Lockhart Literacy: Positioning a Literacy Expert for Search

Kim Lockhart taught reading for 20 years in a Kingston classroom, much of it in French Immersion and Special Education. She has a Queen’s M.Ed., Orton-Gillingham training, and more than 20 podcast and webinar appearances, and school boards across Canada book her for workshops and keynotes. Her website was a Google Sites page with a headshot and a Gmail address.

I started with search, before any design. I ran the terms a school board PD lead, a conference organizer, and a worried parent would actually type, then mapped who ranked for each one. The results were advocacy groups, universities, curriculum sellers, and US providers. Not one individual Canadian literacy consultant ranked for a commercial keyword.

That gap set the positioning. Most Science of Reading material assumes English-only instruction, and Kim’s whole career is second-language classrooms. So every page carries that angle: the Science of Reading and structured literacy, in English and in French. I built the keyword map in four clusters (school boards and educators, parents, branded searches, and the French Immersion terms nobody else is targeting) and gave each page its own set. Then wrote the copy against it, so every title, heading, meta description, and opening paragraph carries the terms that page is meant to rank for. Then titled and wrote alt text for every photo on the site.

I built it on Wix Studio with native tools only, so Kim can run it herself. Five pages are live (Home, About, Services, Media, Contact), with a book page built and waiting for her second book. Then I wrote her a nine-page quick-start guide and recorded six narrated, captioned walkthroughs, covering everything from changing a sentence to swapping a photo to renewing her plan. The site and domain are moving into her own account.