else has, and the answer carries your name. Some become virtual students. Some eventually fly out. All of them are why the Method needs a real home on your site instead of a 763-word page and a feed that forgets.

The strategy in one line: move the Method off Instagram and onto pages you own, then fix the plumbing so Google and the AI tools can actually read them.

The Five Things That Matter Most

These five come first. Not first among equals — first, full stop. Several later tasks simply won't work until they're done. If you only ever do five things from this document, do these.

1. Tell Google your name. Change the business name field from "SCco." to "Trout Psychology," and add a block of code to your site's header that states, in a format search engines read directly, that Trout Psychology is a fly fishing education business in Washington founded by Kristen Bufe. Right now the only machine-readable thing your site says about itself names the wrong company. This is why your search results say "The Methods — SCco.", why every shared link is labeled with a dead brand, and part of why Google keeps confusing you with actual psychology practices. It's the single highest-payoff change in the whole engagement and it's mostly copy-paste. The exact code is in SEO Site Audit.md, finding C1 — copy it from there. About an hour, one sitting.

2. Let the AI tools read your site. One toggle in Squarespace settings turns off the block on ChatGPT, Claude, Google's AI, and Google's ad crawler. You cannot be quoted by systems you've forbidden to read you, and being quoted is the entire authority play. This is a real business decision, not a default we're overriding for you — the trade-off is laid out in SEO Site Audit.md, finding C2. Our recommendation is to turn it off. You don't sell articles; you sell instruction. Ten minutes.

3. Claim your Google Business Profile. This is the free Google listing that puts you on Maps and in local search results. Yours has never been claimed, which blocks Google reviews entirely and keeps you out of an entire category of ready-to-book searches. Two things to know going in: Google will probably make you do a short video verification, and because you don't publish a street address, you'll set it up as a service-area business — Google takes your address for verification and hides it from the public listing. Standard setup for guides, and it works. Pick Fishing charter as the category; "Fishing guide" isn't one Google offers. Full walkthrough in GBP Optimization Report.md. About 45 minutes plus the verification wait.

4. Build the Method a real home. Rebuild /about-the-science into a proper Method page — named, defined in the first paragraph, one section per principle, your credentials stated as facts on the page — and move it to the address /method. Everything else we've written points here: 126 references across the corpus assume this page exists. This is the one item that's genuinely a chunk of work, six to eight hours, and it's worth every hour. Structure and draft copy are in SEO Site Audit.md finding H8 and the Phase 2 service pages folder.

5. Take down the placeholder booking page. The live Picktime page under the old company name — "Sample Service," "Puget Sound School - Test Class," a Gmail address you no longer use. Anyone who lands on it sees an abandoned business. Delete it or fix it; either is fine, but it can't stay as it is. Fifteen minutes.

⚠️ One Thing That Cannot Wait

Everything else in this manual will still be there next month. This won't.

In mid-September the irrigation season on the Yakima ends and the flows drop off a cliff. The flip-flop is the most ownable local story you have — the river visibly becomes a different river in about a week, and the fish move with it. The single best piece of content on the entire social calendar is a before-and-after of the same run at two different flows. The "after" is easy; you can shoot it any time in October. The "before" has to be shot while the water is still up, which means right now.

This deadline isn't ours. It's the river's. Miss the window and the next one is September 2027.

☐ Do this week. About 20 minutes.

1. Pick a run you know well with an obvious landmark in the frame — a boulder, a snag, a distinctive bank feature. Something you'll recognize in a photo a month from now.
2. Stand somewhere you can stand again. Drop a pin on your phone, and photograph your own feet if that's what it takes.
3. Shoot it on your phone. Horizontal, landmark clearly in frame, wide enough to show the water line. A few stills and a few seconds of video. It does not need to be good — it needs to exist and to match the "after."
4. Screenshot the USGS gauge reading for that day, so the flow numbers in the post are real.

Then set a phone reminder for early October to go back to the same footprints and shoot it again.

That's it. Twenty minutes on a river you're already standing in — the difference between the strongest post of the fall and a hole in the calendar.

Month One — Fix What's Broken

Everything this month is repair work, and none of it shows up as a spike on a graph. What it does is stop the site working against you — which it currently does five ways at once: your pages appear in Google under a company name that isn't yours, the only machine-readable description of your business calls it a website named "SCco.", a menu link goes nowhere, a forgotten booking page advertises "Sample Service," and a settings file turns away the AI tools that would quote your Method.

About fourteen hours across four weeks, plus a few decisions only you can make. That's up from the twelve I first estimated — the code and the copy are all printed in this chapter now, so nothing sends you hunting through other documents, but transcribing a Google listing properly takes longer than a summary makes it sound.

This month deliberately excludes renaming pages. That plan starts the week of October 5 and moves one page at a time, because a page address is the only thing here that can cost you traffic.

Before you paste anything: the curly quote problem

5 minutes to read once, and it will save you an evening.

Several tasks this month involve pasting a block of code. All of it is printed in this chapter, in full, so you never have to open a technical file to find it.

There is one way this reliably goes wrong. Word processors — Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Apple Pages, and the Notes app — silently "improve" straight quotes (") into curly typographic quotes (" and "). Code is not prose. A curly quote is a different character, and a single one anywhere in these blocks makes Google discard the entire block. Nothing errors. Nothing turns red. It just quietly stops working, and you find out three weeks later.

So: copy code from this manual straight into the Squarespace box, or, if you need somewhere to stage it while you fill in the blanks, use a plain-text editor:

• Mac: TextEdit → open it, then Format → Make Plain Text before you paste anything in.
• Windows: Notepad. Not WordPad, not Word.

☐ Set up whichever of those you'll use now, while you're thinking about it, so it's ready when you get to the identity code on Thursday. (5 min)

One more rule that comes from the same place: never retype code. Copy and paste it. Every character matters, including the brackets and commas, and a typo behaves exactly like a curly quote — silent failure.

Week 1 — Stop the bleeding

Put your own name back on your search results

15 minutes. The highest-value fifteen minutes in the plan.

Google your Method page and it comes back titled "The Methods — SCco." Your name isn't in it. Neither is "fly fishing." Every share to Facebook or iMessage is labelled "SCco.", and your booking page asks people to book with a company they've never heard of.

And it's worse than the visible title. Your homepage carries a block of hidden text that search engines and AI tools read as the machine-readable statement of who you are. Checked on the live site on August 27, the name inside it reads, character for character:

"name":"SCco. "

That is what every search engine and every AI tool currently believes your business is called. Note the space after the period — it's inside the quotes, so it's part of the name as far as anything reading it is concerned. The visible title on the page says Trout Psychology and is correct; it's the hidden line underneath that's still naming the old company. That block gets replaced outright on Thursday (Paste in the identity code, below). Today's job is the two name fields, so that when the block is rebuilt there's nothing left on the site still spelling out the old name.

Squarespace keeps your name in two separate fields and they currently disagree with each other. You're going to make them agree, and then fix the one piece of customer-facing copy that still names the old company.

☐ Business Name. In Squarespace, click Settings in the left panel → Business Information. The first field is Business Name, and it currently reads:

SCco. 

Replace it with exactly:

Trout Psychology

There is a trailing space after the period in the old value. Select the whole field and delete it rather than backspacing over what you can see, because that space is invisible and it travels with the name into your search results. Click Save at the top of the panel. (5 min)

☐ Website Title. Settings → Website → Website Title (Squarespace also calls this the Site Title in places). It should already read exactly Trout Psychology. Confirm it, character for character — no suffix, no legacy name, no trailing space. Squarespace automatically adds this to the end of every page title, which is why the two fields have to match: the identity code you paste on Thursday says "Trout Psychology" and it can't be contradicted by a title tag saying something else. (3 min)

☐ The booking page description. Your /booknow page currently describes itself to Google as "Book your casting lessons, retreats, and guide trips with SCco. Secure your experience today…" — that's the highest-intent page on the site naming a company nobody recognises. Open the Pages panel → hover Book Now → click the gear icon → SEO, and replace the description field with:

Book casting lessons, retreats and guided trips with Trout Psychology. Reserve your date and start learning to think like a trout.

That's 130 characters, which fits inside what Google displays. Squarespace has moved this panel around between versions — if there's no SEO tab under the gear icon, search Squarespace Help for "edit SEO descriptions." (5 min)

☐ Did it work? Two checks. First, text yourself a link to troutpsychology.com — the preview card that appears should say Trout Psychology, not SCco. (If it still says SCco., that's a cached preview; wait a day and re-send from a different message thread.) Second, visit a page that doesn't exist — type troutpsychology.com/asdf into your browser — and look at the browser tab. It used to read SCco. and it should now read Trout Psychology. (2 min)

🔴 One thing to check before you save the Business Name field. If Streamside Coven Co. is the legally registered company, that Business Name field may be what prints on order confirmations and receipts. Changing it is still right for the public-facing side, but glance at a recent order confirmation email afterwards to see what it says. The legal name belongs on invoices and terms; it does not belong in your search results.

Stop turning away the tools that would quote you

10 minutes. Your site has a robots.txt — a small text file that tells automated visitors which parts of your site they may read — and Squarespace filled it in with a default that blocks twenty-eight of them.

Google Search is unaffected, so your rankings are fine. What's blocked is the set that feeds AI answers — ClaudeBot, GPTBot, and Common Crawl, the dataset a large share of AI tools are built from — so when someone asks an AI how trout learn, your site says no. Also blocked, for no reason anyone chose: AdsBot-Google, which reads landing pages for Google's ad system, so any future ad costs more per click. Turning this off is a real decision, not a default: you sell instruction, not articles, so being quoted is upside.

☐ Settings → Crawlers → find the toggle labelled "Block AI crawlers" → switch it off. On some accounts this sits under Settings → Developer Tools instead. Squarespace relocates this setting periodically; if it's in neither place, search Squarespace Help for "block artificial intelligence crawlers." (5 min)

☐ Did it work? Type troutpsychology.com/robots.txt into your browser address bar. You'll get a page of plain text. Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for ClaudeBot. Before the change, it's there in a long list of blocked names alongside GPTBot, CCBot and AdsBot-Google. After the change, that whole block should be gone. If it's still there, the toggle didn't save — go back and check. Squarespace generates this file automatically and you cannot edit it by hand, so the toggle is the only control. (5 min)

One honest limitation: the toggle is all-or-nothing. If you wanted to allow AI tools to quote you but not to train on you, Squarespace doesn't offer that distinction. The recommendation is to take the block off entirely.

Take down the ghost booking page

25 minutes, plus a decision. A live Picktime page titled "Streamside Coven Co - Fly Fishing in Cle Elum" sits at picktime.com/home/8c73e2d2-c9bb-4b13-bea8-7d13aa1fc716, listing streamsidecovenco@gmail.com, hours of 9–5 daily, and three services: "Private Education Day," "Sample Service," and "Puget Sound School - Test Class" at $150. Someone can book "Sample Service" and expect you to show up. It's also the original source of the $750 and $350 figures that keep surfacing in drafts, which is why nothing in this plan publishes a price.

🔴 Blocker — is Picktime still in use? Your booking button points at /booknow, which suggests it's abandoned. Only you know, and the answer changes the task.

☐ Find your Picktime login, or reset it via streamsidecovenco@gmail.com — which means confirming you still control that inbox. (10 min)

☐ If abandoned: unpublish the page or delete the account. If in use: rename the business to Trout Psychology, delete both placeholder services ("Sample Service" and "Puget Sound School - Test Class"), add (206) 659-5501 and https://www.troutpsychology.com, and swap the Gmail address for one on your own domain. (5–20 min)

☐ Did it work? Open the Picktime URL above in a private/incognito browser window, where you aren't logged in. Either it should be gone, or it should show Trout Psychology with only real, bookable services on it. (3 min)

The retreats link — you already fixed the hard part

10 minutes. When this chapter was written, every page on your site linked to /waretreats, which returned an error and carried no link text either. That's no longer true. Checked on the live site on August 27: your Group Retreats menu item points at /educational-fly-fishing-retreats, the real page, and /waretreats doesn't appear anywhere in the navigation. You found that and fixed it yourself. Skip the menu step — there's nothing left to repoint.

Two smaller things are still worth ten minutes.

☐ Check /private-offerings, which was not confirmed fixed. It was linked the same nameless way the old retreats link was, and unlike the retreats link nobody has verified it. Open the Pages panel in the left sidebar and look for a blank or nameless entry pointing at /private-offerings. Either give it visible link text and point it at a page that exists, or delete it outright. (3 min)

☐ Settings → Developer Tools → URL Mappings. This is a plain text box, one rule per line. Add this line anyway — it's cheap insurance for anyone still holding a bookmark or an old link from the months the address was in your menu:

/waretreats -> /educational-fly-fishing-retreats 301

The 301 means "moved permanently," which is what tells Google to transfer the old address's credit to the new one. Click Save. (5 min)

☐ Did it work? Type troutpsychology.com/waretreats into your browser. You should land on the retreats page, and the address bar should have changed to /educational-fly-fishing-retreats. If you get an error page instead, the mapping line has a typo — the spaces around the arrow matter. (2 min)

Paste in the identity code

1 hour 5 minutes. The big one. Do this when you have an uninterrupted hour, not in the twenty minutes before a shuttle.

Search engines build their understanding of a business from a block of hidden text that spells out, in a format they read literally, who you are and what you do. It's the difference between Google guessing and Google knowing. Yours currently says: this is a website named "SCco." with no description. Six lines, and one of them is empty. That's why "Trout Psychology" keeps resolving to therapy directories — nothing on your site has ever stated, in a form a machine can read, that you teach fly fishing.

The replacement names Trout Psychology as the organization, keeps Streamside Coven Co. as a former name so the history connects, states outright that you are not a mental health practice, names you as founder, names Nate, describes the Method, and models the business correctly as one that travels to the customer rather than one with a shopfront.

Step one: fill in the blanks. The code below has twelve {{PLACEHOLDER}} blanks in it. Gather them before you open Squarespace. Here is the block, complete and exactly as it must be pasted — including the <script> line at the top and the </script> line at the bottom, which are part of it:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "Organization",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization",
      "name": "Trout Psychology",
      "legalName": "{{LEGAL_NAME}}",
      "alternateName": [
        "Streamside Coven Co.",
        "SCco.",
        "Trout Psychology Method"
      ],
      "url": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/",
      "foundingDate": "{{FOUNDING_YEAR}}",
      "description": "Trout Psychology is a fly fishing education and guiding company applying behavior analysis to both the angler and the trout. Founded by Kristen Bufe, B.S. Behavior Analysis, the Trout Psychology Method decomposes complex angling skills into components, teaches them through positive reinforcement, and chains them progressively to mastery, so students learn the reasoning behind on-water strategy rather than memorising mechanics. Instruction is river-based, custom-built per student, and capped at a 3:1 student-to-instructor ratio.",
      "disambiguatingDescription": "Trout Psychology is a fly fishing instruction and guiding business in central Washington. It is not a mental health practice, psychology clinic, or counseling service. The name refers to the application of behavioral science to trout behavior and angler learning.",
      "slogan": "Think like a trout.",
      "email": "{{EMAIL}}",
      "telephone": "+12066595501",
      "logo": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#logo",
        "url": "{{LOGO_URL}}",
        "contentUrl": "{{LOGO_URL}}",
        "width": "{{LOGO_WIDTH}}",
        "height": "{{LOGO_HEIGHT}}",
        "caption": "Trout Psychology"
      },
      "image": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "url": "{{HERO_IMAGE_URL}}",
        "caption": "Trout Psychology fly fishing instruction on the Yakima River"
      },
      "founder": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#kristen-bufe"
      },
      "employee": [
        { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#kristen-bufe" },
        { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#nate-tamarack" }
      ],
      "numberOfEmployees": {
        "@type": "QuantitativeValue",
        "value": 2
      },
      "knowsAbout": [
        "Fly fishing instruction",
        "Fly casting instruction",
        "Streamer fishing",
        "Dry fly fishing",
        "Trout behavior",
        "Behavior analysis",
        "Applied behavior analysis",
        "Yakima River fly fishing",
        "River journaling",
        "Neurodiversity-informed outdoor instruction",
        "Women in fly fishing"
      ],
      "areaServed": [
        {
          "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
          "name": "Washington",
          "@id": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1223"
        },
        {
          "@type": "Place",
          "name": "Yakima River, Washington"
        },
        {
          "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
          "name": "Pacific Northwest"
        }
      ],
      "contactPoint": [
        {
          "@type": "ContactPoint",
          "telephone": "+12066595501",
          "email": "{{EMAIL}}",
          "contactType": "customer service",
          "areaServed": "US",
          "availableLanguage": "English"
        },
        {
          "@type": "ContactPoint",
          "telephone": "+12066595501",
          "email": "{{EMAIL}}",
          "contactType": "reservations",
          "areaServed": "US",
          "availableLanguage": "English"
        }
      ],
      "sameAs": [
        "https://www.instagram.com/troutpsychology/",
        "{{YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_URL}}",
        "https://streamsidecovenco.com/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "@type": "WebSite",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#website",
      "url": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/",
      "name": "Trout Psychology",
      "alternateName": "The Trout Psychology Method",
      "description": "Behavior-analytic fly fishing education, guided trips on the Yakima River, and virtual casting instruction.",
      "inLanguage": "en-US",
      "publisher": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization"
      },
      "potentialAction": {
        "@type": "SearchAction",
        "target": {
          "@type": "EntryPoint",
          "urlTemplate": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/search?q={search_term_string}"
        },
        "query-input": "required name=search_term_string"
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": ["SportsActivityLocation", "LocalBusiness"],
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#business",
      "name": "Trout Psychology",
      "description": "Guided fly fishing trips and behavior-analytic fly fishing instruction on the Yakima River and throughout central Washington. Service-area business: instruction takes place on the water, not at a storefront.",
      "url": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/",
      "telephone": "+12066595501",
      "email": "{{EMAIL}}",
      "image": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "url": "{{HERO_IMAGE_URL}}"
      },
      "logo": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#logo"
      },
      "parentOrganization": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization"
      },
      "address": {
        "@type": "PostalAddress",
        "addressLocality": "Cle Elum",
        "addressRegion": "WA",
        "postalCode": "{{POSTAL_CODE}}",
        "addressCountry": "US"
      },
      "areaServed": [
        {
          "@type": "Place",
          "name": "Yakima River, Washington"
        },
        {
          "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
          "name": "Kittitas County, Washington"
        },
        {
          "@type": "City",
          "name": "Cle Elum, Washington"
        },
        {
          "@type": "City",
          "name": "Ellensburg, Washington"
        },
        {
          "@type": "City",
          "name": "Roslyn, Washington"
        },
        {
          "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
          "name": "Central Washington"
        },
        {
          "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
          "name": "Pacific Northwest"
        }
      ],
      "serviceArea": {
        "@type": "GeoCircle",
        "geoMidpoint": {
          "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
          "latitude": "{{LATITUDE}}",
          "longitude": "{{LONGITUDE}}"
        },
        "geoRadius": "{{SERVICE_RADIUS_M}}"
      },
      "sport": "Fly fishing",
      "priceRange": "$$$",
      "currenciesAccepted": "USD",
      "paymentAccepted": "Credit Card, Debit Card, Gift Certificate",
      "knowsLanguage": "en-US",
      "founder": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#kristen-bufe"
      },
      "sameAs": [
        "https://www.instagram.com/troutpsychology/",
        "{{YOUTUBE_CHANNEL_URL}}",
        "https://streamsidecovenco.com/"
      ],
      "hasOfferCatalog": {
        "@type": "OfferCatalog",
        "name": "Trout Psychology Services",
        "itemListElement": [
          {
            "@type": "Offer",
            "itemOffered": { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/guided-trips#service" }
          },
          {
            "@type": "Offer",
            "itemOffered": { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/virtual-casting-lessons#service" }
          },
          {
            "@type": "Offer",
            "itemOffered": { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/private-education#service" }
          },
          {
            "@type": "Offer",
            "itemOffered": { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/retreats#service" }
          },
          {
            "@type": "Offer",
            "itemOffered": { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/casting-camp#service" }
          },
          {
            "@type": "Offer",
            "itemOffered": { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/schools#service" }
          },
          {
            "@type": "Offer",
            "itemOffered": { "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/streamer-stomp#service" }
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ]
}
</script>

