About
Our Story
Born from the storm of the Global Financial Crisis
Just a few months before the Global Financial Crisis of 2008—the worst world economic downturn since the Great Depression—our Founder, Meri Harli founded an SEO copywriting startup out of her bedroom in Melbourne, Australia.
Luckily, despite the bleak economic landscape, businesses still needed marketing.
So Meri got to work. She built a website, optimized it with every white-hat SEO tactic she had learned working in Australia’s biggest telco, Telstra, and within a few weeks it was ranking at the top of Google’s Page One for my targeted keyword; “SEO copywriter Melbourne”.
And then the phone started ringing and the leads started trickling in. Just a few at first but then within a few months, she had several clients on monthly retainers.
As clients asked for a wider variety of services, Meri hired a small but highly adaptable team to help with the workload as they rapidly expanded to include more digital marketing channels such as Google Ads (pay-per-click), email marketing, social media management, content marketing, and of course all things SEO.
In 2011, Meri launched Fat Cake Media, her first agency brand to offer full-service, multi-channel digital marketing.
She was also invited to be a guest lecturer at RMIT University teaching SEO copywriting to Communications students.
After a few years of running a profitable agency, in 2014, she packed up her office, little brown Burmese cat, sold most of her possessions, and flew to San Francisco to establish Fat Cake, Inc., a California-based company.
Fast-forward to 2023 and Seattle
Today, with 17+ years of in-depth digital marketing experience, Meri has seen her fair share of Google’s core algorithm updates, so she has a pretty good idea of what works to win the long game. “And honestly, I never thought that in 2023, organic search would—still—be the most valuable digital marketing channel for most businesses, but here we are!”
As we now move out of the pandemic era and into the ‘new normal’, Meri relocated the business to Seattle on the shores of the great Puget Sound. Reach out to us to set up a coffee date, we love getting out of the house and meeting in person!
Want to know more? The first 30-minutes are free, so let’s talk!
