How to Get Your Camp on the First Page of Google

How camp SEO can improve Google rankings, strengthen their presence in ChatGPT and AI search, optimize priority pages and Google Business Profiles, and turn organic visibility into more registrations and retreat inquiries.

You can have a beautiful property, an incredible staff, life-changing programs, happy campers, and amazing retreats. But imagine a mom sitting down tonight and Googling “best summer camp near me.” Or picture a church leader looking for the right place to hold an upcoming retreat.

If your camp doesn’t show up, do they even know you exist?

That was the problem Mark put on the table at the beginning of this episode of the Grow Your Camp Podcast. For camps, having an experience worth sharing is only part of the equation. Families, churches, and retreat planners still have to be able to find you.

And for a lot of camp leaders, that brings us into a subject we know is important but may not completely understand: SEO, or search engine optimization.

SEO can quickly start to feel like a mysterious black box. Someone starts talking about keywords, backlinks, algorithms, metadata, domain authority, and technical website issues, and before long it can seem like you need to become an expert just to understand the conversation.

But SEO matters too much to ignore. As Carl shared in the episode, more than half of the website traffic for many camps comes from organic search. For some of the camps the team works with, that number can reach 80% or more. If that much of your website traffic begins with a search, where and how your camp appears online has a direct connection to your ability to grow.

There is another reason this conversation matters right now: search itself is changing.

Parents and retreat planners aren’t only turning to Google anymore. They may ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or another AI tool where to send their child to camp or where to hold a church retreat. That means the question for camp leaders is becoming bigger than, “How do we get onto the first page of Google?”

As Mark put it:

“How do I make sure the internet knows enough about my camp to recommend me?”

To help answer that question, Mark and Carl were joined by Scott Rehnberg, Senior SEO Specialist at Improve & Grow. Scott has worked extensively on SEO for camps and retreat centers, and throughout the conversation he brought the subject back to a surprisingly simple idea: good SEO is largely about making it easy for people—and therefore search engines—to understand what you do.

Before getting into that conversation, though, Carl offered camp leaders a practical way to find out where they stand right now.

Quick Camp Marketing Tip: Google Your Camp Like a Guest Would

Carl’s quick camp marketing tip doesn’t require an SEO platform, an analytics dashboard, or any technical expertise. It starts with five minutes and an internet browser.

Google your camp like a guest would.

The important part is to stop searching like someone who already knows everything about your organization. Camp leaders know their terminology, programs, website, location, and brand. The people they need to reach often don’t. The point of this exercise is to temporarily put yourself in the position of a parent or retreat planner and see what they see.

Carl recommended opening an incognito or private browsing window so that your previous browsing history has less influence on the results. Then perform three searches, each designed to reveal something different about your camp’s online visibility.

Start With Your Camp’s Name

The first search is the easiest: type your camp’s exact name into Google.

Imagine you’re a parent who heard about the camp from another family. You’re already interested, but now you’re checking it out. What does Google tell you?

Ideally, your camp should have a strong presence throughout those results. Your website should be prominent, your Google Business Profile should appear with accurate information and reviews, and you may see social profiles, directories, and other relevant pages about the camp.

During the episode, Carl pulled up Refreshing Mountain as an example. Its branded search produced a substantial collection of information about the organization rather than one website result surrounded by unrelated content.

That’s worth paying attention to because your branded results help communicate how established your camp appears online. If Google can find your website and perhaps a Facebook page, but then quickly runs out of relevant information and begins filling the results with other organizations, that’s a clue that your broader online presence may need attention.

The solution isn’t to find some secret SEO trick. It’s to strengthen the properties you can control. Keep profiles current, make sure they clearly identify your camp, connect them back to your website, and give both prospective guests and search engines consistent information about who you are.

Now Search Without Using Your Camp’s Name

The second search changes the situation completely. Instead of pretending to be someone who already knows your camp, become a parent who has never heard of you.

Search something like “Christian summer camps near me,” “summer camps near me,” or a similar phrase using the city or region your camp serves.

Now look at the results. Does your camp appear in the Map Pack? Where does it show up among the regular website results? More importantly, which camps are getting the visibility you aren’t getting?

Carl encouraged camp leaders to treat those competitors as useful information. Look at the camps that rank well. Do they have a significant number of Google reviews? Are those reviews strong? When you visit their websites, is it immediately obvious that they offer summer camp?

This search reveals something the branded search can’t. The parent in the first example already knew you existed. This parent doesn’t. Your camp has to earn the opportunity to be discovered.