What each blank means, and what to do if you don't have it. Every one of these appears inside quote marks in the code. Replace the placeholder text including the curly brackets, and leave the quote marks around it alone — "{{POSTAL_CODE}}" becomes "98922", not 98922.

Two things this block deliberately does not contain, so you don't go looking for them: there is no street address, because you don't publish one and inventing one would break your Google listing later. And there are no prices, because the only confirmed price in this entire plan is the $250/month virtual lessons.

Step two: paste it in.

☐ In Squarespace: Settings → Developer Tools → Code Injection. You'll see several large empty text boxes stacked down the page, each with a heading. The first is HEADER. Paste the finished block into that one — the site-wide box, not FOOTER, and not ORDER CONFIRMATION PAGE. If there's already something in the HEADER box, add yours on a new line below it rather than replacing what's there. Click Save at the top. Code injection goes live immediately; there's no separate publish step. (8 min)

☐ Did it work? Go to search.google.com/test/rich-results, paste https://www.troutpsychology.com into the box, and click Test URL. Give it a minute. You should see Organization listed in the results with 0 errors. Click into it and confirm the name reads "Trout Psychology" and not "SCco." If you see a red error, it's almost always one of three things: a curly quote, a {{PLACEHOLDER}} you forgot, or a deletion that took out a comma it needed (or left one it didn't). Undo your last edit, re-paste the original block, and redo the fill-in more slowly. (10 min)

☐ Second check, worth the two minutes. In the same Rich Results Test output, look for a second Organization entry. Squarespace adds a little of its own hidden description on some pages, and two Organization entries with different names is the one thing that genuinely confuses Google. If you see two and one of them says "SCco.", that's the Business Name field from Monday not having caught up — re-check it. (2 min)

Add you and Nate to the About page

35 minutes. Same idea as the last block, aimed at people instead of the company.

This is the one that carries your degree. A B.S. in Behavior Analysis applied to fly fishing instruction is the single most defensible thing this business owns — no competitor in the category has anything like it — and right now it exists only as prose on a page, which is to say it exists only for humans who already found you. This block states it in the form Google uses to decide who counts as an expert on a subject.

It also does one job worth naming: it says, in machine-readable form, that you are not a practising clinician. That sentence is doing more work than any other line in this chapter.

This block goes on your About page only, not site-wide. They are different boxes in different places. A page-specific block pasted into the site-wide box publishes claims about your About page on every page of your site, including the booking page and the shop.

Here is the block, in full, again including the <script> and </script> lines:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#kristen-bufe",
      "name": "Kristen Bufe",
      "givenName": "Kristen",
      "familyName": "Bufe",
      "url": "{{ABOUT_PAGE_URL}}",
      "mainEntityOfPage": "{{ABOUT_PAGE_URL}}",
      "image": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "url": "{{KRISTEN_PHOTO_URL}}",
        "caption": "Kristen Bufe, founder of Trout Psychology"
      },
      "jobTitle": "Founder and Lead Instructor",
      "description": "Kristen Bufe is the founder of Trout Psychology and the creator of the Trout Psychology Method, which applies behavior analysis to both the angler and the trout. She holds a B.S. in Behavior Analysis, has 25 years of angling experience and 20 years of water-based instruction, and spent roughly a decade teaching students on the autism spectrum. She specialises in streamer fishing and guides from a raft on the Yakima River. She is a public voice on mental health and the outdoors and an advocate for women in fly fishing.",
      "disambiguatingDescription": "Fly fishing instructor and guide. Holds a degree in behavior analysis, which informs her teaching method; she is not a practising psychologist, therapist, or clinician and does not provide mental health treatment.",
      "gender": "Female",
      "nationality": "American",
      "worksFor": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization"
      },
      "founderOf": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization"
      },
      "homeLocation": {
        "@type": "Place",
        "address": {
          "@type": "PostalAddress",
          "addressLocality": "Cle Elum",
          "addressRegion": "WA",
          "addressCountry": "US"
        }
      },
      "hasCredential": [
        {
          "@type": "EducationalOccupationalCredential",
          "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#kb-credential-bs",
          "name": "B.S. in Behavior Analysis",
          "credentialCategory": "Bachelor's Degree",
          "educationalLevel": "Undergraduate",
          "about": {
            "@type": "Thing",
            "name": "Behavior Analysis"
          },
          "recognizedBy": {
            "@type": "CollegeOrUniversity",
            "name": "{{UNIVERSITY_NAME}}"
          }
        }
      ],
      "alumniOf": {
        "@type": "CollegeOrUniversity",
        "name": "{{UNIVERSITY_NAME}}"
      },
      "knowsAbout": [
        "Applied behavior analysis",
        "Behavior analysis",
        "Fly fishing instruction",
        "Fly casting instruction",
        "Streamer fishing",
        "Trout behavior",
        "Yakima River fly fishing",
        "Neurodiversity-informed instruction",
        "Autism spectrum education",
        "Mental health and the outdoors",
        "Women in fly fishing",
        "River journaling",
        "Task analysis and skill chaining"
      ],
      "hasOccupation": {
        "@type": "Occupation",
        "name": "Fly Fishing Instructor and Guide",
        "occupationLocation": {
          "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
          "name": "Central Washington"
        }
      },
      "subjectOf": [
        {
          "@type": "Article",
          "name": "Side Channels",
          "publisher": {
            "@type": "Organization",
            "name": "The Fly Fish Journal"
          },
          "url": "{{FLY_FISH_JOURNAL_URL}}"
        },
        {
          "@type": "PodcastEpisode",
          "name": "The Lost Meander Podcast",
          "datePublished": "2025-07",
          "url": "{{PODCAST_EPISODE_URL}}",
          "partOfSeries": {
            "@type": "PodcastSeries",
            "name": "The Lost Meander Podcast"
          }
        }
      ],
      "sameAs": [
        "{{KRISTEN_INSTAGRAM}}",
        "https://www.instagram.com/troutpsychology/"
      ]
    },
    {
      "@type": "Person",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#nate-tamarack",
      "name": "Nate Tamarack",
      "givenName": "Nate",
      "familyName": "Tamarack",
      "url": "{{ABOUT_PAGE_URL}}",
      "mainEntityOfPage": "{{ABOUT_PAGE_URL}}",
      "image": {
        "@type": "ImageObject",
        "url": "{{NATE_PHOTO_URL}}",
        "caption": "Nate Tamarack, instructor at Trout Psychology"
      },
      "jobTitle": "Instructor and Guide",
      "description": "Nate Tamarack is an instructor and guide with Trout Psychology, describing himself as Instructor, Hype Man, and Quirky Nature Nerd. He specialises in dry fly fishing and runs a hard boat on the Yakima River. He is affiliated with Streamside Coven Co.",
      "worksFor": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization"
      },
      "affiliation": {
        "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization"
      },
      "knowsAbout": [
        "Dry fly fishing",
        "Fly fishing instruction",
        "Hard boat river guiding",
        "Yakima River fly fishing",
        "Aquatic entomology",
        "Trout behavior"
      ],
      "hasOccupation": {
        "@type": "Occupation",
        "name": "Fly Fishing Instructor and Guide",
        "occupationLocation": {
          "@type": "AdministrativeArea",
          "name": "Central Washington"
        }
      },
      "sameAs": [
        "{{NATE_INSTAGRAM}}"
      ]
    }
  ]
}
</script>

What each blank means, and what to do if you don't have it.

Those last two are worth chasing down rather than deleting. Someone else publishing about you is the kind of evidence Google weighs most heavily, and you have two real ones — most businesses this size have none.

☐ Fill in the blanks and paste it. Open the Pages panel → hover over your About/Instructors page → click the gear icon → Advanced tab → the box labelled Page Header Code Injection. Paste the finished block there and click Save. This box only exists on Business and Commerce plans; you're on Commerce, so it's there. It is a per-page box reached through the page's own gear icon — it is not in the site-wide Settings panel, and that difference is the whole point. (20 min)

☐ Did it work? Two tools, because Google's own tester is the wrong instrument for this one. Go to validator.schema.org, paste your About page's full address, and run it — you should see Person twice, once for you and once for Nate, with no errors. Then run the same page through search.google.com/test/rich-results; it will say something like "no rich results detected," and that is the correct outcome, not a failure. Person markup doesn't produce a visual feature in search results. It builds an expert profile in the background, which is exactly what you want it doing. (10 min)

☐ Last check of the week. Open troutpsychology.com in a browser, right-click on empty space, choose View Page Source, and press Ctrl+F / Cmd+F for SCco. If the only hits are inside the alternateName list you deliberately pasted — which keeps the old name attached to the new one, on purpose, so the history connects — Week 1 is done. If SCco. still appears as the site's actual name anywhere, something didn't save. (5 min)

Week 2 — Claim your listings

A Google Business Profile is the listing that appears in Google Maps and in the box of three local results above the normal search results. You've never claimed one, and it's the biggest gap in your local presence — bigger than anything on the website — because for "fly fishing guide Cle Elum," that box is most of what people click.

Everything you need to type into it is printed in this section. Have it open on a laptop, not a phone.

Step one: find out what already exists

20 minutes, and don't skip it. Building a new listing on top of an old forgotten one leaves you with two profiles splitting your reviews, and merging them is a support ticket that takes weeks.

☐ Run all six of these searches, exactly as written. The first five in Google Maps, the last in ordinary Google search:

Trout Psychology
Streamside Coven Co
Streamside Coven
Trout Psychology Cle Elum
Kristen Bufe fly fishing
"Trout Psychology" site:google.com/maps

Then search Maps for fly fishing guide Cle Elum WA and fly fishing lessons Ellensburg WA and read every result — an old listing may exist under a name nobody thought to search for. (20 min)

What each outcome means:

• Nothing found → create a new profile at business.google.com/create.
• A listing exists and shows "Claim this business" or "Own this business?" → claim that one. Do not create a second.
• A listing exists and is already claimed by someone else → do not create a duplicate. Use "Request access" on the listing; Google emails whoever owns it and gives them seven days to respond. Tell me the moment this happens — it's the longest-lead problem in the whole plan.
• Two or more listings → claim both, then request a merge. Keep whichever one has reviews as the survivor, regardless of which name is on it, and rename that one afterwards.

Step two: claim it, on the right account

15 minutes.

☐ Go to business.google.com/create (or click "Claim this business" on the existing listing) and sign in on the Google account that will own this permanently — not a shared personal account, not mine, not an agency's. Whichever account does this becomes the owner, and changing that later is a support process. A Google Workspace address on troutpsychology.com is the right long-term answer; streamsidecovenco@gmail.com will work if that's what you control today. (15 min)

☐ Enter the business name exactly as:

Trout Psychology

Two words. Never Trout Psychology LLC, never Trout Psychology — SCco., never Trout Psychology Fly Fishing. Adding descriptors to this field breaks Google's rules and is a common cause of suspensions and of competitors filing edits against you. (included above)

⚠️ The trap specific to your business. Somewhere in this flow Google will suggest a category based on your name, and it may well suggest a psychology or counseling one. Do not accept it to move things along. That choice sticks, and a listing filed as a mental health service ranks for the wrong searches, attracts the wrong calls, and is harder to undo than a slow verification.

☐ Set the primary category to exactly:

Fishing charter

Fishing guide is not a category Google offers — it does not exist, so don't hunt for it. The complete set of fishing categories Google has is: Fishing camp, Fishing charter, Fishing club, Fishing pier, Fishing pond, Fishing store. "Charter" sounds like saltwater, but Google doesn't split fresh from salt, and inland river guides all sit here. (5 min)

☐ Add these secondary categories, typed one at a time into the category picker:

Fishing camp
Sports school
Tour operator
Outdoor activity organiser
Fishing club

Six categories total, which is deliberate — Google allows ten, and a tight set outperforms a padded one. One quirk: Outdoor activity organiser appears in category lists with the British spelling, and the American picker may show "organizer." Type "outdoor activity" and pick whichever spelling appears. Don't try to add both. (10 min)

Never add, under any circumstances: Psychologist, Psychotherapist, Mental health service, Counselor, Family counselor, Marriage counselor. Also skip Life coach and Educational consultant, which are tempting given how you describe the Method and which pull the listing in exactly the wrong direction. And skip Rafting — the raft is how you get to the fish, not the product, and it would fill your inbox with whitewater enquiries you'd have to decline.

Step three: verification, which will be a video

1 hour to prepare, 5 minutes to film, then a wait.

With no public street address, Google routes businesses like yours to video verification nearly every time. Postcards are mostly unavailable for hidden-address businesses. Plan for video and it won't be a surprise.

It is one unbroken take — you cannot stop and restart — typically one to five minutes, showing three things in this order:

1. Where you operate. River access, the truck and trailer, any signage or branding on them.
2. Your tools of the trade. Rods, reels, fly boxes, the raft, the hard boat, waders, and the streamside teaching kit — workbooks, whiteboard, flowcharts. Film these slowly and deliberately. This is your easiest win; most businesses have a counter and a till, and you have a boat and a whiteboard.
3. Proof you run it. Your WA guide licence, any outfitter registration, the insurance certificate, branded material, and logging into your business email or booking system on camera.

☐ Stage everything in one place in that order and walk the route once without recording. Shoot landscape, in daylight, phone held steady, narrating what you're showing. Do not cut. Do not edit. (1 hr prep, 5 min filming)

☐ Review usually takes about five business days. A rejection names one specific reason — fix that one thing and resubmit. Two failures in a row is the point to contact Google Business Profile support rather than trying a third time blind. (waiting)

☐ The moment it's verified, before anything else: add a second owner or manager, so one lost password isn't a lost listing. Business Profile → Settings → People and access → add. Then turn on notifications for suggested edits — because of the name, this listing will attract more "helpful corrections" from strangers than a normal one, and you want to know when someone tries to reclassify you as a therapist. Screenshot the finished profile as your baseline. (15 min)

Step four: set it up as a business that travels

20 minutes. A service-area business is Google's setting for a business that goes to the customer rather than the other way round — plumbers, mobile groomers, guides who work from a boat. Google requires a real address at signup so it can verify a human exists. It does not require that address to be shown.

☐ During setup, enter your real mailing address, then check the box saying you serve customers at their location. After verification, go to Business Profile → Edit profile → Location → Business location and clear the address so the public listing shows service areas only. (10 min)

Leaving a home address publicly visible isn't against any rule, but it publishes your home address to the internet permanently. For a woman-owned solo-founder business that's a real consideration, not a theoretical one. Clear it.

