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Marketing Intern

Fresh Water Systems · Aug 2018 – Apr 2019 · Mauldin, SC

InternshipSEOContent StrategyKeyword ResearchVideo ContentProduct DescriptionsE-commerce

Highlights

  • Was the warehouse point of contact for a sitewide product photography refresh, which led to the internship offer.
  • Became the company's first in-house SEO on day one of the internship and taught myself from scratch.
  • Built a content program from filmed interviews with the in-house certified water expert: YouTube videos, transcribed into blog posts targeting top-of-funnel search demand.
  • Wrote product descriptions for the e-commerce store.

From the warehouse floor

I started at Fresh Water Systems in the warehouse, picking and packing orders. Fresh Water Systems sells water filtration products online: reverse osmosis systems, filters, pipe fittings, and the rest. Every day I walked those aisles and handled the products the company sold, so I knew where everything was and what it was for.

The summer before I left for college, a new marketing director came out to the warehouse with a project. The website was getting a refresh, and every product needed new photos. The company bought mobile photography stations: light boxes on wheeled carts with cameras, computers, and a generator. We’d work through the aisles with a list of products, shoot each one in the light box, edit the photos, and hand them to the web team.

The director asked me to be the project’s point of contact, since I knew the warehouse. I did it well enough that the web team had good things to say about my work. When I mentioned I was heading to Charleston Southern to study communications, he asked if I’d like an internship the next summer.

“I want you to be our SEO guy”

I came home to Greenville in the summer of 2018 and started the internship. On the first day, the director sat me down and said, “I want you to be our SEO guy.” Nobody in-house did SEO.

He gave me Moz’s SEO training articles to start with, and I went from there: reading, watching YouTube, and learning how search engines actually decide what shows up on a results page. I was hooked.

Turning research into a content program

What I learned pointed to a clear gap: we needed content that captured search demand at the top of the funnel and led people to our product pages. So I built a process around our in-house certified water expert:

  1. Keyword research to find the questions people were searching about products like reverse osmosis filters.
  2. Filmed interviews with the water expert, asking him those exact questions and having him explain what each product is and how it works.
  3. YouTube and the website: the videos were published on both.
  4. Blog posts from transcripts: we transcribed each interview, wrote a blog post from it, and embedded the video at the top.

I also wrote product descriptions for the store’s product pages.

It was 2018, and I was learning content strategy for SEO by doing it. That internship gave me a skill I kept building through college, and it’s a big part of how I landed my first job after graduation.