If you’re not appearing where you would expect, take a hard look at the page on your website dedicated to summer camp. Does it clearly communicate what you offer, who it’s for, and where you’re located? Does it use the same straightforward language a parent would naturally use when looking for a camp?

The goal isn’t to cram a search phrase onto a page as many times as possible. It’s to make sure the page clearly answers the question the parent is asking.

Then Search Like a Retreat Planner

For camps that host guest groups, Carl’s third search was some version of “retreat centers near me” or “Christian retreat centers near me.”

This time, you’re no longer a parent searching for summer camp. You’re a pastor, youth leader, men’s ministry leader, or another retreat planner trying to find a place for your group.

Again, look at the Map Pack and the regular search results, but don’t limit your attention to competing camps. You may discover that some of the strongest results aren’t retreat centers at all.

Carl demonstrated this using Refreshing Mountain. For the search he performed, Refreshing Mountain appeared prominently in the Map Pack, but one of the highest-ranking regular results was a local tourism website with a page about retreat venues in Lancaster. Another prominent result came from Yelp.

A couple of years earlier, the team had noticed that the local tourism page was already earning strong visibility for this type of search. Rather than treating that page simply as competition, they helped Refreshing Mountain get listed on it. Now someone who clicks the tourism result still has an opportunity to discover Refreshing Mountain.

That’s an important shift in how to think about search visibility. You don’t necessarily have to own every result yourself. Sometimes the best opportunity is to make sure your camp is represented on the directories, tourism websites, and other resources that Google already considers useful.

The same principle is becoming increasingly relevant in AI search.

Ask ChatGPT the Same Kind of Question

As a bonus, Carl suggested taking the exercise beyond Google. Open ChatGPT or another AI tool and ask the question the way an actual retreat planner might ask it.

Instead of typing a short phrase like “retreat centers near me,” someone might ask, “What are the best Christian retreat centers near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that could host a group of 40 to 50 men for a men’s retreat?”

Then look at what happens.

Which organizations get recommended? What information is included about them? Which camps seem to be missing? What do the organizations appearing ahead of yours have that you don’t?

You can even keep the conversation going. Ask why a particular camp was recommended. Ask why another wasn’t. The answers aren’t necessarily a definitive SEO audit, but they can give you useful clues about the information and online sources influencing what the AI knows about those organizations.

“Put yourself in the shoes of a parent or a retreat planner and start doing some searches today.”

The point of Carl’s exercise isn’t simply to find out whether you’re number one. It’s to get beyond the vague feeling that you “probably should do something about SEO” and see how your camp is actually represented when someone goes looking for what you provide.

That leads naturally into the bigger question Scott helped unpack during the rest of the episode: once you see where you stand, what can you actually do about it?

Scott’s Camp Story: The Memories That Stick

Before talking about search engines, rankings, or websites, Mark asked Scott a more personal question: What was his camp story?

Camp had been part of Scott’s life long before he started helping camps get found online. As a kid, he attended youth camps through his church and went to summer camp with his family. But when he thought about the experiences that had stayed with him, his mind kept returning to annual family trips to Camp of the Woods in the Adirondack Mountains.

There were counselors, events, activities, and all the things you might expect to remember from camp. But one of Scott’s most vivid memories involved something considerably less structured.

His dad liked to load the family into the car at night and drive around to local dumpsters. They would pull up, turn off all the lights, sit in the darkness for a moment, and then switch the lights back on to see bears gathered around the dumpsters.

Carl naturally had a follow-up question: Had Scott continued this tradition with his own kids?

Not exactly. But Scott laughed that his dad had a tendency toward adventures like that, and some of that spirit has carried into the next generation. The details make the story memorable, but they weren’t really Scott’s point. What stayed with him was the time together.

Those camp trips took the family away from their normal routines. His parents could hear a speaker while the kids were off doing activities, and then they would come back together. Years later, Scott could still remember the feeling of that uninterrupted family time.

Now he’s watching camp and retreats become part of his own children’s stories. His daughter attends winter retreats with their church, and his son is approaching the age when he’ll begin having those experiences too. Scott gets to hear the stories when they come home and watch them build memories of their own.

Mark connected Scott’s story to what he sees as one of the core purposes of Christian camp: creating space where people can connect with God and with each other in the beauty of creation. Scott’s story happened to include bears at dumpsters, but underneath it was exactly that kind of connection.

And that’s part of why a conversation about SEO is ultimately about much more than search rankings. Camps work hard to create experiences that can stay with people for decades. Helping families and groups find those experiences in the first place is what gives them the opportunity to become part of the story.