☐ Set these 15 service areas, and stop there:

Cle Elum, WA
Roslyn, WA
South Cle Elum, WA
Ronald, WA
Easton, WA
Thorp, WA
Ellensburg, WA
Kittitas, WA
Kittitas County, WA
Snoqualmie Pass, WA
North Bend, WA
Snoqualmie, WA
Issaquah, WA
Yakima, WA
Selah, WA

(10 min)

Seattle, Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond and Sammamish are deliberately held back. That's where your multi-day retreat clients come from, but listing Seattle when you operate 85 miles east dilutes the Cle Elum and Ellensburg relevance that actually wins you the local box. Add Seattle and Bellevue after 90 days if you're ranking well locally, and pull them straight back out if local rankings soften. Treat it as a test.

Don't add anywhere in Oregon, Idaho or Montana. The Method travels; the boat doesn't.

The virtual lessons don't belong here. There's no good way to express "available anywhere on earth" in a field designed for driving distance, and adding twenty states to reach virtual customers would wreck the local relevance. Virtual gets handled three other ways: the "Online classes" attribute below, its own entry in the services list, and posts in winter.

Step five: fill in the profile

2 hours 15 minutes. All of the copy is written and printed below — you're transcribing, not composing. Do it in one sitting if you can; a half-filled profile ranks like a half-filled profile.

☐ The core fields. Enter these exactly:

Business name:      Trout Psychology
Primary category:   Fishing charter
Phone:              (206) 659-5501
Website:            https://www.troutpsychology.com
Appointment link:   https://www.troutpsychology.com/booknow
Business location:  cleared / hidden
Service areas:      the 15 above

Leave the "additional phone" field blank unless you have a dedicated booking line. Never enter streamsidecovenco.com as the website — it redirects to the right place, but a redirecting address passes a weaker signal and reintroduces the old name.

There's also an Opening date field. Enter the real year the business started, not your years on the water. If you don't know it, leave it empty rather than guessing. (15 min)

☐ The description. Google gives you a 750-character box, and only the first ~250 characters show before the "More" cut, so the opening sentences carry the load. Paste this exactly — it's 715 characters and it's built to front-load "fly fishing," "Yakima River" and "Cle Elum" before the cut:

Trout Psychology teaches fly fishing the way people actually learn. We run guided fly fishing trips and fly fishing schools on Washington's Yakima River, launching from Cle Elum. Founded by Kristen Bufe, a behavior analyst with 25 years on the water, our method applies behavioral science to both the angler and the trout — so you leave understanding why a fish eats, not just how to cast. Every trip runs at a 3:1 student-to-instructor ratio with custom curriculum, streamside workbooks, and river journaling. We guide streamers and dry flies from raft and hard boat, teach multi-day private education and group retreats, and offer virtual casting lessons anywhere. Book a Yakima River trip at troutpsychology.com.

Paste it as one continuous paragraph. Don't add prices, don't add links beyond the bare domain, don't add HTML — Google strips or rejects all three. And don't rewrite it seasonally; the description is a stable identity signal, and seasonality belongs in posts. (10 min)

☐ The services list. This is a real ranking surface and almost nobody in your category uses it properly. Add each of these as a service, with the name on the first line and the description after it. Every name contains a fishing or casting word on purpose — that's the same disambiguation work the identity code is doing:

Guided Fly Fishing Trip — Yakima River
Full-day guided fly fishing on the Yakima River from Cle Elum, for one or two anglers. Float by raft or hard boat with instruction built in — you fish and you learn why it works. Streamers with Kristen, dry flies with Nate. Gear and flies provided.

Private Fly Fishing Float Trip
A float trip for you and one other angler, no strangers in the boat. We build the day around what you want to work on — reading water, streamer presentation, dry fly drifts, or just fishing hard. Yakima River, launched from Cle Elum, Washington.

Shared Fly Fishing Trip (Split a Boat)
Book a single seat and split the boat with another angler. The most affordable way onto the Yakima with a guide, and a good option for solo travelers. Same instruction, same water, lower cost per person. Central Washington, near Cle Elum and Ellensburg.

Fly Casting Lessons
One-on-one fly casting instruction on the water. We break the cast into components, teach each one, and chain them back together — so the fix holds after you leave. Loop control, distance, accuracy, and the casts that actually matter on a trout river.

Virtual Fly Casting Lessons
Remote casting coaching with video analysis — $250 per month, a subscription, for unlimited review. Send footage from your local water, get frame-by-frame feedback and a specific practice plan. Available anywhere in the world, year-round, no travel required.

Private Fly Fishing Education (1–3 Days)
A custom curriculum built for you, taught over one to three days on the Yakima River. Not a standard lesson plan — we assess where you are, design the progression, and teach with workbooks, whiteboards, and strategy blueprints you keep. Max 3:1 ratio.

Fly Fishing School
Structured multi-day fly fishing instruction on the water in central Washington. Casting, entomology, reading water, rigging, and trout behavior — taught in sequence, at a 3:1 student-to-instructor ratio, so every student gets real coaching time.

Casting Camp
A focused camp for anglers who want their cast fixed for good. Small groups, full days on the water, and a diagnostic approach that finds the root cause of your loop problems instead of handing you a generic drill. Yakima River, Cle Elum, Washington.

Streamer Stomp
Our signature streamer program. Two days of aggressive, moving-water streamer fishing for trout — sink tips, retrieves, water selection, and the predator behavior behind the eat. Taught by a streamer specialist with 25 years on the water.

3-Day Immersive Group Retreat
Three days on the Yakima River for a group of four to six anglers. Full immersion in the method: on-water instruction, river journaling, evening strategy work, and a cohort that keeps fishing together after. Central Washington. Custom curriculum.

Where Google offers a pre-set service name that matches, use the pre-set — those carry more weight than custom ones. Where none matches, add it as custom with the name above. (45 min)

🔴 One decision inside this task. There is an eleventh service drafted — Walk-and-Wade Fly Fishing Trip — and I've left it out of the list above because nobody has confirmed you offer it. If you do, tell me and I'll give you the copy. If you don't, leaving it out is correct: a service listed that you don't sell generates calls you have to decline.

☐ Attributes. These show up as filter chips in Maps, so they're worth the five minutes. Turn on: Identifies as women-owned (do this one first — it's a genuine differentiator in a male-dominated category and it's a filter people actually use), Online appointments, Online classes, Appointment required, and Onsite services.

Leave every accessibility attribute unset. That's deliberate, not an oversight: wheelchair-accessible attributes don't meaningfully apply to a drift boat on moving water, and claiming them would be worse than saying nothing. Accessibility gets handled honestly in conversation and on the website instead — see the held question Q18 below.

LGBTQ+ friendly is available and consistent with how you talk about the business, but it's your call to make, not mine. (10 min)

☐ Hours. Set Monday through Sunday to 7:00 AM – 7:00 PM and leave it there year-round.

That's not literally when you work — you launch before dawn and come off the water at dusk — but publishing a 9-to-5 you don't keep generates calls nobody answers, and the old Picktime page's "open daily 9–5" is exactly the inherited placeholder we're cleaning up. The "Appointment required" attribute carries the real message. If your category offers an "Open by appointment" setting, that's more accurate still — use it if you see it.

Do not mark the profile "Temporarily closed" in winter. It suppresses the listing badly and is hard to recover from. You're not closed in winter; you're selling virtual lessons and booking next season. (5 min)

☐ Photos — the first twelve, in this order. Order matters more than volume here. The first five establish at a glance that this is a fly fishing business, which is the whole disambiguation problem in one image:

1. Cover photo: an angler mid-cast on the Yakima, river and canyon visible, golden light
2. A wild Yakima trout held low over the water, wet hands, clearly a trout
3. The raft on the water, two anglers fishing, guide at the oars
4. You guiding — teaching in the boat or streamside, rod in hand
5. Wide Yakima canyon landscape, recognisably central Washington
6. The Trout Psychology logo, square, clean background — set this as the profile Logo
7. Branded hat, shirt or sticker somewhere real: a dashboard, the boat, the water
8. The streamside whiteboard with an actual diagram on it, river behind
9. A student writing in a river journal on the bank, rod leaning nearby
10. The portable teaching kit laid out — workbook, whiteboard, flowchart, fly box
11. A strategy blueprint page, readable enough to intrigue, not fully legible
12. Over-the-shoulder: your hand adjusting a student's grip

Minimum 720 × 720 pixels, 1200 × 1200 or larger preferred. No stock photography, ever — Google devalues it and it's transparently wrong for a business selling authenticity. Photos 8 through 12 are the ones no competitor has; they're what makes the listing read as "this guide teaches seriously" rather than "this guide catches fish." Note their position, though — after the fishing photos, not before. Lead with the whiteboard and the listing reads like a clinic, which is the exact problem you're solving.

After the first twelve, add three to five a week. Steady addition reads as an active business; forty at once reads as a launch and then silence. (60 min)

⚠️ Read this before posting a single question and answer

The Q&A section on your listing is public, editable by anyone, and live the instant you post. Twenty-one questions have been drafted for it. Fourteen are cleared and printed below. Seven are not, and they are not printed anywhere you could paste them from by accident.

The seven held ones — Q6, Q9, Q16, Q17, Q18, Q19, Q20 — cover pricing, women-only programs, your weather and reschedule policy, instruction for neurodivergent anglers, limited mobility, the gear list, and gift certificate scope. Every one of them makes a promise you haven't confirmed you offer. The pricing one publishes $750 and $350 — figures that trace back to that stale Picktime page, not to any rate card you've approved.

There is no version of "post it now and correct it later." A Google answer is indexed and screenshot-able the moment it goes up. An unanswered accessibility question is better than a wrong one, because a wrong one is a promise.

🔴 Blocker — seven decisions only you can make. For each one: correct the draft to what's actually true and actually offered, and confirm in writing. Approving three and holding four is completely fine — they're seven independent decisions, not one.

How to post the cleared fourteen. Google won't let you ask yourself a question from the business account. Post the question from a personal Google account — yours, a friend's, a past client's — then answer it from the business account, which puts an "Owner" badge on the answer. Post three to five per week, not fourteen in an afternoon.

☐ Post Q1 first. It's the most important piece of copy on the entire listing. (10 min)

☐ Post the rest at three to five per week, in number order. (20 min/week)

Here are all fourteen, ready to paste.

Q1. Is Trout Psychology a therapy practice or a psychology office?

No — Trout Psychology is a fly fishing guide service and fly fishing school on the Yakima River in Cle Elum, Washington. We take anglers fishing and we teach them to fly fish. The name comes from our teaching method: our founder, Kristen Bufe, holds a B.S. in Behavior Analysis and applies the science of learning to both the angler and the trout. Trout follow the same laws of learning that every other organism does, which means their behavior is predictable, and predictable behavior is something you can build a fishing strategy around. So the psychology is real — it is just aimed at fish and at how people learn to fish. If you are looking for mental health care, we are not that, and we would encourage you to reach a licensed provider. If you want to learn to fly fish, book at troutpsychology.com.

Q2. Where do you launch your guided trips?

We fish the Yakima River in central Washington and launch from the Cle Elum area, with access points ranging through the upper river and the Yakima Canyon depending on flows, season, and what we are targeting that day. The Yakima is Washington's only blue-ribbon trout stream and it fishes well most of the year. We serve anglers coming from Cle Elum, Roslyn, Ellensburg, Yakima, and the whole Seattle metro over Snoqualmie Pass — it is roughly a 90-minute drive from Seattle. We will confirm the exact launch and meeting point when we book your trip, because it depends on conditions. Book at troutpsychology.com or call 206-659-5501.

Q3. Do I need my own gear, or do you provide it?

We provide the gear. Rods, reels, lines, leaders, tippet, and flies are included on guided trips, so you can book a trip without owning a single piece of fly fishing equipment. If you have your own rod and you want to fish it, absolutely bring it — we will happily work with your setup and help you get more out of it. Waders and boots are usually the one item to check on when you book, since sizing matters. Bring polarized sunglasses, a hat, sunscreen, layers, and a valid Washington fishing license. Everything else, we handle. Questions about a specific rod or line? Call 206-659-5501.

⚠️ One edit rule on Q3, and it matters. Post it exactly as written above. Do not add a specific list of what's included and what isn't — the itemised version is Q19, and Q19 is on hold because the gear split isn't confirmed. The general version above ("we provide the gear; bring your own if you prefer; ask about waders") is safe, useful, and enough.

Q4. I have never fly fished before. Is a guided trip a waste of your time or mine?

Not at all — complete beginners are genuinely some of our favorite people to take out. Our whole method is built on breaking complex skills into components, teaching each one, and chaining them together, which is exactly what a first-timer needs. You will not be handed a rod and left to flail. You will learn the cast in pieces, learn where fish live and why, and you will fish. We keep a maximum 3:1 student-to-instructor ratio specifically so nobody gets ignored. Many of our clients had one bad early experience with fly fishing and assumed they were the problem. They usually were not. Book a trip at troutpsychology.com.

Q5. What is the Trout Psychology Method?

It is behavioral science applied to both sides of the equation — the trout and the angler. On the trout side: fish are organisms that follow the same laws of learning as anything else, so their behavior is shaped by their environment in ways you can observe and predict. Learn to read that, and you are building an evidence-based strategy instead of guessing at fly patterns. On the angler side: we use task analysis and shaping — decompose the skill, teach the components with positive reinforcement, chain them into mastery. You learn the reasoning, not just the mechanics, so you can solve new problems on new water without us. And you learn best when you are laughing, which is why our trips are fun and not solemn.

Q7. Can I book a trip if I am traveling solo?

Yes, two ways. You can book a private trip, which means it is just you and your guide and the day is built entirely around what you want to work on. Or you can book a shared trip and split the boat with another angler — you get a seat, the same instruction, and a lower cost per person. Solo travelers often prefer the split option, and we have had plenty of people meet a fishing partner that way. Tell us which you would like when you book at troutpsychology.com.

Q8. What is the difference between fishing with Kristen and fishing with Nate?

Mostly water type and fly type. Kristen specializes in streamer fishing and runs the raft — that means covering water, moving flies, and hunting bigger, more aggressive fish. She has 25 years of angling experience and 20 years of water-based instruction, plus a background in behavior analysis that shapes how she teaches. Nate Tamarack fishes dry flies and runs a hard boat — surface presentation, drift, and the technical side of fooling a trout that is looking up. Between them there is about 40 years of fishing knowledge. If you know what you want to learn, ask for the matching guide. If you do not, tell us your goal and we will match you.

Q10. What are the virtual casting lessons, and do they actually work?

They work because casting is a mechanical skill and video is a very good diagnostic tool. You film your cast on your own water, send it to us, and we analyze it frame by frame — identifying the actual root cause of the problem rather than handing you a generic drill. Then you get a specific practice plan, you film again, and we iterate. It is $250 per month — a subscription, not a per-session fee — covering unlimited video analysis. There is no geography requirement: we coach anglers who will never fish the Yakima. It is also the best possible use of a Pacific Northwest winter. Sign up at troutpsychology.com.

Q11. When is the best time of year to fish the Yakima River?

The Yakima fishes year-round, but it changes character completely by season. Spring brings runoff and the early hatches. Summer means low, clear water and technical dry fly fishing, with the best action early and late in the day. Fall is arguably the peak — canyon color, October caddis, and the best streamer fishing of the year, which is our founder's specialty. Winter is quiet, cold, and productive if you are patient, and it is when most of our clients switch to virtual casting lessons and start planning next season. Tell us what you want to catch and how you want to catch it, and we will tell you when to come. Call 206-659-5501.

Q12. Do you serve Ellensburg, Yakima, or the Seattle area?

Yes. We are based in Cle Elum and fish the Yakima River, and our clients come from all over central and western Washington — Ellensburg, Kittitas, Yakima, Selah, Thorp, Roslyn, Easton, and the Seattle metro including Bellevue, Issaquah, and North Bend. Cle Elum is about 90 minutes from Seattle over Snoqualmie Pass, which makes a day trip genuinely doable and a weekend easy. We meet you at the launch, so there is no need to come to us first. Book at troutpsychology.com.

Q13. Do I need a Washington fishing license?

Yes. Every angler 15 and older needs a valid Washington State freshwater fishing license, and you are responsible for having one before your trip. You can buy one online through the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife or at most sporting goods stores and many gas stations in the area — it takes a few minutes. We do not sell licenses. Also worth knowing: the Yakima River is catch-and-release for trout with selective gear rules, so barbless hooks and careful handling are the norm. We will walk you through the regulations that apply to the water we are fishing that day.

Q14. Is the Yakima River catch-and-release?

For trout, yes — the Yakima is managed as a catch-and-release, selective-gear fishery, which is a large part of why it holds the quality of wild trout that it does. We fish barbless, keep fish wet, minimize handling time, and release everything. If that is new to you, we will teach you how to do it well: how to land a fish quickly, how to hold it, how to revive it, and how to take a photo without hurting it. Good fish handling is part of the instruction, not an afterthought. Regulations do change — always check current WDFW rules for the season you are fishing.

Q15. How far in advance should I book?

