Client Profile

Contents

Prepared: August 27, 2026
Engagement: Local Marketing Playbook — Phases 1 & 2
Primary goal: Brand authority — establish the Trout Psychology Method as the recognized standard in fly fishing education

⚠️ Fields marked [CONFIRM] are inferred from public sources and must be verified with Kristen before deliverables ship.

BUSINESS PROFILE

Founder background

• B.S. in Behavior Analysis; discovered the field "by chance at a college party"
• Grew up outside Detroit; now based in central Washington
• 25 years angling experience; 20 years water-based instruction
• Roughly a decade teaching students on the autism spectrum
• Team collectively: ~40 years fishing knowledge
• Specializes in streamer fishing
• Public voice on mental health and the outdoors; advocate for women in fly fishing
• Featured: The Fly Fish Journal (Side Channels), The Lost Meander Podcast (July 2025)

Second instructor

• Nate Tamarack — "Instructor / Hype Man / Quirky Nature Nerd"; specializes in dry flies; runs a hard boat; affiliated with Streamside Coven Co.

THE METHOD (core IP — the authority asset)

Behavioral science applied to both the angler and the trout.

Defining principles, in the brand's own words:
- "Trout are organisms that follow the same laws of learning" — environment shapes trout behavior, so anglers can build evidence-based on-water strategy
- "You learn best when you're laughing" — joy, laughter, fun and human connection drive learning
- "Think like a trout" — the fundamental skill being taught

Instructional mechanics:
- Complex skills decomposed into components, taught with positive reinforcement, chained progressively to mastery (task analysis + shaping — classic ABA)
- Students learn the reasoning, not just the mechanics
- 100% river-based instruction for most offerings
- Portable streamside teaching materials: workbooks, whiteboards, flowcharts
- River journaling to build observational skill
- Custom curricula, not standardized lesson plans
- Max 3:1 student-to-instructor ratio
- Strategy blueprints that let students problem-solve independently

Strategic note: This is a genuinely defensible differentiator. No competitor in fly fishing education is running credentialed behavior-analytic pedagogy. Everything in the authority track should ladder to it.

SERVICES

Seasonality: Yakima River fishing peaks spring through fall; winter = virtual lessons, content, and next-season booking. [CONFIRM specific peaks]

CURRENT DIGITAL PRESENCE

Critical technical findings (preliminary — full detail in SEO audit)

1. Brand-name collision in title tags. Multiple pages render as "… — SCco." or carry a doubled suffix ("… | Trout Psychology — Trout Psychology"). Legacy Streamside Coven Co. branding is still in the site title field.
2. Domain-name ambiguity. "Trout Psychology" reads as a mental-health practice to both humans and search engines. Search results for the brand surface actual psychology directories. Entity disambiguation is a real SEO task here.
3. No published street address, which blocks local pack eligibility and citation building.
4. No blog / no content engine, which is the primary vehicle for the stated authority goal.
5. ~~Pages are aggressively rate-limiting crawlers (repeated HTTP 429).~~ Disproved — see ADDENDUM. Verified not to affect Googlebot (Aug 27, 2026). Confirm once via Search Console → Settings → Crawl stats; no longer a gating issue.

COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

Local / regional (Yakima River guiding):
- Red's Fly Shop (redsflyfishing.com) — dominant Yakima operator, large content library
- Troutwater Fly Shop (Ellensburg)
- Worley Bugger Fly Co. / The Evening Hatch [CONFIRM relevance]

National (fly fishing education & casting authority):
- Orvis Fly Fishing Learning Center — the incumbent "how to learn" authority
- Trouts Fly Fishing, Gink & Gasoline, Mac Brown Fly Fish, Kelly Galloup (streamer authority)

Differentiators to press:
- Only credentialed behavior-analysis-based fly fishing pedagogy
- Named, ownable method with its own vocabulary
- 3:1 ratio, custom curriculum, river-based
- Woman-owned; "unconventional, irreverent, revolutionary"
- Neurodiversity-informed teaching experience — a real and underserved audience

GOALS & BUDGET

• Primary goal: Brand authority — make the Trout Psychology Method the recognized approach
• Supporting goals: fill guide trips; scale the $250/mo virtual lesson subscription
• Budget: [CONFIRM]
• Timeline: [CONFIRM]
• Past marketing experience / concerns: [CONFIRM]

STRATEGIC POSITION (one paragraph)

Trout Psychology's growth constraint is not traffic volume — it's that the single most valuable asset the business owns, the Method, exists almost entirely inside Kristen's head and inside Instagram reels that disappear from the feed in 48 hours. There is no durable, indexable, citable home for it. The authority play is therefore to move the Method off the feed and onto owned, structured, schema-marked pages that Google, AI answer engines, and prospective students can all find, quote, and link to — while cleaning up the brand-entity confusion (SCco. vs. Trout Psychology vs. actual psychology practices) that currently splits the signal.

ADDENDUM — Verified corrections (added after Phase 1 audits)

These supersede any conflicting statement above. All verified by direct inspection Aug 27, 2026.

Revised #1 priority

Not the 429. It is the entity signal: the only machine-readable identity on the site names the wrong company, the title tags name the wrong company, and the AI crawlers that would otherwise carry the Method into answer engines are blocked at robots.txt. Fix those three and everything downstream compounds.