Making Camp SEO Simple

With Scott’s camp story on the table, Mark moved into the question many camp leaders probably want answered first.

What exactly is SEO, and why should a camp director care?

SEO Isn’t a Trick—It’s About Being Clear

Scott’s answer stripped away much of the mystery.

At its simplest, search engine optimization is about making your website and your broader presence in search easy to understand, so that the right people can find you when they’re looking for what you offer.

“It’s not a trick.”

That distinction matters. SEO doesn’t begin with tricking Google, stuffing a page with keywords, or discovering a loophole in an algorithm. It begins with understanding what a parent, church leader, or retreat planner needs to know and making that information easy to find and digest.

Scott used the example of someone planning a winter church retreat. That person might begin with a broad search for retreat locations within a few hours of home. Once they find a few possibilities, the questions become more specific. Does this place host youth retreats? Is food available? What accommodations are offered? How much will it cost? Is the facility a good fit for this particular group?

The camp that clearly answers those questions is helping the prospective guest move toward a decision. At the same time, it is giving Google clearer information about what the organization offers and which searches its pages might be useful for.

“If people can understand it, Google’s more likely to understand it.”

There are technical components to SEO, and Scott acknowledged that some issues require someone who understands how websites are crawled and indexed. But for a camp leader trying to understand the basic idea, the starting point is much more accessible: provide clear information that answers the questions your prospective guests are already asking.

Think of Google Like a Library

Carl added an analogy that makes the concept even easier to picture.

Think about walking into a library because you want to learn about Abraham Lincoln. The library doesn’t contain every book that has ever been written about Lincoln. It has a collection of resources that have been selected and organized so the librarian can point you toward useful information.

Google has a similar problem at a vastly larger scale. When someone searches for a summer camp or retreat center, there are countless possible pages it could display. Its job is to surface the resources it believes will be most useful for that particular search.

Simply having a website, then, isn’t enough. Your website needs to give Google good reasons to understand that your page is relevant to the question being asked. If a parent is looking for summer camp, your site should contain clear, useful information about summer camp. If a church leader is looking for a place to hold a retreat, your site needs to make it obvious that you host guest groups and answer the questions that planner is likely to have.

The analogy also points toward something that became increasingly important as the conversation continued. Your own website is not the only source the internet can use to understand who you are.

And that’s where the conversation turned from traditional Google SEO to ChatGPT and AI search.

How Do You Get ChatGPT to Recommend Your Camp?

Once Scott had simplified the basic idea behind SEO, Mark moved the conversation into newer territory. Google is still enormously important, but it isn’t the only place people are searching anymore. Parents and retreat planners are increasingly asking ChatGPT and other AI tools for recommendations.

So how do you get ChatGPT to recommend your camp?

Scott started with an important expectation: there isn’t a form you can fill out to guarantee that your camp appears. There isn’t a switch on your website that turns on ChatGPT visibility, and you can’t completely control whether an AI tool recommends you.

What you can do is influence the information those systems have available to work with.

One of the simplest ways to begin is to do exactly what Carl recommended during the quick marketing tip. Ask ChatGPT for recommendations that would be relevant to your camp, then pay attention not only to which organizations appear but also to where the information about those organizations seems to be coming from.

Sometimes that information may come directly from a camp’s website. But Scott has also seen AI tools rely on directories and other third-party sources. A retreat directory, tourism website, industry organization, or similar resource may help establish what your camp is, where it’s located, and what it offers.

If you have control over a listing on one of those sites, make sure it’s complete. Add accurate information, useful images, appropriate links, and the correct address. The same principle applies to your Google Business Profile. Across all of those places, you want the internet to encounter consistent signals about who you are and what you provide.

“Sometimes the off-site things you do can give a lot of credibility to your website.”

Carl compared this to getting the word out about a business before the digital world existed. If you wanted people in the community to know about you, you wouldn’t put up one sign and assume the job was done. You might advertise in several places, develop relationships, earn word-of-mouth recommendations, and give people multiple opportunities to encounter your name.

Your website is a little like your most important billboard. But, as Carl put it, one billboard in the middle of the woods isn’t enough to make everyone within a three-hour radius aware of your camp.

That same principle can help camp leaders think about AI search. You want a strong website, but you also want a broader online presence that reinforces what the website says.

Carl suggested taking the experiment one step further. After asking ChatGPT for recommendations, ask why it recommended one organization. Ask why it didn’t recommend another. The answers can give you clues about the information associated with each camp and the areas where your own online presence may be weak.