For peak season — roughly late spring through fall — book several weeks ahead, and further out for weekends, holidays, and multi-day programs. Group retreats run for four to six people and fill on a longer lead time, so those are worth planning a season ahead. Off-season and midweek trips are often available with much shorter notice, and last-minute cancellations do happen, so it never hurts to ask. Virtual casting lessons can start any time, year-round, with no lead time at all. Check availability at troutpsychology.com or call 206-659-5501.

Q21. Do you offer multi-day trips or fly fishing schools?

Yes — multi-day is where the method really shows. Private education runs one to three days with a curriculum built specifically for you. Group retreats are three-day immersive programs for four to six anglers. We also run Casting Camp for anglers who want their cast genuinely rebuilt, our signature Streamer Stomp for moving-fly fishing, and structured schools. Everything is taught on the water, at a maximum 3:1 ratio, with streamside workbooks, whiteboards, and strategy blueprints you take home. The point is that you can solve problems on new water without us. Details at troutpsychology.com.

Bing and Apple

35 minutes. Same information, second and third place — and Apple Maps is what every iPhone opens by default, which in a Seattle-adjacent market is not a small audience.

☐ Claim Bing Places at bingplaces.com — once your Google listing is verified, Bing offers to import from it directly, which turns this into a five-minute job. Then claim Apple Business Connect at businessconnect.apple.com. (35 min)

☐ On both, use these exact strings — character for character, because consistency across listings is the entire point of the exercise:

Business name:  Trout Psychology
City/State/ZIP: Cle Elum, WA 98922
Phone:          (206) 659-5501
Website:        https://www.troutpsychology.com

For description fields with tighter limits than Google's, use this 138-character version:

Guided fly fishing trips and behavior-science fly fishing schools on the Yakima River in Cle Elum, WA. 3:1 ratio. Streamers and dry flies.

Week 3 — Get the review engine running

You have no locatable Google reviews, which means you're asking strangers to hand you $250 a month on faith. Every script, email, text and card is already written; this week installs the machinery.

The mechanic that makes this work

Your trips end on a river with no cell service, so the standard advice — text the link while they're still glowing — is useless. The ask splits in two.

The ask is verbal, in the boat, in the last thirty to forty-five minutes of the float, while they're warm and talking. Not the parking lot at dusk; the moment is gone by then.

The send is delayed to 7:30 that evening, when they're home on the couch. Service returns on I-90 and SR-970 near Cle Elum: pull over, open a saved text shortcut, and schedule the message for 7:30pm (iPhone: press and hold the send arrow → Send Later).

The card is the backstop — a waterproof QR card handed over at the moment of the verbal ask. No signal needed, and it works even if every digital send fails. The best $80 this business spends this year.

☐ Build the review link. Once the listing is verified, open your Business Profile dashboard and find Ask for reviews — it gives you a short link that looks like https://g.page/r/ followed by a string of characters. Copy it. Then in Squarespace go to Settings → Developer Tools → URL Mappings and add a line (replacing the second address with your real one):

/review -> https://g.page/r/YOUR-CODE-HERE 301

That gives you troutpsychology.com/review — an address you can say out loud in a drift boat and print on a card. Nobody has ever successfully read a g.page/r/CmB2x... link aloud. (25 min)

☐ Did it work? On your phone, not your laptop, open a private browsing window and type troutpsychology.com/review. It should land you on the Google review box for Trout Psychology with the stars ready to tap. Test it on a phone that isn't signed into your business account. If Squarespace refuses to save a mapping that points at another website, search Squarespace Help for "URL mappings external redirect" — the alternative is a small page that forwards, and I'll build it if it comes to that. (5 min)

☐ Order the cards. 250 laminated QR cards, roughly $60–110, about a week to arrive. Laminate two extra for the boats. (30 min)

☐ Load the templates. Eight email templates into Squarespace Campaigns as saved drafts, and six text scripts as shortcuts on both phones — iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, with shortcuts like ;;rev1 so a script expands as you type. Do Nate's phone too, in the same sitting, or it won't happen. (65 min)

☐ Send the re-engagement email to your past students. This is the one that takes you from zero to roughly 8–15 reviews in three weeks. New trips compound slowly; this doesn't. (1 hr)

🔴 Blocker: that only works if a past-student list exists somewhere reachable. If it's in your inbox, in a booking system, or in your head, finding out which is the real first task here.

Set the expectation on the booking page

30 minutes, and it has to be your words.

Someone books a guided trip expecting a guide who puts them on fish. They get a teacher, because that's your entire business. If nobody told them, the mismatch arrives as a three-star review saying they paid for a guide and got a class — a review that attacks your differentiator directly, reframing the Method as an excuse rather than the product. For a business that sells instruction but looks like it sells fishing, that's your biggest review risk, and it's entirely preventable.

☐ Write one honest paragraph for the guided trips page and the booking confirmation email: every trip is a teaching trip, and here's what that means for the day. There's a worked version in the review system document if you want a starting point, but it should sound like you. Do it before the season, not after the first bad review. (30 min)

The target

☐ 12 reviews a month in season (April–October), 8 of them on Google. 4 a month off-season. About 95 in year one. (ongoing)

That's deliberately unambitious. A peak month puts 35–45 people through a genuine review moment, and the conversion rates in the plan produce twelve without stretching.

One thing to steer, though. "Great day, caught a bunch of fish" is worth almost nothing — a hundred Yakima guides have that review. So the verbal ask ends with a question:

What's one thing you understand now that you didn't at 8am?

Only a review about teaching sells a $250-a-month program.

Week 4 — Turn on measurement

Two free Google tools, and the plainest way to tell them apart: one tells you what people did on your site, the other tells you what they searched to find it. Analytics is the first, Search Console the second — and Search Console is the more useful of the two for what you're trying to do.

Search Console first

50 minutes.

☐ Go to search.google.com/search-console → Add property → choose the Domain option on the left, not URL prefix. Enter troutpsychology.com. Google gives you a long text string to add to your domain's settings. In Squarespace: Settings → Domains → click your domain → DNS Settings → Add record → type TXT, host @, and paste the string as the value. Save, then click Verify back in Search Console. It sometimes takes an hour for the record to propagate — if verification fails immediately, wait and try again before assuming you did it wrong. (30 min)

The Domain option covers http, https, www and non-www in one property, which is why it's worth the DNS step instead of the easier verification method.

☐ Add streamsidecovenco.com as a second Domain property the same way, so you can see what the old address is still receiving. It already redirects correctly — there's nothing to fix there, you just want visibility. (10 min)

☐ Submit your sitemap. In Search Console: Indexing → Sitemaps → enter sitemap.xml in the box → Submit. Squarespace generates this file for you automatically. (5 min)

☐ Did it work? The Sitemaps page should show Success and a discovered-URL count in the low twenties (your site has 22 addresses in it). If it says "Couldn't fetch," wait a day — that's usually Google not having got to it yet rather than a real error. (5 min)

☐ Then use the search box at the top of Search Console to inspect and Request indexing for: your homepage, the Method page, and each service page. This is you telling Google "look again, things changed" rather than waiting for it to notice. (10 min)

☐ While you're in there, one leftover from the audit: Settings → Crawl stats → the By response panel. If you see a 429 bucket against Googlebot, tell me with the timestamps. If you don't — which is what we expect, because this was tested directly — that item is closed permanently. (5 min)

Then Analytics

1 hour 10 minutes.

☐ Go to analytics.google.com → Admin → Create → Property. Set:

Property name:   Trout Psychology — Web
Time zone:       (GMT-08:00) Pacific Time — Los Angeles
Currency:        US Dollar (USD)
Industry:        Travel
Business size:   Small (1–10 employees)
Objectives:      Generate leads  +  Examine user behavior

Do not pick "Drive online sales" as the only objective — it hides the reports the authority work is measured on. Then create a Web data stream with the address https://www.troutpsychology.com and the name Trout Psychology Website, and copy the Measurement ID it gives you. It looks like G- followed by ten characters. Write it down somewhere you'll find it again. (25 min)

☐ Set data retention to 14 months, today. Admin → Data Settings → Data Retention → change from the 2-month default to 14 months. This is not retroactive. Skipping it costs you the ability to compare this September to next September, which for a business with a season is the only honest comparison there is. While you're on that screen, turn Reset user data on new activity on. (10 min)

☐ Two settings that quietly ruin the data if you skip them. In Admin → Data Streams → your stream → Configure tag settings:

• Define internal traffic — add your home/office IP address and Nate's, and set the filter to Active. You're a two-person business with modest traffic; your own browsing is a meaningful share of it, and unfiltered it will look like real interest.
• List unwanted referrals — add these four:

squarespace.com
checkout.squarespace.com
paypal.com
stripe.com

Without that second one, every customer returning from checkout gets recorded as a brand-new visitor referred by Squarespace, and your channel data becomes fiction. (15 min)

☐ Connect it to your site. Squarespace: Settings → Analytics → External Services → Google Analytics → paste the G- Measurement ID → Save. (10 min)

☐ Link Search Console to Analytics. GA4 Admin → Product Links → Search Console links → link the troutpsychology.com property. Half the useful reporting depends on this one click. (5 min)

☐ Did it work? In GA4, open Reports → Realtime, then open your website on your phone using mobile data (not your home wifi, or your own internal-traffic filter will hide you). Within about thirty seconds you should see 1 active user and the page you're looking at. If nothing appears after two minutes, the Measurement ID didn't save on the Squarespace side. (5 min)

What's actually worth tracking

Seven things, not seventy. Every extra "conversion" dilutes the number until the report means nothing.

☐ In GA4, Admin → Events, mark these as key events:

guide_trip_inquiry
subscription_signup
retreat_registration
gift_certificate_purchase
phone_click
contact_form_submit
email_signup
purchase

In plain English: booking enquiries, virtual lesson signups, retreat registrations, gift certificate purchases, taps on your phone number, contact form completions, and email signups — plus Google's own purchase event, which is already on. If one of these names isn't in the list yet, it's because nothing has triggered it. Come back after a week of traffic rather than forcing it. (15 min)

Do not mark anything else. Scroll depth and button clicks are not conversions, however tempting the buttons.

What Squarespace won't let you track — honestly

Subscription renewals are invisible. Your $250/month virtual lessons get recorded once, on the first payment, and never again — renewals happen on Squarespace's servers with no browser involved, so there's nothing for Analytics to see. It will understate your best product's revenue by roughly ninety percent, and no setting fixes it.

☐ Once a month, open Squarespace → Commerce → Subscriptions and write down by hand: active subscribers, new signups, cancellations. Track cancellations from month one even when the number is zero — churn is the metric nobody asks for and everybody needs. (30 min/month)

Three more limits, so nothing surprises you in month three: checkout runs on Squarespace's own servers, so nothing can watch people move through the checkout steps; cart abandonment is a manual pull from the commerce panel; and Squarespace forms don't reliably announce themselves, so form tracking has to be built against the thank-you message appearing and then tested rather than trusted.

What to look at monthly, and what to ignore

20 minutes a month. If it takes longer, you'll stop by March.

☐ In Search Console → Performance, build three filters (+ New → Query → Custom) and check them monthly:

Non-brand informational  →  query contains: how / what / why / learn / tips
Local guide intent       →  query contains: yakima / cle elum / guide / washington
Disambiguation risk      →  query contains: therapist / counseling / mental health / psychologist

The first is the authority number — the one that must grow. The second is local demand. The third is people arriving looking for the other kind of Trout Psychology, and it should shrink over the year; if it doesn't, the entity problem is still live and now you can prove it with a number. (15 min)

☐ In Analytics, check phone taps, form submissions and booking clicks. (5 min)

☐ Ignore month-over-month comparisons. Fishing peaks spring through fall and gift certificates spike in December — a January-versus-December drop is a season, not a problem. Year-over-year is the only honest comparison, and it isn't available to you until next August. (0 min)

☐ Ignore percentages on small numbers. Four clicks to eight is not "100% growth." Write the absolute number beside every percentage, always. (0 min)

Write this expectation down now: months one and two produce no visible change. Months three and four, the searches you appear in start rising. Months five to eight, clicks follow. Months nine to twelve, people start searching your name directly. Brand authority is a lagging indicator — judge it in month three and you'll judge a working plan a failure.

The six things only you can decide

Each of these blocks work that is otherwise ready to go. None can be worked around, and none should be quietly skipped.

☐ The rate card — what every service costs, in writing. Right now $250/month is the only confirmed price in the entire plan, and until that changes, pricing stays off your Google listing and off the service pages while the old Picktime figures circulate. (1–2 hrs)

☐ The seven held Google answers — Q6, Q9, Q16, Q17, Q18, Q19, Q20. Seven separate decisions; approve them one at a time.

☐ Whether a usable business address exists — home, a shop, an outfitter partner, a registered agent. It never becomes public, but without one there's no verification and no listing at all.

☐ Which company is the legal registrant — Streamside Coven Co. or Trout Psychology. It decides what goes in {{LEGAL_NAME}} and what prints on your receipts.

☐ Whether Picktime is still in use, and your login for it.

☐ What your booking system is — it changes how bookings get tracked — and where your past-student email list lives.

Month Two — Put Your Method Where People Can Find It

Before you look at the checklist: almost none of this month is writing.

The five service pages are written. All fifty FAQ answers are written. Your bio is written nine different ways for nine different places, and Nate's is written except for the parts only he knows. It's all sitting in Phase 2 - Content/, finished, in your voice.

What is not written is the handful of facts nobody but you has — what a full day costs in 2026, how long Casting Camp actually is, what happens when someone cancels four days out. 47 of those blanks across the five service pages, 25 FAQ answers, 13 in the bios.

So this month is pasting and deciding. The pasting is tedious and finite. The deciding is the part that needs you, and there are about six real decisions in it — listed at the end, so you can see how few.

Everything you need to paste is in this chapter. The one exception is the body copy of the five service pages, which runs to several thousand words each and would double the size of this book — that you copy from the files. Titles, descriptions, addresses, forwarding rules, the FAQ code, the text to Nate: all of it is printed below, and you should never have to go hunting.

The six places in Squarespace you'll be working

You will use these same six screens all month. Learn them once here and every task below is a two-line instruction.

1. Create a page. In the top-left of the editor, click Pages. Hover over the section you want it in — Main Navigation for menu pages, Not Linked for pages you want live but hidden — and click the +. Choose Blank Page. Type the page title. It appears in the list.

2. Set a page's address (its slug). In Pages, hover the page name and click the gear icon ⚙. On the General tab there's a URL Slug field showing something like /new-page-2. Type the address you want, without the domain: method, or learn/casting-camp. Squarespace adds the leading slash. Click Save.

3. The SEO panel — the title and description Google shows. Same gear icon ⚙, then the SEO tab. Two fields: SEO Title and SEO Description. These are what appear as the blue headline and the grey paragraph in a Google result, and they are not the same as the page's heading on screen. Paste, then Save.

4. Forwarding addresses. Settings → Developer Tools → URL Mappings (some accounts show it as Settings → Advanced → URL Mappings). One big text box. One rule per line.

5. Code on a single page. Pages → hover the page → gear icon ⚙ → Advanced tab → Page Header Code Injection. This is the box for code that belongs to one page only. It is a different box from the site-wide one you used in Month One, and the difference matters: a block pasted site-wide publishes claims about one page on every page.

6. Rebuild the menu. Everything in the Main Navigation section of the Pages panel is your top menu, in the order shown. Drag to reorder. To make a dropdown, click + → Folder, name the folder with the exact menu label, then drag pages into it — indented pages become that folder's dropdown items.

☐ 10 minutes. Open each of those six screens once before you start anything, just to see them. Do not change anything. You want to have already found them when you're mid-task.

Reorganize your pages

You've already done the hard part of this. Checked on the live site on August 27, your top menu now reads:

Home  ·  Offerings ▾  ·  Our Unique Method ▾  ·  Book and Contact  ·  Login  ·  Cart

The individual services — Casting Camp, Guide Trips, Private Education, Streamer Stomp, Casting Lessons, Schools, Group Retreats, Gift Certificates — are no longer sitting side by side in the menu. They're grouped inside those two folders. That was your call and it was the right instinct, so read the rest of this section as tidying up after a move you've already made, not as a rebuild.

Here's what the grouping bought you, so you know why it was worth the afternoon:

A visitor can tell what the business is. Before, someone who'd never heard of you got a nine-way choice with no framing — nothing there explained the difference between a $250-a-month video subscription and a three-day retreat for six. They were asked to decide before anyone had told them what you do. A folder puts a frame around the choice before the choice arrives.

Google stops splitting its attention nine ways. Search engines judge a page's importance partly by how much the rest of your site points at it. Nine equal service pages linking sideways at each other means each collects about a ninth of the vote and none gets enough to win. Grouped under parents, the votes concentrate: the folder pages get strong, the Method page strongest, and the services inherit authority from above.

What's left is narrower than what you've done. Two jobs, and neither is a rebuild:

1. The folder addresses. "Offerings" sits at /offerings, which is fine and needs nothing. "Our Unique Method" sits at /new-dropdown, which is a Squarespace default nobody renamed. That's the next section, and it's ten minutes.
2. Which page sits inside which folder. The services are spread across your two folders today. The tree below splits them a different way — everything that's a day on the water in one place, everything that's a skill in another — and the Method folder holds only Method pages, not services.

The target shape hasn't changed. Trips is everything that's a day on the water. Learn is everything that's a skill. The Method sits first, above both, because it's the answer to why anyone should book either. You're partway there already: "Our Unique Method" is the Method parent under a different label, and "Offerings" is holding what will become Trips and Learn.

