If you are selling camp, I’m going to consider that you are a camp marketing officer (CMO). Here are a couple of pressing things you might have heard about recently.
Let us dive right in.
You can watch the podcast where I talk about the impact of ChatGPT on SEO for summer camps
Will ChatGPT affect the SEO game?
First of all, the new thing is ChatGPT, and the old thing being disrupted is SEO, which people often ask me about.
You do not need to worry about how ChatGPT is going to change your world, at least not yet, but you should learn how to use it.
The 2 things you need to know are
- How other big players are using it. Bankrate for example
- What Google as the big dog that kind of governs all things SEO has to say about it.
I will then show you what you should do next.
Bankrate is a banking content provider that connects and sells other banking financial instruments, so getting free traffic through SEO is very important to them, so they are really good at it. They have garnered a lot of attention and achieved really high rankings because, instead of putting a byline where their authors would typically be, they say that Bankrate wrote it. Bankrate also explains that this is because ChatGPT, an AI technology, generated it for the first time. They also praise Angelica for serving as the editor and Kate for reviewing it. So they are saying, “This is maybe 50% to 75% first in an AI builder, but then we had significant human capital deploy this.”
This is a little bit scary for the people who are trying to produce content. If you have been struggling to produce a monthly blog for the last four years, this is why you might not be ranking for the things that you want.
What does Google feel about robots?
Google says this is how we’re going to treat AI builders: that you’re going to go through the same filter as our E-E-A-T. This is their kind of filter for who gets the SEO criteria. If you have experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, you will rank.
If you don’t have those things and you pay a thousand people to write fake, bad, and weird reviews and comments for you, or if you use an AI to get those thousand fake reviews, they’re going to penalize you. This is a big thing that Google’s liaison for a search engine is all over Twitter saying: “It doesn’t matter if you use it like this. Show us that you’re a human, that your content is written for humans, and that a human curated it.” And you have the E.E.A.T.; it’s a huge problem. And it’s that you’re never going to beat Bankrate for those things.
What can you do with ChatGPT for SEO?
What you can do now is what my friend Audrey Monkey’s been doing with Sunshine Parenting and for her camp. Gold Arrow Camp is past all these ads on a search for “Why summer camp is great for kids to get off screens.” You’ll find Google has curated some of Audrey’s content from Gold Arrow Camp’s site, and they’re spinning that up as the answer.
Then she’s given that free link. And then she’s also got this from her consulting and book publisher deals. So how you can use this chat and AI content to kind of perform and play the SEO game is going to be very different now. So it’s not going to be the way it was, where you can keyword stuff, and it has been like that for a long time, but it’s not going to totally destroy the world.
And what I wanted to finish with is that it’s still a below-the-fold game. So any chat, any search that includes summer camp for and and January in kind of lead season, January to open season for most short session camps, you’re still going to experience a ton of ads that are generic for your, your search, and camp-related.
Some are going to be specifically competitors, some are going to be related, and some are going to be extensions.