Mark shared that he had started seeing a similar development inside newer marketing tools that monitor AI search visibility. In one example, he could see outside sources such as camp and retreat directories contributing to AI-generated answers. The tools themselves will continue to change, but the underlying lesson is useful: what the broader internet says about your camp can help shape whether AI systems understand and recommend it.

Why Some Camp Websites Don’t Show Up

If a camp isn’t showing up well in search, Scott said the problem usually isn’t one catastrophic SEO mistake. More often, several smaller problems are working together.

A website might be difficult for Google to crawl. Beautiful, oversized photos might make pages painfully slow to load. Navigation might make it difficult for visitors to find what they need. A page may attract someone’s attention without giving them a clear next step.

Those problems matter even more on a phone. Scott pictured a group of church leaders sitting around a table discussing their next youth retreat while someone pulls out a phone and starts researching possible locations. If a camp’s website loads slowly or is frustrating to navigate on that phone, the group may simply move on to another option.

Then there is an even more fundamental problem: the website may not actually contain the information people are searching for.

A camp might host men’s retreats, women’s retreats, youth retreats, family groups, and other gatherings throughout the year, while its website talks almost exclusively about summer camp. The organization knows that it hosts retreats. Its existing guests know. But a church leader who has never heard of the facility has no reason to know that.

Scott described a retreat center in Virginia that illustrated several of these issues. The property was beautiful, it was located near historic Williamsburg, and it had loyal guests. But when the organization came to the team, the website was outdated and slow. The navigation was difficult to work through, and the site didn’t have dedicated pages for many of the retreat audiences the organization actually served.

The solution wasn’t a single SEO trick. They cleaned up the site, simplified the navigation, and created pages that answered the questions prospective guests were actually asking. Instead of expecting one general page to communicate everything, they built clearer information around offerings such as men’s retreats, women’s retreats, church retreats, youth retreats, and even quilting retreats, which were popular at the facility.

As those changes took hold, Scott said they began seeing search appearances increase and more lead forms being completed. The website had become easier for Google to understand, but just as importantly, it had become easier for people to use.

That connection between search visibility and user experience came up repeatedly in the conversation. Getting someone onto your website isn’t the finish line. If they arrive and don’t know what to do next, that traffic isn’t doing much for the camp.

Scott encouraged camps to simplify the next step and measure something meaningful. If the goal is more church retreat inquiries, make it obvious how a church leader should inquire, then pay attention to whether more of those forms are being submitted. You can build more sophisticated analytics around that later, but the basic question is straightforward: are more of the right people taking the action you want them to take?

Two Retreat-Center Problems Camps Can Fix

Carl jumped in with two issues he sees frequently when reviewing camp websites, particularly among camps that rely on guest-group retreats for year-round revenue.

The first is a mismatch between how important retreats are to the organization and how much attention they receive on the website.

Carl recalled speaking with a West Coast camp where more than half of the organization’s annual revenue came from guest-group retreats. Yet there wasn’t a single page on the website dedicated to guest-group rentals. There was only a small mention on the homepage.

Think about that from the perspective of a stranger. The camp knows that it hosts retreats. Its returning groups know. But someone searching online for a new retreat venue has almost nothing to tell them that this camp is an option.

If retreats represent an important part of your revenue, your website should reflect that reality. At minimum, there should be a dedicated page explaining the guest-group experience. And if particular kinds of retreats are important to the organization, there may be good reasons to provide deeper information for those audiences as well.

The second problem is even easier to overlook: the camp’s Google Business Profile isn’t categorized correctly.

Most camps understandably identify themselves primarily as a summer camp or children’s camp. But Carl said that among camps he works with that also host retreats, he frequently finds that Retreat Center hasn’t been selected as an additional category on the Google Business Profile.

That small omission can make it harder for Google to understand that the organization is relevant when someone searches specifically for a retreat center.

So before jumping into a complicated SEO project, camps that host guest groups have two very practical things to check: Do we have a dedicated page explaining our retreat offering? And does our Google Business Profile actually tell Google that we’re a retreat center?

Those steps won’t automatically put a camp at number one, but they make it possible for Google and prospective guests to understand what the camp offers in the first place.

Give People the Information They Need to Choose You

Being eligible to show up is different from becoming the result Google considers most useful.

Carl returned to the library analogy. If you want your book about Abraham Lincoln to become one of the library’s most useful resources, it can’t contain a single page of vague information. It needs to cover the subject well and answer the questions readers actually have.

The same is true for a camp’s priority offerings.