⚠️ The Method page ships first. Not first-ish. First. /method is the anchor: every service page links to it, every future blog post links to it. It's also a hard dependency — the cornerstone blog post scheduled for Tuesday, October 20 links to /method and can't publish until that page exists. The move is set for the week of October 12, alone, so you can tell what caused what.

Rename the folder that's still called /new-dropdown

10 minutes. Your "Our Unique Method" folder reads perfectly well in the menu. Its address is /new-dropdown — the placeholder Squarespace fills in when you create a folder, which it never asks you to change. That is a real, live, public address on your site right now. Anyone can type it in and land on your Method section.

Be clear about the size of this: nobody's traffic depends on /new-dropdown and no ranking turns on it. It's embarrassing rather than harmful. What it costs you is the half-second where somebody glances at the address bar, or pastes the link into an email to a friend, and your site reads as one that got set up and walked away from. You sell careful, thought-through instruction. The address bar shouldn't argue with that.

Rename it to /method. That's the recommendation because the Method page is the centrepiece and everything else in this manual already routes to /method — the forwarding list below, the links inside the five service pages, the cornerstone blog post.

⚠️ Check for a collision before you type. The tree below also puts a Method page at /method. Two things on the site can't hold the same address, so if you've already built that page, the folder can't take the name. If Squarespace refuses it, name the folder /the-method and leave the page at /method — the page is the one that matters, because /method is the address the rest of the manual points at. Either answer is fine. Don't spend twenty minutes on it.

☐ Rename the folder's address. In the Pages panel, hover the Our Unique Method folder and click the gear icon ⚙. The address field is on the panel that opens — on a page Squarespace labels it URL Slug, and a folder's version of that panel is the same idea with fewer fields on it. Replace new-dropdown with method, then Save. If the panel that opens has no address field on it at all, don't guess — search Squarespace Help for "change a folder URL." Folder settings are one of the screens Squarespace has moved between versions and I'd rather send you to their help page than to the wrong tab. (5 min)

☐ Leave a forwarding address so the old one doesn't break. Settings → Developer Tools → URL Mappings — the same plain text box as everything else in this chapter, one rule per line. Add:

/new-dropdown -> /method 301

If you ended up naming the folder /the-method instead, point the line there instead. The 301 is the code that means this move is permanent. (2 min)

☐ Did it work? In a private browsing window, type troutpsychology.com/new-dropdown by hand. You should land on the Method section and the address bar should have changed to the new address. Then click Our Unique Method in your live menu and check the address bar there too. (3 min)

The new menu, exactly as it should read

Here is the whole thing. Indented items are dropdown items under the item above them. The text on the left is the exact label to type; the address on the right is where it points. Nothing is abbreviated and nothing is left to interpretation.

Trout Psychology (logo)                              →  /

The Method  ▾                                        →  /method
    The Method Overview                              →  /method
    Think Like a Trout                               →  /method/think-like-a-trout
    How We Teach                                     →  /method/how-we-teach
    River Journaling                                 →  /method/river-journaling
    Neurodiversity-Informed Instruction              →  /method/neurodiversity-informed-instruction
    Method Glossary                                  →  /method/glossary

Guided Trips  ▾                                      →  /trips
    All Guided Trips                                 →  /trips
    Yakima River Guided Trips                        →  /trips/yakima-river-guided-trips
    Streamer Fishing Trips                           →  /trips/streamer-fishing-trips
    Dry Fly Trips                                    →  /trips/dry-fly-trips
    Group Retreats                                   →  /trips/group-retreats

Learn  ▾                                             →  /learn
    All Instruction                                  →  /learn
    Virtual Casting Lessons                          →  /learn/virtual-casting-lessons
    Casting Camp                                     →  /learn/casting-camp
    Private Education                                →  /learn/private-education
    Fly Fishing Schools                              →  /learn/fly-fishing-schools
    Streamer Stomp                                   →  /learn/streamer-stomp

Journal                                              →  /journal
    (no dropdown)

About  ▾                                             →  /about
    About Trout Psychology                           →  /about
    Instructors                                      →  /about/instructors
    Kristen Bufe                                     →  /about/kristen-bufe
    Nate Tamarack                                    →  /about/nate-tamarack
    FAQ                                              →  /faq

[ Book a Trip ]  (button, far right)                 →  /book

Account and Cart icons — icons only, no text labels

Six items and a button. "Learn" rather than "Lessons" or "Instruction" because it's the shortest word a customer would actually use, and because you can add products under it later without renaming the parent. "The Method" is first on purpose: it makes the menu read as an argument rather than a price list.

The one thing to be careful about, and it's the whole trick: when you first rebuild this menu, every label points at the address the page has today, not the address it will have later. The Method link points at /about-the-science. Guided Trips points at /guidedtrips. The menu changes; the addresses don't. That way if something goes sideways in the following two weeks, you know it was the menu, and undoing a menu takes ten minutes. The addresses move afterwards, one tranche at a time, with the forwarding rules below.

☐ 5 minutes. Decide whether the writing section is called Journal or Blog. Journal is the recommendation — river journaling is already your vocabulary — but there's no search advantage either way and it's your brand, not ours. Nothing else gets built until the word is picked. Whichever you choose, the label and the address must match: Journal → /journal, Blog → /blog.

☐ 2–3 hours (yours or your web person's). Build /method and its five sub-pages — Think Like a Trout, How We Teach, River Journaling, Neurodiversity-Informed Instruction, Method Glossary. Create each one in Pages → Not Linked → + → Blank Page, then set its slug via the gear icon ⚙ → General → URL Slug using the addresses in the tree above. Do not add them to the menu yet. Pages nothing links to change nothing and risk nothing. Needs: the Method copy and the decision above.

☐ 5 minutes. Verify. Type each new address straight into your browser — troutpsychology.com/method/glossary and so on. Each one should load its own page, not an error. Then look at your live site in a private browsing window: the menu should be unchanged. If a new page has appeared in the menu, drag it into Not Linked.

☐ 1–2 hours. Reshape what you've already built into the six-item version above, with the new labels pointing at your existing page addresses. You have two folders; the tree needs four — so rename Our Unique Method to The Method, and split what's inside Offerings into Guided Trips and Learn by the rule above: a day on the water goes in Trips, a skill goes in Learn. Add an About folder. Folders are made in the Pages panel the same way you made the two you have.

☐ 15 minutes. Verify. On a laptop and on your phone, click all six menu items and every dropdown item. Every one should load a real page. Count the top-level items: six, plus the Book a Trip button. If anything lands on an error, that item's link is pointing at an address that doesn't exist yet — repoint it at the current address.

☐ 1 minute. Confirmation only — this one is already fixed. Your "Group Retreats" menu link used to point at /waretreats, a page that doesn't exist. As of August 27 it points at /educational-fly-fishing-retreats, and /waretreats is gone from the navigation entirely. Click it once after the menu rebuild to confirm the rebuild didn't undo it. After the addresses move it should point at /trips/group-retreats.

The forwarding addresses — the actual list

When you rename a page, you leave a forwarding address, so old links and Google don't hit a dead end. Old bookmarks, the podcast show notes pointing at your Method page, Google's own index — all get quietly walked to the new address instead of an error. What you're about to paste is one line per renamed page: the old address, an arrow, the new address, and the number 301, which is the code that means this move is permanent, update your records. Squarespace reads that box every time someone arrives, and sends them on. The rules never expire and you never delete them.

Two things make this less alarming than it sounds.

The list has been checked against your actual live pages. An earlier version contained seven addresses that were educated guesses; all seven were wrong. The site was crawled on August 27 and the list rebuilt from what's genuinely there — which is how we learned the real retreats page is /educational-fly-fishing-retreats and that your gift certificates page is /giftcertificates, run together, not hyphenated. Every old address below is a page that exists right now.

The risky move is deliberately scheduled away from booking season. Your guided trips page earns the most and is probably the first thing most new customers ever see. It moves absolutely last, alone, the week of November 9, after the process has been proven four times on pages where a mistake wouldn't matter. It does not move in March, April or May. If anyone proposes touching it in booking season, the answer is no.

Here is the complete list, in the order the lines get added. Do not paste it all at once. Paste the block for a tranche in the week that tranche is scheduled, then leave it alone and watch.

# ── Tranche A — week of Oct 5, 2026 — proving the mechanism ──
/aboutthemission -> /about 301
/nate -> /about/nate-tamarack 301

# ── Tranche A2 — week of Oct 12, 2026 — the Method, alone ──
/about-the-science -> /method 301

# ── Tranche B — week of Oct 19, 2026 — booking and gift first ──
/booknow -> /book 301
/giftcertificates -> /gift-certificates 301

# ── Tranche B — week of Oct 26, 2026 — supporting services ──
/washington-casting-camp -> /learn/casting-camp 301
/private-fly-fishing-lessons-washington -> /learn/private-education 301
/schools -> /learn/fly-fishing-schools 301
/streamer-stomp -> /learn/streamer-stomp 301
/instructors -> /about/instructors 301
/educational-fly-fishing-retreats -> /trips/group-retreats 301
/waretreats -> /trips/group-retreats 301

# ── Tranche C — week of Nov 2, 2026 — the $250/mo product, alone ──
/castinglessons -> /learn/virtual-casting-lessons 301

# ── Tranche D — week of Nov 9, 2026 — the revenue page, absolutely last ──
/guidedtrips -> /trips 301

Thirteen real renames, plus one courtesy line. Notes on the ones that aren't obvious:

• /waretreats was never a real page, and as of August 27 it's not in your menu either — you've already repointed that link. There's no traffic to preserve, so that line is cheap insurance for anyone who bookmarked it while it appeared to work. If Month One already added /waretreats -> /educational-fly-fishing-retreats 301, edit that line rather than adding a second one — you want one hop, not a hop to a page that then hops again. Two hops in a row loses signal and is easy to avoid.
• /booknow and /giftcertificates go in Week 7, first within their tranche, ahead of the gift-buying season and because 29 links across the five new service pages already say /book and 21 already say /gift-certificates. Those links only resolve once these two lines exist.
• /educational-fly-fishing-retreats is a live, indexed page with its own title in Google — "3-Day Fly Fishing Retreats in Washington." It is not a free test. Watch that one on its own, not just as part of the group.
• Never rewrite a new address back to an old one to fix a problem. If a destination changes again later, edit the original line so it points straight at the final address.

☐ 10 minutes per tranche, five times. Go to Settings → Developer Tools → URL Mappings, paste that tranche's lines at the bottom of the box, and click Save. Lines starting with # are comments — Squarespace ignores them, and they're there so that in six months you can tell what happened when. Needs: the destination page to already exist. A forwarding rule pointing at a page you haven't built yet sends people to an error.

☐ 10 minutes per tranche. Verify, and don't skip this. Open a private browsing window (so you're not seeing a cached version) and type each old address into the bar by hand — troutpsychology.com/aboutthemission. Three things should happen: the page loads, it's the right content, and the address bar now shows the new address. If the address bar still shows the old one, the rule didn't take. If you get an error, the destination page doesn't exist yet.

☐ 5 minutes per tranche. In Google Search Console, open Sitemaps and resubmit, then use the search bar at the top to check each new address and click Request Indexing. This is telling Google to come look now rather than whenever it gets round to it.

☐ Wait, and this is a real instruction. Seven days after Tranche A, fourteen after each of A2, B and C, twenty-one after D. In Search Console → Performance, compare clicks on the moved pages against the fortnight before. Flat or up is normal. A single page down more than a quarter is worth investigating before the next tranche goes out. Nothing here is so urgent it's worth compressing.

Publish the five service pages

All five are written and ready in Phase 2 - Content/Service Pages/.

The body copy is the one thing you copy from the file. Each page runs three to four thousand words — open the file, find ## 4. PAGE COPY, and paste that section into the page. Everything else you need for each page is printed below: the exact title, the exact description, the exact address, where each goes, and what's still blank. You should not need to open the file for anything except that one section.

☐ 45 minutes. Read all five straight through before touching anything. You're checking two things: does it sound like you, and is anything in it not true?

☐ 2 hours, and it's the ugly one. Settle the 2026 rate card in one sitting: private full day, private half day, the shared "split with a stranger" seat, walk-and-wade, one/two/three-day private education, camp, retreats — plus what's included, what you provide versus what they bring, deposits, and your cancellation window. That one session clears most of the 47 blanks, since the same numbers recur across pages — much less painful than being ambushed by the same question five times.

☐ 30 minutes. Write down what Casting Camp actually is — length, dates, group size, price, venue, on water or on grass, what you provide.

How to publish one page

The same six steps every time. Roughly 30–45 minutes per page once the blanks are filled.

1. Pages → + → Blank Page. Title it with the page's H1 (the big heading at the top of §3 in the file).
2. Gear icon ⚙ → General → URL Slug — set the address from the block below.
3. Paste ## 4. PAGE COPY from the file into the page body. Keep the headings as headings — use Squarespace's Heading 1 / Heading 2 / Heading 3 styles, not bold text made big. Headings are how both a skim-reader and a search engine find the shape of the page.
4. Gear icon ⚙ → SEO tab — paste the SEO Title and SEO Description from the block below, exactly, including the punctuation.
5. Search the page for [CONFIRM. If you find one, stop and fill it in.
6. Save, then Verify (below).

⚠️ These pages cannot publish with the placeholders in them. "Pricing to be confirmed" tells a customer you don't know your own prices and tells Google the page is unfinished. One bracket left in is worse than the page not being up.

1 — Yakima River Guided Trips

Your highest-earning page: both boats, both guides, the shared-seat option, and the argument that every trip is a teaching trip.

Body copy: Phase 2 - Content/Service Pages/01 - Yakima River Guided Trips.md, §4.

URL slug         /trips

SEO Title        Yakima River Fly Fishing Guide | Trout Psychology

SEO Description  Guided fly fishing on the Yakima River from Cle Elum, WA.
                 Every trip is a teaching trip — streamers, dry flies, and
                 how to actually think like a trout.

Build this page at /trips now, while /guidedtrips is still live and untouched. The forwarding line for /guidedtrips is the very last thing that happens, in November.

What you must decide — 10 blanks:

☐ Trip lengths offered — full day, half day — and 2026 rates for each

☐ The shared-seat rate, and how you pair two strangers

☐ Pairing lead time, and what happens if no second angler books

☐ Walk-and-wade: do you offer it, from which access points, at what rate

☐ What's included in a day, and what a client brings versus what you provide — rods, reels, lines, waders, boots

☐ Maximum number of boats you'll run on a single date

☐ Your seasonal breakdown — peak windows, runoff timing, and which months you'd steer a first-timer toward

☐ Actual on-water hours in a full day (the code block at the bottom of the file assumes a full 24-hour day, which is wrong and needs your number)

☐ The full rate card again for the code block at the bottom of the file — don't put a guessed price in there, it's a factual claim to Google

☐ Whether you're actually selling the shared-seat and walk-and-wade options at the structure described. If not, cut those sections rather than editing them.

2 — Virtual Fly Casting Lessons

The $250/month video coaching — the only thing you sell that isn't capped by days you can stand in a river.

Body copy: Phase 2 - Content/Service Pages/02 - Virtual Fly Casting Lessons.md, §4.

URL slug         /learn/virtual-casting-lessons

SEO Title        Virtual Fly Casting Lessons Online | Trout Psychology

SEO Description  Monthly online fly casting coaching with video analysis.
                 $250/mo. A behavior analyst breaks your cast into parts and
                 rebuilds it — from anywhere, all year.

What you must decide — 7 blanks:

☐ How many video submissions are included per month, and your turnaround time

☐ What software or app you annotate the videos in

☐ How many live sessions per month, how long each, how they're scheduled, on what platform

☐ Whether there's a minimum commitment, and whether there's a setup or intake fee

☐ The exact cancellation and billing terms — this appears twice on the page

☐ Your honest expectation of how long it takes to see change. Don't publish a timeline you haven't set.

☐ The submission and session counts again for the code block at the bottom of the file — they're the strongest reason someone signs up and currently the biggest hole in the page

3 — Private Fly Fishing Education

One to three days, custom curriculum, 3:1 ratio.

Body copy: Phase 2 - Content/Service Pages/03 - Private Fly Fishing Education.md, §4.

URL slug         /learn/private-education

SEO Title        Private Fly Fishing Education, 1-3 Days | Trout Psychology

SEO Description  One to three days of private fly fishing instruction in
                 Washington. Custom curriculum, 3:1 max ratio, built around
                 what you actually want to learn.

Keep the phrase "private fly fishing lessons, Washington" somewhere in the page's main heading or opening. The old address carried that phrase and the new, shorter one doesn't — you don't want to lose the search term along with the address.

What you must decide — 7 blanks:

☐ One-day rate and on-water hours

☐ Two-day rate, and what you tell people about lodging

☐ Three-day rate, the schedule, whether the days must be consecutive, and lodging guidance

☐ 2026 rates for all three lengths, per student and per group, and what's included — instruction, flies, terminal tackle, lunch, shuttle

☐ The 1/2/3-day pricing again for the code block at the bottom of the file

☐ The accommodation paragraph. One restrained paragraph about teaching students on the autism spectrum sits in the copy marked "do not publish without Kristen's sign-off on wording." Read it. Approve it, edit it, or cut it. Everything else on this page can publish without you.

