Dollar General

I own the top-level and faceted category pages — the highest-intent pages in the catalog. Keyword research runs through Conductor: one best-fit primary term per page, chosen against real SERP competition rather than volume alone.

The template is consistent by design. An opening paragraph that states what the category is and who it's for, middle paragraphs that route the reader into subcategories through in-line links, a closing paragraph that restates the value, and an FAQ block written to capture featured snippets. Every underlined phrase in the samples is a deep link — that's how authority flows down the tree instead of pooling at the top.

The discipline is holding a keyword target, a house style guide, and a page template at once and still sounding like a person. Dollar General's voice has to stay plain. Any sentence a customer wouldn't say out loud is wrong for this brand, no matter how well it ranks.

Headlines, section headers, on-graphic text, and short descriptions for the homepage and category landing pages — the copy that has to land in under a second while a customer is scrolling past on a phone.

This is where Dollar General's voice is most itself. Get together. Spend less. is four words carrying the entire brand promise, and it works because it doesn't try to be clever about value — it just says the thing. The house rule I hold on these: "for less" earns its place once per page. Repeat it and it stops meaning anything.

All of it is written against live design. I take frame-level Figma files and write to the actual space the layout gives me, so the copy fits without the designer reflowing anything.

Weekly paid ads copy across every text channel. High volume, tight character limits, and the requirement that a headline still reads as Dollar General and not as generic retail filler.

Ad copy is the purest version of the job: a handful of characters, a fixed offer you didn't set, and a measurable outcome. There's nowhere to hide a weak line.

UX copy for the DG Rewards program inside the mobile app — the labels, states, confirmations, and error messages a customer reads while trying to redeem something.

Different discipline from marketing copy, and worth calling out separately. Nobody reads UX copy for pleasure; they read it when they're confused or in a hurry. Success is that they never notice it. That means writing to a component, matching the design system's tone, and covering the empty, loading, and error states that marketing writers usually never touch.

Dollar General's year runs on a merchandising calendar — back to school, harvest, Halloween, holiday, spring cleaning. Each is a coordinated push across category pages, landing pages, ads, and email, with a hard go-live date set months in advance.

The rule I hold on these: seasonal headers have to match the actual go-live date, not the date I'm writing. It sounds trivial until a Halloween header is still live on November 3rd across two hundred pages.

Tone shifts by season and the shift has to be deliberate. Halloween gets to be playful — spook-tacular, frighteningly unforgettable — because the category invites it. Back to school doesn't; a parent buying supplies in August wants to know what's cheap and what's in stock.