About

You'll always talk to the person doing the work.

I'm Keith Boutwell. Most people call me Coach. Hudson South is a small team of people I've worked with for years, built so that nobody hands your questions to an account manager who forwards them to someone you never meet.

Start with a look at your market Meet the team

The name

I'm from Hudson, Massachusetts. I moved south.

I grew up in Hudson, about thirty miles west of Boston. At twenty-three I moved to the Raleigh area, and I never moved back. That's the whole story behind the name. It isn't a metaphor and it doesn't stand for anything clever.

I mention it because a lot of companies in this business are named after a concept somebody workshopped. This one is named after where I'm from and where I ended up. If we work together you'll hear a fair amount of the first one in how I talk.

The work

Twenty-five years of getting people found. The rules just changed.

I've spent my career in search. Most of it was the version everyone knows: rankings, links, the ten blue results, and the long argument about which of them mattered this year. I got good at it, and for a long time being on page one was the whole job.

Then the job changed. More people skip the scroll now and just ask a question, then take the answer they get. There's no page two in an AI answer. There are usually only a handful of names, and either yours is among them or it isn't.

Everything I learned about ranking still helps. It just stopped being the finish line.

That's what Hudson South does now. We work out which questions your buyers actually ask, we find what you know that nobody has written down, and we build content that answers those questions clearly enough and specifically enough that an assistant has a reason to name you. I still touch every engagement, and I'm not the only person who does the work.

25+

Years in digital marketing and search, most of it before any of this had an acronym.

15+

Years coaching football and basketball, which is where the name people call me came from.

Business per trade, per market. When we take you on, your competitor doesn't get this.

Why people call me Coach

Fifteen years on a sideline teaches you something about this work.

I coached football and basketball for more than fifteen years, including a state championship in 2019. The name stuck, and I've stopped fighting it.

Coaching is mostly not the part people imagine. It isn't the speech. It's watching how somebody already does a thing, figuring out what they're good at that they haven't noticed, and building around that instead of making them into someone else.

That's the same job. You already know things your competitors don't. Most of it has never made it onto your website.

It's also why Hudson Twenty-One exists. Nobody wants content that sounds like it came from a machine, and nobody wants to be rewritten into a version of themselves they don't recognize. So we measure how you actually communicate, write it down, and everyone here builds from that same profile. You sound like you, at a volume you couldn't produce on your own.

The team

The people you would work with.

Director of Design

Jenaye Merida

Jenaye designs and builds what Hudson South publishes. She's been the design side of this work for years, and she runs her own studio, Merida Creative, alongside it.

She came to design from publishing. Ten years across publicity, marketing, and literary representation, starting at Lifeway as a publicist and marketing strategist, then K-LOVE Books and WTA Media as a literary agent and marketing manager. The job in all of them was the same: help someone work out what they actually have to say, then build the thing that gets people to hear it.

That background matters more here than it looks like it should. A page that gets quoted has to be structured properly, not just look right, and most designers were never asked to think about the difference. Jenaye was doing a version of it a decade before anyone called it AI search.

She's a Squarespace Circle member and has built close to fifty custom sites. Her client work runs from recording artists and nationally known authors to nonprofits, law firms, and financial practices.

Paid Media Strategist

Jana Abadiano

Jana runs paid advertising for Hudson South clients across Google, Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn, and ChatGPT. She also builds retargeting campaigns that bring past visitors back, and adds other paid channels when a campaign calls for them. Her work covers campaign planning, ad creative and copywriting, audience testing, and ongoing optimization, with a focus on lead generation and clear, transparent reporting.

Her background spans search marketing and paid social, including work with agencies serving U.S. businesses across e-commerce, local services, education, and wellness. Having worked on both sides, she sees how a search ad, a social ad, and a retargeting sequence fit together, and how each one connects to the rest of a company's marketing.

She takes a hands-on approach to every account: testing the message, tracking performance by channel, and shifting budget toward what the results support. About our paid media work

Video Producer · Director · Motion Designer

Jeremy Bales

Jeremy Bales is a video producer and creative director who turns complex ideas into clear, memorable visual stories. Through his independent creative studio, Jeremy works with businesses, organizations, and agencies to produce professional video content that educates audiences, builds trust, and communicates expertise.

His work spans brand storytelling, educational content, interviews, promotional videos, and motion graphics. Combining creative strategy with hands-on production and post-production experience, Jeremy manages projects from initial concept and scripting through editing, animation, and final delivery.

With a focus on making specialized subjects accessible and engaging, Jeremy helps organizations communicate what they do, why it matters, and what sets them apart.

At Hudson South, Jeremy brings that experience to clients who have valuable knowledge to share but need help turning it into video. He connects video production with each client's broader content strategy, turning customer questions, service explanations, and real stories into content for websites, social media, advertising, and client education. His involvement gives clients creative direction and hands-on production support, with a clear purpose behind each video: helping the right audience understand their business and take the next step. About our video production

How we work

A few things worth knowing before you call.

We'll tell you if it isn't worth doing. Some businesses don't need this yet, and some markets are already well covered by somebody doing it properly. You'll hear that on the first call rather than three months in.
We don't take competitors. One business per trade in each market, for as long as we're working together. It costs us money and it's the right way to do it.
Everything is written down. Your Twenty-One profile, the research, the claims and where each one came from. If we stop working together you keep all of it, and none of it lives only in somebody's head.
Clients bring us more than content. Intake, marketing systems, AI workflow, sometimes sitting in the marketing leadership seat for a while. We take those on where there's a clear business case and say so when there isn't.
Most of our work comes from referrals. That has been true for twenty-five years, and it shapes how we run things. I'd rather have twelve clients who recommend us without being asked than twelve hundred people who know the name.

Free competitor analysis

Start with a look at your market.

Thirty minutes, no cost, and nothing to buy at the end of it. We build a full competitive analysis for your market and go through it with you on screen.

Check your market Book the call directly