☐ Note what's deliberately not on this page: the neurodivergence search terms are held back for /method/neurodiversity-informed-instruction, on purpose, until you've had the accessibility conversation with yourself. Nothing to do here — just don't add them.

4 — Casting Camp

The biggest gap in the set. No length, dates, group size, price or venue exist anywhere, so every logistical detail on the page is a placeholder. The search terms are nearly uncontested — free territory you can't claim until you describe the program.

Body copy: Phase 2 - Content/Service Pages/04 - Casting Camp.md, §4.

URL slug         /learn/casting-camp

SEO Title        Fly Fishing Casting Camp WA | Trout Psychology

SEO Description  Casting Camp in central Washington. Your cast, taken apart
                 and rebuilt one piece at a time by a behavior analyst who
                 thinks practice should be fun.

Keep "Washington" in the page's main heading. The current address carries the geography and the new one doesn't.

What you must decide — 11 blanks:

☐ Camp length — a day, a weekend, several days?

☐ Dates for the 2027 season, and how far ahead you can list them

☐ Group size, and how many instructors run it

☐ Price, deposit, and cancellation policy

☐ Venue — on the water, on grass, or both — and where

☐ Lodging guidance for out-of-town campers

☐ What gear you provide versus what a camper brings

☐ Whether beginner-specific dates exist

☐ Whether women's-specific dates exist

☐ Whether the curriculum in the file matches what you actually teach — it's the standard casting chain and is probably right, but the emphasis is yours

☐ Dates, duration, capacity and price again for the code block at the bottom of the file

Until length, dates, group size and price exist, either publish the page without dates and without the mid-page "book a date" block, or hold it entirely. A camp page with no dates converts poorly; a camp page with wrong dates converts negatively. Because this page carries the spring homepage rotation, the practical deadline for dates is roughly February.

5 — Group Retreats

Three days, four to six people. This one replaces a page Google already has indexed, so it needs a forwarding address, not a fresh publish.

Body copy: Phase 2 - Content/Service Pages/05 - Group Retreats.md, §4.

URL slug         /trips/group-retreats

SEO Title        Fly Fishing Group Retreats, WA | Trout Psychology

SEO Description  Three-day immersive fly fishing retreats in central
                 Washington for groups of 4-6. Small, custom-built, and
                 taught by a behavior analyst with a raft.

What you must decide — 12 blanks:

☐ Retreat pricing, per person and per group

☐ Exact dates offered for 2027

☐ Deposit structure and cancellation policy

☐ Exactly what's included: instruction, guiding, boats, flies and terminal tackle, meals, lodging, shuttle

☐ Whether you arrange lodging, recommend it, or leave it to the group

☐ Whether non-fishing partners can come

☐ Whether dedicated women's retreat dates are scheduled, or groups just book privately

☐ Whether the three-day arc in the copy — baseline, rebuild, generalize — matches how you actually run a retreat

☐ Maximum instructors you can put on a single retreat

☐ Whether you offer custom-length retreats

☐ How you invoice a company, and how flexible the group size is

☐ Before publishing any women's-retreat photograph: consent from everyone in it, and confirmation that women's retreats are a thing you offer

☐ 10 minutes, before the week of October 19. Decide where Group Retreats belongs. It sits under Trips now. If a retreat is really three days of instruction that happen to involve boats, it belongs under Learn at /learn/group-retreats — and the copy reads instruction-forward, which mildly argues for that. One decision, made once, before the forwarding line ships, because redirecting the same page twice costs you signal for no reason.

Verifying a service page

☐ 5 minutes per page. Load the page in a private browsing window. Four checks:

• The address bar shows the slug you set, exactly, all lowercase, no trailing slash.
• The browser tab shows your SEO Title — not "Home", not "…— SCco.". If it shows SCco., the Month One site-title fix didn't save; go back to Settings → Business Information before you publish anything else.
• Ctrl+F (Cmd+F) for [CONFIRM on the live page. Zero results. Do this every single time; it takes four seconds and it's the one mistake that's genuinely embarrassing.
• Paste the page's address into a text message to yourself. The preview card that appears should show your SEO Description. If it shows the first sentence of the page instead, the description field didn't save — go back to the SEO tab. (Some apps ignore the description and show a photo instead; if you get nothing useful, it's the app, not the page.)

One thing to read first, because it's a position, not copy

These pages make an argument. Decide out loud whether you want to make it in public. On private education:

Instruction that produces dependency is bad instruction, even when the client enjoys it.

And sharper, on guided trips:

the business model quietly rewards dependency. A client who never learns to read water books again next year.

That's a real claim about your industry. It says a guide who sends someone home happy but no better at reading water hasn't done the job — and it reframes the big outfitters' greatest strength, volume, as the reason they can't teach at a 3:1 ratio with a curriculum written for one person's broken hookset. It names nobody, and doesn't need to. It's defensible, it's true to how you teach, it's the most differentiated paragraph in the set, and it may come up at the boat ramp.

☐ 10 minutes. Read those two sections and decide whether you'll stand behind them. Want it softer, it gets softened; want it gone, it goes. What shouldn't happen is it going live without you having read it.

Publish the FAQ

Fifty questions in FAQ Content and Schema.md, in eight categories. 25 can publish today. 25 are waiting on you.

Every answer is built the same way: the answer itself in the first 40 to 60 words, then the longer explanation underneath. That's not a style preference. When someone asks ChatGPT "how much does a guided trip on the Yakima cost," or Google puts an answer box above the results, those systems lift a short self-contained answer off a page and quote it — they don't summarize, they take the part that already looks like an answer. So those first 40 to 60 words do nearly all the work. Don't bury them under a warm-up when you paste.

Two rules that sound fussy and aren't:

• The short answer must be visible on the page, not hidden behind a click. Drop-down accordions are fine for the long explanation underneath. The short answer has to be there when the page loads, or the tools you're writing it for never see it.
• Put the categories on the page in this order, which is not the order they're in the file: the Method, complete beginners, booking and logistics, virtual casting lessons, gear and technique, accessibility and inclusion, multi-day programs, gift certificates. The file is ordered for you to review. This order puts the nine finished Method answers — the authority payload — at the top, where they carry the most weight.

☐ 20 minutes. Build the page. Pages → + → Blank Page, title it Frequently Asked Questions, then gear icon ⚙ → General → URL Slug → faq. In the SEO tab, set the SEO Title to Frequently Asked Questions | Trout Psychology.

☐ 1 hour. Publish the 25 ready answers — they're marked ✅ in the index at the top of the file. Use a real Heading 2 for each category and a Heading 3 for each question. Needs: the /faq page.

☐ 90 minutes. Answer the twenty held questions about logistics — prices, licences, cancellation, gear, what happens when the river blows out. The rate card above answers most of them.

☐ 1 minute. Confirm $250/month is still the virtual lesson price. It appears in two answers and in the code below; if it's changed, it changes in both.

The code that goes with the FAQ page

Below is the whole thing, ready to paste. It's the same 25 answers written out again in a format built for machines — Google and the AI tools read it and understand each block as a question and its answer, rather than as a wall of text they have to guess at. That's the entire benefit: your answers get treated as answers.

To be straight with you about what it does not do: Google stopped showing those expandable FAQ boxes in normal search results for businesses like yours back in 2023. Nobody is going to screenshot a win from this. What it does is make your answers quotable by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI summaries, and help Google finally understand that Trout Psychology is a fly fishing business — which is the whole point of this engagement.

☐ 10 minutes. Copy the block below and paste it into Pages → hover the FAQ page → gear icon ⚙ → Advanced → Page Header Code Injection. That box only — this belongs to the FAQ page, not the whole site.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "FAQPage",
  "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#faqpage",
  "url": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq",
  "name": "Frequently Asked Questions",
  "inLanguage": "en-US",
  "isPartOf": {
    "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#website"
  },
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#organization"
  },
  "about": {
    "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#method"
  },
  "mentions": [
    {
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#kristen-bufe"
    },
    {
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/#nate-tamarack"
    }
  ],
  "mainEntity": [
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-is-there-cell-service-on-the-yakima-river",
      "name": "Is there cell service on the Yakima River?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Cell service along the Yakima River canyon is unreliable and drops out completely in long stretches, especially between Ellensburg and Roslyn and in the deeper canyon sections. Plan to be unreachable for most of a fishing day. Download maps before you leave, and leave your trip plan with someone at home."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-is-the-trout-psychology-method",
      "name": "What is the Trout Psychology Method?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "The Trout Psychology Method applies behaviour analysis to both the trout and the angler. Trout are organisms that follow the same laws of learning, so their behaviour can be predicted from observable conditions rather than guessed at. Anglers are taught the same way: skills broken into components, reinforced, and chained to mastery."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-does-think-like-a-trout-actually-mean",
      "name": "What does \"think like a trout\" actually mean?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Thinking like a trout means predicting a fish's behaviour from its conditions instead of guessing at its preferences. A trout is not choosing a fly; it is responding to current, temperature, light, cover, food and pressure. Read those conditions and you can work out where it holds and what it will take."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-is-trout-psychology-a-therapy-or-mental-health",
      "name": "Is Trout Psychology a therapy or mental health practice?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "No. Trout Psychology is a fly fishing education and guiding company in Cle Elum, Washington. The name refers to applying behavioural science to trout behaviour and to how anglers learn. Founder Kristen Bufe holds a B.S. in Behaviour Analysis and uses that training to teach fly fishing, not to provide clinical care."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-how-is-a-trout-psychology-trip-different-from",
      "name": "How is a Trout Psychology trip different from a normal guided fly fishing trip?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "A standard guided trip puts you on fish. A Trout Psychology trip teaches you why the fish were there. Instruction runs at a maximum three-to-one ratio with a custom curriculum, streamside teaching materials, and river journaling, so you leave able to solve unfamiliar water without a guide."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-why-do-you-cap-lessons-at-three-students",
      "name": "Why do you cap lessons at three students per instructor?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Trout Psychology caps instruction at three students per instructor. Past that ratio, individual feedback stops being possible and students spend the day watching someone else learn. Guided trips are private for one or two anglers, with a shared option for solo anglers willing to split a boat."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-is-river-journaling-and-why-do-you",
      "name": "What is river journaling, and why do you teach it?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "River journaling is the practice of recording what you observed on the water — conditions, fish behaviour, what you tried and what happened — so patterns become visible over time. Trout Psychology teaches it because memory is unreliable and unstructured. A written record turns a season of fishing into usable data."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-is-a-strategy-blueprint",
      "name": "What is a strategy blueprint?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "A strategy blueprint is a decision framework Trout Psychology students take home — a structured way to work out what to do on unfamiliar water when nothing is happening. Rather than a list of flies, it is a sequence of questions about conditions and fish behaviour that leads to the next thing to try."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-do-trout-actually-learn-can-they-learn-to",
      "name": "Do trout actually learn? Can they learn to avoid flies?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Yes. Trout learn the same way other organisms do, through consequences. A fish that is hooked, handled and released has experienced a strong aversive consequence paired with whatever preceded it, and heavily fished water reliably produces fish that refuse patterns and presentations they once ate freely."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-qualifies-kristen-bufe-to-teach-fly-fishing",
      "name": "What qualifies Kristen Bufe to teach fly fishing this way?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Kristen Bufe holds a B.S. in Behaviour Analysis, has twenty-five years of angling experience and twenty years teaching on the water, and spent roughly a decade teaching students on the autism spectrum. She specialises in streamer fishing and guides the Yakima River from a raft out of Cle Elum, Washington."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-am-i-too-old-to-learn-fly-fishing",
      "name": "Am I too old to learn fly fishing?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "No. Fly casting is a timing and sequencing skill, not a strength or endurance skill, and it is routinely learned well into later life. Trout Psychology teaches by breaking skills into small components and building them one at a time, which suits adult learners better than being handed a rod and told to copy."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-will-i-be-bad-at-it-i-am",
      "name": "Will I be bad at it? I am not athletic or coordinated.",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Almost certainly you will be bad at it for a while, and that is normal rather than a verdict. Fly casting is a timing skill built from small components. Trout Psychology teaches those components one at a time with immediate feedback, so early difficulty is expected, planned for, and not a sign you cannot do it."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-how-long-does-it-take-to-learn-fly",
      "name": "How long does it take to learn fly fishing?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Most people can make a functional thirty-foot cast and catch a fish within a day of good instruction. Becoming an angler who can read unfamiliar water and solve it alone takes seasons, not days. Trout Psychology teaches toward the second thing, which is why students learn reasoning rather than just mechanics."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-will-i-catch-a-fish-on-my-first",
      "name": "Will I catch a fish on my first day?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Often, but no honest guide will promise it. Trout are wild animals responding to conditions that change daily, and no instructor controls water temperature, flow or weather. What a first day reliably delivers is a functional cast, an understanding of where fish hold and why, and a plan you can repeat."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-is-fly-fishing-good-for-mental-health",
      "name": "Is fly fishing good for mental health?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Many anglers find time on a river genuinely restorative, and that experience is widely reported. Trout Psychology is a fly fishing instruction and guiding company, not a health provider, and makes no clinical or therapeutic claim. Fly fishing is a hobby taught well here — it is not treatment and is not a substitute for care."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-how-much-do-virtual-casting-lessons-cost",
      "name": "How much do virtual casting lessons cost?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Trout Psychology's virtual casting lessons are a monthly subscription priced at $250 per month. Coaching is delivered remotely through video analysis, so students work directly with founder Kristen Bufe from anywhere in the world rather than travelling to central Washington for an in-person lesson."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-do-i-need-in-order-to-film",
      "name": "What do I need in order to film a casting video?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "A phone camera, a rod, and about twenty metres of open grass. Film from the side so the whole rod and line are in frame, then again from behind. Prop the phone on a bag or use a small tripod. No water, no fish, and no special equipment are required to work on casting."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-do-i-need-to-live-in-washington-to",
      "name": "Do I need to live in Washington to take virtual lessons?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "No. Virtual casting lessons are delivered by video analysis and are geography-independent — students work with Kristen Bufe from anywhere. The in-person trips and multi-day programs are based on the Yakima River in central Washington, but the casting subscription has no location requirement at all."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-are-virtual-casting-lessons-as-good-as-inperson",
      "name": "Are virtual casting lessons as good as in-person lessons?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "For casting mechanics, video coaching is often better than a single in-person lesson, because it is repeated over weeks rather than delivered once, and video can be paused and replayed. For reading water and fishing decisions, in-person on the river is not replaceable. The two do different jobs."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-is-private-education-and-how-do-multiday",
      "name": "What is private education, and how do multi-day programs work?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Private education is one to three days of custom fly fishing instruction on the Yakima River, built around a specific student rather than a standard lesson plan. Instruction is capped at three students per instructor, runs on the water rather than in a classroom, and uses portable streamside workbooks, whiteboards and flowcharts."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-is-the-difference-between-streamer-fishing-and",
      "name": "What is the difference between streamer fishing and dry fly fishing?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "A dry fly floats on the surface and imitates an insect a trout eats passively as it drifts past. A streamer sinks and imitates prey — baitfish, leeches, sculpins — and is actively retrieved, so the trout must chase and commit. Dry fly fishing is a game of drift; streamer fishing is a game of provocation."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-should-i-fish-streamers-or-dry-flies-on",
      "name": "Should I fish streamers or dry flies on the Yakima River?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "Both work on the Yakima, and the right answer depends on the day's conditions and on what you want from it. Dry fly fishing rewards patience and precise drifts; streamer fishing covers water and provokes reaction eats. Trout Psychology has a specialist in each — Kristen for streamers, Nate Tamarack for dry flies."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-why-do-trout-chase-a-streamer-and-then",
      "name": "Why do trout chase a streamer and then turn away at the last second?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "A chase means the trout committed to the pursuit and then got information that changed the decision. Usually the fly stopped behaving like prey — a retrieve that hesitated, a fly that never tried to escape, or a close-range look that revealed size, profile or motion the fish did not expect."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-kind-of-trout-live-in-the-yakima",
      "name": "What kind of trout live in the Yakima River?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "The Yakima River holds wild rainbow trout and westslope cutthroat trout, along with mountain whitefish. These are wild fish, not stocked ones, which is why they respond to fishing pressure and conditions the way they do — and why reading behaviour matters more here than on a put-and-take fishery."
      }
    },
    {
      "@type": "Question",
      "@id": "https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq#q-what-is-the-difference-between-fishing-from-a",
      "name": "What is the difference between fishing from a raft and a hard boat?",
      "acceptedAnswer": {
        "@type": "Answer",
        "text": "A raft is softer, more forgiving in shallow or technical water, and can hold position in places a hard boat cannot. A hard boat rows drier, tracks better and gives a more stable casting platform. Kristen guides from a raft and Nate Tamarack runs a hard boat, so both are available."
      }
    }
  ]
}
</script>

Three things about this block, all of which will save you a phone call:

• Every question and answer in it must also appear as visible text on the page, word for word. Code that says something the page doesn't say is a rule violation, and Google is unsentimental about it.
• Never put a note or a comment inside the <script> tags. This format has no way to hold a comment, and one stray line silently kills the entire block.
• When you finish a held answer, add it in two places in the same sitting — the visible page and this block, in the same shape as the others. Never one without the other.

☐ 5 minutes. Verify. Go to search.google.com/test/rich-results, paste in https://www.troutpsychology.com/faq, and run it. You want FAQ listed as a detected item and 0 errors. If it says nothing was detected, see the troubleshooting note at the end of this chapter — it's almost always quote marks. validator.schema.org is a second opinion if you want one.

☐ 2 minutes. Verify. Check that the #organization and #method blocks from Month One are already live sitewide. The code above refers to them by name. If they aren't there yet the block still works, it just wastes most of its value.

The five answers nobody drafted

⚠️ Five answers were deliberately left blank — D1 through D5, the accessibility and inclusion questions. Not missed, not padding. They are: whether you offer women-only trips or clinics; whether you teach neurodivergent and autistic anglers; what accommodations you can make; whether a guided trip is too much for someone with anxiety; and whether you can teach at a slower pace with less talking.

Every one asks the business to describe a service commitment: what you'll actually do for a student who needs something. We can state what's confirmed — the B.S. in Behavior Analysis, roughly a decade teaching students on the autism spectrum, three students per instructor maximum, curricula built per student, trips that are private for one or two anglers so there's no group to perform in front of. Those are facts. What accommodations you offer is not a fact; it's a promise about the future, and it sits squarely in your professional territory. A marketer deciding on your behalf what a family can expect on a boat is how a student gets let down on a river — a promise made on a website and not kept on the water is worse than no promise at all.

So the document gives prompts instead of copy: sensory, communication, pacing, physical access, and how someone raises a need before booking. You write the answers.

☐ 1 hour, and don't hand it to anyone. Write D1 through D5 yourself. Under-promise on purpose: "tell us what would make the day work and we'll talk it through" is an honest, complete answer. Be specific about what a raft on moving water genuinely can't do — naming a limit is more respectful than implying it isn't there. One line belongs on the page however you answer the rest — this is fly fishing instruction informed by behavior analysis; not therapy, not ABA services, not treatment. That sentence protects the student, protects you, and doubles as the clearest signal that you're not a psychology practice.

Publish the team pages

Your bio is done — nine versions in Team Bios.md: the long website bio, a short one for booking cards, a one-liner, a blog byline, social profiles, and a spoken introduction for podcast hosts to read. Different lengths for different slots, so nobody improvises a bio at 11pm.

One correction before you build anything. Team Bios.md §5 and §6.3 tell you to build /team, /team/kristen-bufe and /team/nate-tamarack. Ignore those addresses. The correct ones are /about/instructors, /about/kristen-bufe and /about/nate-tamarack — they're what the menu above uses and what the forwarding list sends /instructors to. Everything else in that document is right; it's only the three addresses that are stale.

Five small things are missing from your own bio: the name of the university that granted the behavior analysis degree, any casting or guiding certifications (or a clean "none"), how to pronounce Bufe, whether you want a signature item in every photo, and whether the team is just the two of you this season. The university name is the highest-value item in the document — a degree traceable to a real institution is the one thing no competitor here has and none can quickly go get. If you'd rather not name it, say so; the credential stays and the link comes out.

☐ 15 minutes. Answer those five.

Ask Nate over dinner

☐ 15 minutes, one conversation. Nate's bio has eight blanks only he can fill. You two live in the same house, so this is not a scheduling problem — it's a "we keep meaning to and then the day happens" problem, which is worse. Pick an evening, pour something, and work down the list. He talks, you type. It stands between you and half the team pages.

One warning from experience: do not let him answer number 2 or number 3 with "oh, a while." Make him land on a real number, because that number ends up in seven pieces of copy.

The eight questions:

EIGHT QUESTIONS FOR NATE — for his bio page
Don't polish the answers. That's the writing's job. Just don't round anything up.

1. How you got into fly fishing — 3 to 5 sentences. Where were you when it stuck? Who taught you, or self-taught? What were you doing before this?
2. How long have you been fly fishing? A real number or a year.
3. How long have you been guiding or instructing? A real number or a year. These can be different, that's fine and normal.
4. How you teach — one short paragraph. Is there a kind of angler you're best with? Total beginners, people coming back after years off, kids, bug nerds?
5. Where are you from, and where do you live now? One or two sentences.
6. Certifications and licenses — guide license, first aid/CPR, WFR, swiftwater rescue, boat operator, casting instructor cert. Everything you actually hold. If it's none of them, just say "none" and we'll cut the section. Nobody's going to be weird about it.
7. One non-fishing thing about you. A hobby, an obsession, a stupid fact. This is the line that makes someone book with a person instead of a website.
8. Instagram and LinkedIn — public handles you want linked, or "no" for either. "No" is a completely fine answer; we'd rather delete the link than point at a dead one.

Also: is anyone approaching you for podcasts or media? Changes what we write next.

That's Team Bios.md §6.2 word for word, with the bold markers taken out so it pastes clean into a phone.

The photographs

☐ 20 minutes to book, half a day to shoot. Book a photographer for a half day on the water with both of you; the brief for them is §4 of Team Bios.md, hand it over as-is. What matters: a proper headshot each, shot the same day in the same light so the team page doesn't look assembled from scraps, and photographs of instruction actually happening — you mid-explanation at the streamside whiteboard, hands correcting a grip, a river journal open with handwriting visible. Every guide on the Yakima has four hundred photos of someone holding a fish. Nobody else can photograph a whiteboard on a riverbank, because nobody else brings one, and that frame becomes the Method page hero. No budget this season? §4.9 has DIY instructions that work.

Building the three pages

☐ 45 minutes. Publish both bio pages once the blanks are filled, plus the hub. Three pages, built the same way as the service pages:

URL slug         /about/instructors
                 Hub. Group shot, ~150 words on the 3:1 ratio and the
                 real difference between you two — Kristen: streamers,
                 raft. Nate: dry flies, hard boat — then two cards.

URL slug         /about/kristen-bufe
SEO Title        Kristen Bufe — Founder & Fly Fishing Instructor | Trout Psychology
SEO Description  Use the one-line bio from Team Bios.md §1C. It's already
                 written to the right length.

URL slug         /about/nate-tamarack
SEO Description  Use the one-line bio from Team Bios.md §2C.

The page heading on each bio page is the person's name alone — Kristen Bufe, not "Meet Kristen" or "About Our Founder." A name query is the search you win fastest, and the heading is the strongest signal you've got for it. Inside each bio, use Heading 2s for The Method, Experience, Credentials and In the press, and set the credentials off in a bordered block so they're visually distinct from the prose. That block is what a human skims to and what an AI tool extracts.

☐ 10 minutes. Paste the code block from Team Bios.md §3 — the one describing you and Nate — but split it in two and paste each half on its own bio page, via that page's gear icon ⚙ → Advanced → Page Header Code Injection. Fill in every {{PLACEHOLDER}} first; if you don't have a value, delete the line rather than guess. Keep the names in the @id lines exactly as written — the site-wide block from Month One points at them.

☐ 5 minutes. Verify. Run both bio page addresses through search.google.com/test/rich-results. You want Person detected with 0 errors, twice. Be aware this produces no visible result in Google — nothing to screenshot. What it does is give Google a named, credentialed human to attach the Method to, so that everything you publish afterwards accrues to you instead of evaporating. The real measure is slower: Google Kristen Bufe once a month and watch for the day the results stop being other people.

When something breaks

The code doesn't work and you can't see why — check the quote marks first. This is the single most common failure and it is invisible. When you copy code out of anything that formats text — Word, Google Docs, email, Notes, a PDF, a nicely-rendered document — the software helpfully converts straight quotes "like this" into curly typographer's quotes "like this". To you they look nearly identical. To a browser they are different characters, and the entire block silently stops working. Nothing turns red. Nothing warns you.

The fix is to make sure code never passes through a formatting program on its way to Squarespace. Open the source file in a plain-text editor — Notepad on Windows, or TextEdit on a Mac with Format → Make Plain Text turned on — and copy from there. If you're not sure whether a block is already broken, paste it into Notepad and look: curly quotes are visibly slanted. Or search the pasted code for " and "; any result is a break.

The same rule applies to hyphens. A formatting program turns -- into —, and an em dash inside code breaks it exactly the same way.

A forwarding rule won't save, or does nothing. The arrow is a hyphen and a greater-than sign — -> — with a space on each side, and the 301 goes at the end with a space before it. Squarespace is fussy about spacing and unhelpful about saying so. Check there's no stray character at the end of the line and that the line isn't wrapped.

A forwarding rule saves but gives an error page. The destination doesn't exist yet. Build the page first, then add the rule.

The old address still shows in the address bar. Your browser cached it. Try a private browsing window, which doesn't use the cache. If it's still wrong there, the rule didn't take.

Squarespace won't let you use an address. Two pages can't share one. If /method is refused, something already has it — check Not Linked and the trash, since deleted pages hold their address for a while.

The Rich Results Test says nothing was detected. In order of likelihood: curly quotes; a comment accidentally left inside the <script> tags; the block pasted into the site-wide code box instead of the page's own; or the page not yet saved and published.

A page looks fine but Google still shows the old title. Google re-checks on its own schedule. Use Search Console → the search bar at the top → Request Indexing and then be patient; a few days is normal, a couple of weeks is not alarming.

Something has clearly gone wrong and you want out. Every step this month is reversible. A menu can be dragged back in ten minutes. A forwarding rule can be deleted. A page can be moved to Not Linked and stop existing publicly without being destroyed. Nothing here is a one-way door — which is exactly why the moves are spread across six weeks with a wait between each.

What you're actually deciding this month

Everything above is pasting except these:

• Your 2026 rate card — what's included, deposits, cancellation window. Two-thirds of this month's blanks resolve the moment it exists.
• What Casting Camp is — length, price, group size, venue.
• What you commit to on accessibility. Yours to write, nobody else's.
• Whether you'll say in public that instruction producing dependency is bad instruction. A position, not a tagline.
• Whether Group Retreats live under Trips or under Learn. Before the week of October 19.
• Journal or Blog. Five seconds of thought; blocks a surprising amount.

Everything else is copy, paste, and check that no brackets survived.

Months Two and Three — Start Publishing

Everything so far has been repair work — the "SCco." title tags, the blocked crawlers, the Google Business Profile, the old booking page. Those jobs are finite: you do them once and they stay done.

This chapter is not like that. From here on the work is a rhythm — articles on Tuesdays, reels twice a week, a video every other Thursday, an email every month. Nothing here has a finish line, and pretending otherwise would set you up to feel like a failure in July when you skip a week.

So the honest frame is this: the goal is not to execute this perfectly. It's to still be doing it in March. Everything below is built to survive a bad week, and the last section says what to drop first when the river is good and the calendar is full.

Good news first: most of the writing is already finished.

The writing is already done — six articles

Six full articles are drafted and edited in Phase 2 - Content/Blog Posts/. Not outlines — finished pieces, headlines and internal links included. They publish on Tuesdays:

• Tue Sep 22 — Why Trout Eat Streamers in the Fall
• Tue Sep 29 — The Yakima Flip-Flop: What September's Flow Drop Does to the Fish
• Tue Oct 6 — Streamer Retrieves That Trigger a Chase
• Tue Oct 13 — Fly Fishing and the Nervous System
• Tue Oct 20 — The Trout Psychology Method, Explained — the cornerstone, the one everything else links back to
• Tue Oct 27 — October Caddis on the Yakima

What you actually have to write

100–150 words per article, six times. About two hours total, spread across six weeks.

Every article has one gap marked [KRISTEN: in the file, and it's always the same kind of gap: a real thing that happened to you. Those paragraphs are why the articles work. A drafted article is competent; a drafted article with a real story in it is yours, and nobody can copy it.

☐ Post #1 — the Michigan browns, then the first fall that playbook failed on the Yakima

☐ Post #2 — the real flip-flop gauge numbers, late August versus late September, by reach

☐ Post #3 — the strip-set story: the fish you lost, or the drill that fixed it

☐ Post #4 — your own river-and-nervous-system story

☐ Post #5 — the college party origin story

☐ Post #6 — marked [KRISTEN or NATE:]; ask Nate, he may have the better story

If a sentence sounds like you talking in a boat, it's right. Don't let anyone smooth it out.

Two articles need your sign-off before they publish

Four of the six are ready to schedule once your story is in. Two are not.

The nervous system post — approve the disclaimer wording

20 minutes, before October 13.

Fly Fishing and the Nervous System is about what time on the water does to a person. It carries a block stating plainly that Trout Psychology is fly fishing instruction informed by behavior analysis: not therapy, not clinical treatment, not a mental-health service.

That block is load-bearing, not boilerplate. Your business is called Trout Psychology, searches for your brand currently surface actual psychology directories, and people and search engines already confuse you with a clinical practice. An article about mental health that doesn't draw the line hard would deepen the confusion the rest of this plan spends months fixing.

Which is why the post does double duty. By stating clearly what you are not — in public, in a piece people will read and link to — it becomes the clearest public statement of what you are. Be comfortable with the exact words, because you're the one who'll get asked about them.

☐ Read the disclaimer block and the two anxiety FAQ answers in 04 - fly-fishing-and-the-nervous-system.md and either approve them or rewrite them in your voice

The fall streamer post — be ready to defend it

30 minutes, before September 22.

Why Trout Eat Streamers in the Fall says publicly that a widely repeated explanation in the sport is wrong for this river.

The common story is that trout hammer streamers in fall because they're pre-spawn and territorial. That's genuinely true on brown trout water, and the post says so and cites the research. Then it points out what almost nobody writing fall streamer content mentions: the Yakima is not a brown trout river. It's wild rainbows and westslope cutthroat, both spring spawners, so the pre-spawn mechanism isn't operating here at all. The fall eat on the Yakima is a foraging story — cold water, cheap calories, an energy budget.

That's the strongest expertise moment in the set, and the one somebody will argue with in your comments — probably within a week, probably confidently. Be comfortable defending it. Being publicly right about something the sport repeats casually is how authority gets built.

☐ Read 01 - why-trout-eat-streamers-in-the-fall.md end to end and confirm you'd say the brown-trout paragraph out loud to another guide

Social — four weeks planned, September 21 to October 18

28 posts, seven a week, already written — copy, hashtags, shot lists and a design brief for each, in Social Media Calendar.md. The split is 16 Instagram, 4 YouTube, 4 Facebook, 4 TikTok: deliberately weighted to Instagram, because that's where your audience already is. Your reels on trout behavior and tippet already work, and nothing here asks you to stop making them.

The repurposing idea, plainly

One article feeds everything. The article is written first. One argument from it becomes a reel. A different argument becomes a carousel — the science-heavy one, because people screenshot slides. The reel gets re-uploaded vertical as a YouTube Short with the link in the description. The whole article becomes the email.

You film once, and it feeds four places. That's why the reel is never a summary of the article — it's one idea from it, in one shot.

⚠️ Three gaps to fix before you build the queue

The social calendar was built against an older blog schedule that published every two weeks; the blog now publishes weekly. Shifting the window forward two weeks fixed most of it. Three problems survived, documented in §1.5 of Social Media Calendar.md. Handle them before scheduling anything.

1. Monday Sep 21's reel points at an article that isn't live until Tuesday. Its caption says "link in bio" for a URL that won't resolve until the next morning. Fix: move the reel to Wed Sep 23 and slide the Wednesday carousel to Thursday — or keep the slot and point the link at /journal with a "tomorrow" tease.

2. Week 4 supports the retrieves article, which published Oct 6 — during week 3. Its Tuesday carousel was written as a launch-day asset and is now a follow-up. Fix: keep the copy, it's evergreen, but change the Tuesday Stories frame from "new on the Journal" to "in case you missed it."

3. The nervous system article, Oct 13, has no social posts at all. It publishes on week 4's Tuesday and that slot is taken. Fix: add one Wednesday carousel, or decide consciously that it launches on Stories and email alone. Either is defensible; publishing it silently is not.

☐ Pick a fix for the Monday Sep 21 link problem before scheduling

☐ Re-point week 4's Tuesday Stories frame to "in case you missed it"

☐ Decide whether the nervous system post gets a carousel or ships on Stories and email only

The posting times are guesses — replace them

15 minutes, this week. Every time in the calendar is a starting hypothesis, not a law. Nobody who hasn't looked at your account can tell you the right hour to post — and you already have the real answer: Instagram → Insights → Total followers → Most active times. If it contradicts the calendar, the calendar loses.

☐ Screenshot your most-active-times chart and move any scheduled post that contradicts it

☐ Log four numbers per post: time posted, reach, saves, shares — saves and shares are the ones that track with buying instruction. Likes track with nothing.

Video — the biggest opportunity, and the most work

Two things were verified by direct inspection on August 27, and both change the plan.

The YouTube video ranking for "Thinking like a Trout" is not yours. It belongs to Rick Simon Fishing Adventures, an unaffiliated channel. Nobody's impersonating you and the phrase isn't exclusively ownable, so don't contact them, dispute it or mention it publicly. Publish the definitive version and let depth settle it.

Your own channel is claimed but completely empty. The handle @troutpsychology is secured — the part money can't always fix. But the display name says "Kristen Bufe," the description is blank, and there are zero videos. Same problem as the "SCco." title tags: three surfaces naming three different companies. Rename it the same week the website title tags change, so they flip together.

☐ Rename the channel to exactly Trout Psychology — no suffix — after the website title-tag fix ships. YouTube limits name changes, so get it right in one pass

☐ Paste the channel description from Video Strategy.md §2.2 verbatim, and record your current subscriber count once as a baseline

The flagship

"How to Think Like a Trout | The Trout Psychology Method." Roughly ten and a half minutes. Publishes Thursday October 1.

This is the authority anchor. Every other video ends by pointing at it, it's embedded on /method, and it's what people will judge the channel by. It has to be genuinely good, which is why it gets more production time than everything else combined.

Three scripts are fully written — the flagship, a short piece on refusals, and the streamer chase deep-dive — and the full plan is 31 assets from three filming days.

The production reality

The flagship alone is 28–34 hours, over about three weeks: 3–4 hours locking the script, 2 on whiteboard segments, 5–6 filming, 3–4 trying to get a usable refusal shot, 10–14 editing, and 5 more on audio, thumbnails and the description. That is not a weekend.

Most of it you can shoot alone — whiteboard segments on a tripod, pieces to camera with a locked frame, static B-roll, wide casting shots, hand and gear details, and every Short but five. A phone and a $15 clamp on the oar tower covers it.

Five things need Nate: the cast-to-eat sequence, any follow or pan while you're wading, over-the-shoulder of a moving angler, anything from a boat under way, and fish-in-hand or release shots — nobody handles the fish and the camera at once.

That's the real cost: you and Nate are both revenue-generating on any fishable day, so three filming days are three days not guiding. Price that deliberately, once, rather than letting it erode the first time a booking comes in.

Audio near moving water is what ruins river video. River noise sits directly on top of the range where speech lives. It isn't fixable afterward, and on a river you can't re-shoot. Three rules do most of the work: the microphone goes on your body, six to ten inches below your chin, windscreen on even in calm air; move away from the loud water, because 40 feet from a riffle instead of 6 beats any microphone you could buy; and film dense explanation off the water entirely — a gravel bar, a tailgate, a garage. The river is where the demonstration happens. The bank is where the teaching happens. Cut them together and it reads as one day.

☐ Block three filming days as unavailable-for-guiding: mid-September, early October, early November

☐ Buy the phone clamp and a body mic with a furry windscreen before the first filming day

☐ Write the two [KRISTEN: story] moments in the flagship and V3 scripts before filming

☐ Verify audio on headphones before leaving each location, and back up to two places the same night

Email — set it up in month three

Six sequences, 21 emails, all written, plus a sample newsletter, in Email Marketing System.md. Nothing needs drafting — it needs building.

The one email that matters most

One is worth more than the other twenty combined: P1, the pre-trip email, sent the moment someone books.

It says in one honest paragraph that this is a teaching trip. That there will be a whiteboard in the boat. That you have a degree in behavior analysis and intend to use it on them and on the trout. Then: if what you wanted was a quiet rowed day and not a class, reply and say so, and I'll refer you to someone excellent who does exactly that — no fee, no hard feelings.

That email prevents the most damaging review you can get — the person who booked expecting a fishing day, got a lesson, had a perfectly fine time and still writes three stars because it wasn't what they thought they were buying. Unanswerable afterward. Entirely preventable beforehand.

It also asks them to name the one thing about their fishing that frustrates them most, which is what makes "custom curriculum" real rather than a phrase. Somebody has to actually read those replies.

☐ Set up Kit and authenticate the domain before importing a single contact

☐ Build P1 first, and paste its expectation-setting paragraph onto the booking confirmation and the guided trip page

☐ Add a recurring task: re-read the client's P1 reply the morning of their trip

The lead magnets

Start with the River Journal — a twelve-page printable field system for recording what the water was doing, not just what you caught.

It's the right first one because it isn't a marketing invention. River journaling is already something you teach streamside; this is the take-home version. And journaling is itself a behavior-analytic technique — self-monitoring changes behavior on its own, before any instruction is applied. So the honest pitch is also the strongest: this works even if you never buy anything from me.

It needs one thing only you can supply: a photograph of one of your own filled-in pages, handwriting and all. A blank template with no example is a template nobody uses, and a fake one would be obvious to anyone who fishes.

The other two are the Refusal Flowchart, for spring 2027, and the Cast Diagnostic quiz — worth starting first even though it lands later, since it sorts your list by skill level.

☐ Photograph one real filled-in journal page from your own notes for page 10 of the River Journal

Why Kit

The honest reason has nothing to do with features. Kit's editor is a plain text box — writing an email in it feels like writing an email. Every other option wraps that in a drag-and-drop template builder, which is how a two-person operation quietly stops sending in month four. Kit also handles the one mechanic this system genuinely needs: someone sitting in a nurture sequence gets pulled straight out the moment they book.

The real test isn't which tool has more features. It's which one you'll still open in July, at nine at night, after eleven hours on the water. That's Kit.

Your ongoing rhythm

Every week — roughly 3 hours:

☐ Publish Tuesday's article (15 min — it's written; you're pasting and hitting go)

☐ Post the two Instagram reels, Tuesday and Thursday (45 min)

☐ Post the week's carousel (20 min)

☐ Post the weekly booking CTA (10 min)

☐ Answer comments and DMs (30 min, in two sittings, not all day)

☐ Log reach, saves and shares (10 min)

☐ Cross-post one thing to Facebook and one to TikTok (20 min)

Every month — roughly 2 hours:

☐ Send the monthly newsletter (45 min)

☐ Film one batch day, or bank Shorts if a filming day slipped

☐ Read last month's numbers — what got saved, which article got read to the end (30 min)

☐ Check next month's articles have their [KRISTEN:] stories filled in (15 min)

What happens in peak season, and what to drop first

From May through September this shrinks, and it should. Cut in this order:

1. TikTok first. Newest channel, no audience, nothing to lose.
2. Facebook second. It's a cross-post, not a creation.
3. The Sunday Instagram feed post — but never the weekly booking CTA.
4. Shorts drop to one a week before the long-form video slips. Six excellent videos with a thin Shorts layer is a strategy; twenty-four Shorts and no long-form is Instagram with extra steps, and you already have Instagram.

Never cut the Tuesday and Thursday Instagram reels. That's the engine of the account.

The floor is four posts a week, all Instagram, two of them reels. Below that the account goes quiet in the month it should be loudest, and quiet in September on a Yakima guiding business costs more than any skipped article ever will.

If a week goes sideways entirely, skip it and pick up the next Tuesday. One missed week is invisible. Three missed weeks is a stopped project — and a stopped project is the only way this plan actually fails.

What I Need From You

There are about 256 unanswered questions in this package. That number is horrifying and also misleading — most are one fact, answered once, reused in nine places. The real list is five sittings long, ordered by how much each is holding up. Batch 1 is the one that matters.

Batch 1 — Your rate card ⚠️

45 minutes. Do this one first.

Every page that sells something has a blank where the price goes. Exactly one price here is confirmed — $250 per month for virtual casting lessons — and even that should be re-checked, because it came from a source old enough to also list a "Sample Service."

☐ Guided trips — private (1–2 anglers), full day and half day

☐ The shared "split with a stranger" option, and walk-and-wade if it's priced apart from the boat

☐ Private education — 1 day, 2 days, 3 days

☐ Casting Camp

☐ Schools / group schools

☐ 3-day group retreats, and whether 2027 dates are set

☐ Streamer Stomp — no price and no defined shape anywhere. How long, who for, how many people?

☐ Deposit amount, and whether it's refundable

☐ Confirmation that $250/month for virtual lessons is still current

What stays stuck: all five service pages, the pricing answers on the FAQ and on your Google listing, and every email that mentions booking. That's most of the writing in this package, and it cannot go live with {{PRICE_FULL_DAY}} on it.

You don't need a pricing strategy. You need the numbers you already charge people. Write them on an envelope and photograph it.

Batch 2 — What you actually offer

60–90 minutes. Fine to split across two evenings.

Nobody drafted answers to these, on purpose. Each describes something you'd be promising a real person before they've met you, and a promise made on a website and not kept on a river is worse than never making it. These are yours to write.

☐ Accessibility. What can genuinely be adjusted — sun, heat, noise, wader and life-jacket fit, physical contact during a casting correction, breaks, ending a day early. Also what can't: a raft on moving water has real limits, and naming them is more respectful than pretending otherwise.

☐ Neurodivergent and autistic students. What you'll describe as offered versus as background. Whether there's a conversation before booking, and how someone asks for it.

☐ Women-only programs. A bookable product, or a woman-owned business with a woman instructor? Very different answers. If it's real, it deserves its own page.

☐ Weather. Who decides a day is unfishable, and what happens then — reschedule, credit, refund. Cover high water, smoke and heat closures specifically.

☐ Cancellation. What happens when the angler cancels, and when you cancel. Different answers.

☐ Gear. What you provide, what they bring, what they can rent. A general "we provide the gear" line is cleared; an itemized list can't go up until you write it.

☐ Gift certificates. What they buy, and whether they expire.

☐ Virtual lessons. Videos per month, live sessions, turnaround time, minimum commitment, how someone cancels.

What stays stuck: the FAQ page, and seven drafted answers on your Google listing that are sitting in a folder marked "do not post."

Batch 3 — Things only Nate knows

One evening. Fifteen minutes if you stay on task.

Eight facts: years fishing, years guiding, certifications, where he's from, how he teaches, one non-fishing thing, and which social handles to link.

☐ The eight questions are written out in Month Two, under Ask Nate over dinner. He talks, you type. The only rule is that "a while" is not an acceptable answer to a question that starts with "how long.

What stays stuck: Nate's bio, his page, his byline on the October caddis post — and the "roughly 40 years across the team" line, which sits in seven pieces of copy on a number nobody has verified.

Batch 4 — Two things to sign off on

20 minutes, mostly reading.

☐ The not-therapy line in the nervous-system post. It says plainly that you teach fly fishing informed by behavior analysis, that it isn't therapy or treatment, and that you're not anyone's clinician. Read the wording and change anything you don't want your name on.

☐ The fall streamer position. The first post publicly contradicts a popular belief — that fall aggression is about spawning browns — and notes the Yakima is a rainbow and cutthroat river, where that mechanism isn't operating. It's correct and defensible. It's also the kind of thing people argue about in fly shops, so you should know it's going out under your name.

What stays stuck: two of your six blog posts.

Batch 5 — Operational details

20 minutes. Needed, but nothing stops if it waits a week.

☐ Which booking system you actually use. A live Picktime page under the old business name is showing "Sample Service" and an old Gmail address — real, or abandoned?

☐ Peak season dates on the Yakima — when it genuinely turns on and when it ends. Every seasonal date in the calendar keys off this.

☐ Group retreats — does that page live under trips or under learning? Pick once; moving it twice costs you.

☐ Social accounts: do you control the YouTube channel with "Thinking like a Trout!" on it? Is there a Facebook page? TikTok, yes or no?

☐ Whether the legal registrant is Trout Psychology or Streamside Coven Co., plus a mailing address for verifying your Google listing (it stays hidden).

Straight Answers to Questions You Might Have

How long until this works?
Different parts move at different speeds. Claiming your Google listing and getting first reviews shows up in two to six weeks. Fixing your page titles so your own name appears in search results shows up within a month. Becoming the recognized authority on teaching fly fishing takes six to twelve months of publishing, and there's no way to buy speed on that. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

Do I have to do all of this?
No. Four things produce most of the result: put your business name back in your page titles, stop blocking the AI systems that would otherwise quote you, claim your Google listing, and publish the Method page. Roughly a week of work, and it's the part that compounds. The rest is amplification.

What if I only have four hours a month?
Spend it like this: one hour publishing a blog post that's already written, one hour asking recent clients for reviews, one hour posting to your Google listing (four posts in one sitting), one hour answering whatever's blocking you above. Skip the video plan and the email sequences until winter. Four consistent hours beats twelve in March and none after.

Why does the name Trout Psychology cause problems?
Because search engines and people both read "psychology" as a therapy practice — search your own name and you'll get actual psychology directories. You're not renaming the business; the name is good and it's yours. The fix is to make everything around it say "fly fishing" loudly: page titles, business categories, listing description, and an explicit line on the mental-health post saying this is instruction, not treatment. That line does double duty — it protects students and it teaches Google what you are.

Is any of this going to make me sound like a marketer?
The copy was written in your voice, from your Instagram, your interviews and your podcast appearance. If a sentence doesn't sound like you, change it — that's expected, not a problem. Nothing here is so finely tuned that rewriting a line breaks it. The only things to leave alone are page titles and the short description lines, which have character limits.

What happens if I do nothing?
Nothing catastrophic, and nothing good. You keep getting the clients Instagram sends you, which is a real business. But reels vanish in 48 hours, and the Method — the only thing you own that nobody can copy — stays in your head and in a feed nobody can search. Meanwhile Red's and Orvis keep collecting everyone who types a question into Google, because they answered it and you didn't.

Do I have to pay for anything?
Almost none of it. The Google listing, Search Console and Analytics are free, and directory listings mostly are. The costs are optional: an email platform once your list outgrows the free tier, and a photographer for proper teaching photos — the best money in the plan.

I don't have a public street address. Is that a problem?
No, and don't invent one. You register as a business that travels to customers and give Google a mailing address for verification only, which stays hidden. You'll likely verify by video rather than postcard. Mildly annoying, and it works.

Why write blog posts when AI just answers everything now?
Because those systems have to read something to answer with. Right now your site tells them not to bother — a file blocks them, on by default, which nobody chose. Unblock it, publish real explanations, and you become the thing being quoted. That's the whole play.

What if I set a price and then change it?
Change it. Prices live on a handful of pages and take ten minutes to update. Waiting until you're certain costs more than being wrong for a season.

Plain-English Glossary

AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI summaries. They answer directly instead of listing links, and they quote sources. Being quotable is the goal.

Alt text — a short description attached to an image, read aloud to blind visitors and used by search engines. "Kristen demonstrating a roll cast," not "IMG_4021."

Anchor text — the visible words of a link. "Fly fishing lessons in Cle Elum" tells search engines what's on the other end. "Click here" tells them nothing.

Backlink — a link to your site from someone else's, treated as a vote of confidence. One from a fishing magazine counts far more than one from a random directory.

Call to action (CTA) — the line telling a reader what to do next. "Book a fall streamer day."

Citation (directory listing) — your name, phone and city listed on a site like Yelp or a fishing directory. They matter mostly for consistency: identical details everywhere.

Click-through rate (CTR) — of the people who saw your page in search results, the share who clicked it. A weak headline shows up here as a low number.

Crawler (bot) — an automated program that reads web pages, from Google or an AI company. If it can't reach your page, that page effectively doesn't exist to them.

E-E-A-T — Google's shorthand for what it wants in content: real experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness. A named author with a real degree scores well here.

Entity — a specific person, place or organization that search engines recognize as a distinct thing. Your problem is that "Trout Psychology" isn't yet a recognized fishing entity.

Funnel — the path from stranger to customer: read a post, join a list, book a trip. Useful mainly as a way of asking "what's this reader's next step?"

Google Analytics (GA4) — the free tool that shows how many people visited, where they came from, and what they did. Answers "is this working."

Google Business Profile — the free listing that puts you on Google Maps and in the box of local businesses above search results. Yours is unclaimed.

Google Search Console — the free tool showing which searches brought people to your site, and flagging pages Google can't read. Analytics is about visitors; this is about search.

Impressions — how many times your page appeared in search results, clicked or not.

Indexing — Google storing a copy of your page so it can appear in results. A page that isn't indexed cannot rank, no matter how good it is.

Internal link — a link from one of your pages to another. Sends readers somewhere useful and tells Google which pages matter most.

JSON-LD — the format those labels are written in: a small block of code pasted into a page. You'll never write one by hand; they're done for you.

Keyword — the words someone actually types into a search box. "Yakima river fly fishing guide" is a keyword; it's what you write toward.

Landing page — a page built for people arriving from somewhere specific, with one clear next step and nothing competing for attention.

Lead magnet — something useful given away in exchange for an email address. A river journaling worksheet, for example.

Local pack — the map with three businesses at the top of local searches. Getting in requires a claimed Google listing and reviews.

Meta description — the two-line summary under your page's title in search results. Doesn't affect ranking; strongly affects whether anyone clicks.

NAP — name, address, phone. The rule is simply that they read identically everywhere they appear.

Redirect — an instruction that sends anyone visiting an old web address to the new one. Needed whenever a page's address changes, so links and rankings survive.

Robots.txt — a small file telling automated readers which parts of your site they may read. Yours currently blocks the AI systems, by default, which works directly against everything here.

Schema / structured data — labels added to a page spelling out what things are: this is a price, this is a business, this is a person. It's how a page becomes readable by machines, not just people.

Search intent — what someone actually wants when they search. "How do trout see color" wants an explanation; "fly fishing guide Cle Elum" wants to book. Match the page to the want.

Service-area business (SAB) — a business that travels to customers rather than receiving them at a shop. Google has a setting for this; it lets you list a service area and keep your address private.

Sitemap — a list of your pages given to Google so it knows what exists. Squarespace makes one automatically.

Slug — the readable part of a web address after the domain. In troutpsychology.com/method, the slug is method.

Title tag — the clickable headline of your page in search results, and the browser tab text. Yours currently say "SCco.", which is why your name is missing from your own search results.

Where Everything Lives

Twenty-nine files is a lot to open at random. Find what you're trying to do instead.

Code should always be copied from Copy-Paste Pack.txt, never from a formatted page. Formatting quietly turns straight quotes into curly ones, and curly quotes break code silently.