If guest retreats are important to your camp, don’t stop after creating one thin page announcing that retreats are available. Think through what someone planning a retreat needs to know. How do they get there? What does lodging look like? What are the rates? Are there dedicated meeting rooms? What activities are available for kids or adults? What are the policies? What does the food experience look like?

Those questions aren’t filler for the sake of creating more website content. They’re part of the actual decision a guest is trying to make. Answering them makes the site more useful to that person while giving Google more context about the experience you provide.

That led Mark to another distinction that can be especially important for mission-driven camps: build the website around the demand of your audience, not only the desire of your mission.

Camp leaders care deeply about why their organizations exist, and that mission should remain central. But the person arriving at the website often has a more immediate question: Can you help me do the thing I’m trying to do?

Mark used Angeles Crest in Southern California as an example. The site communicates the organization’s mission, but it also quickly gives visitors a simple choice: join an Angeles Crest camp or plan your own church retreat. Someone arriving with either goal doesn’t have to dig through the organization’s story before figuring out where to go.

Mark framed this through hospitality. A camp’s “why” may be ministry, but camps are also serving people through hospitality. The website has to communicate that hospitality clearly enough for a guest to understand what is available.

That doesn’t diminish the mission. It creates a clearer path into it.

If guest groups provide a major portion of a camp’s revenue but the retreat offering is buried somewhere deep in the website, prospective guests are being asked to work unnecessarily hard to understand the camp. Search engines are being asked to do the same thing.

The camps that do this well make their priorities visible.

What Actually Moves the Needle With SEO?

By this point in the conversation, Mark had heard about website content, reviews, directories, user experience, Google Business Profiles, technical issues, and links. So he asked the natural question: if a camp leader can only focus on a few things, what actually moves the needle?

Scott’s first answer was that all of those things matter. Words matter. Content matters. Links matter. Technical SEO matters.

But that doesn’t mean every camp should start in the same place.

The right priority depends on what is holding you back. If Google can’t properly find or index your website because of a technical problem, that needs to be fixed first. There isn’t much value in polishing content that search engines can’t reliably access.

Once that foundation is in place, Scott narrowed his recommendations to three areas.

First, build a strong page for each priority audience you want to reach. Start with the growth objective rather than trying to optimize everything at once. If the goal is to increase retreat bookings, decide which types of retreat bookings matter most and make sure those audiences have strong pages designed around their needs.

Second, take your Google Business Profile seriously. Claim it, complete it, use the right categories, add good photos, earn reviews, and respond when people leave them. Make sure the address and phone number match the information on your website and other online listings.

Scott has even seen camps categorized as campgrounds when they aren’t primarily places for people to pitch tents or park campers. Details like that seem small, but they help search engines determine what an organization actually is.

Third, decide what you are going to measure.

You don’t need to begin by staring at dozens of analytics reports. If the goal is more retreat inquiries, measure retreat inquiries. If the goal is registrations for a particular program, watch registrations. If phone calls matter, pay attention to those.

The point is to connect SEO activity to an outcome the camp actually cares about. Otherwise, it’s easy to become excited about rankings or traffic without knowing whether any of that visibility is helping fill the programs you’re trying to grow.

Why Your Camp’s Name Matters More in an AI Search World

While discussing Google Business Profiles, Scott pointed to a shift he is beginning to see in the way people arrive at websites.

Traditionally, a camp might attract someone through a broad informational search. A church leader could search for retreat ideas, find a helpful blog post, and enter the website from there. Increasingly, AI tools and Google’s own AI-generated results can answer some of those early informational questions without requiring the person to visit a camp website.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the camp disappears from the journey.

A person might ask an AI tool for retreat-center recommendations, discover the name of a camp there, and then go to Google and search specifically for that organization. That’s what Scott meant by a branded search: someone searches for the camp or retreat center by name.

That makes the experience surrounding your brand even more important. When someone searches for you after encountering your name somewhere else, what do they find? Does the Google Business Profile appear? Are the reviews strong? Is the organization categorized correctly? Are the address, phone number, photos, and other information accurate?

In other words, Carl’s five-minute exercise from the beginning of the episode comes full circle. Search your camp’s name and look at what a prospective guest sees, because increasingly that search may happen after an AI tool has introduced the person to you.

A clear, credible online presence helps turn that initial recommendation into the next step of the relationship.

Paid Ads Can Create Visibility. SEO Builds the Asset.

Mark then shifted the conversation to the timeline. Paid advertising can create visibility quickly, including through tools such as Google Ads. SEO has a reputation for taking considerably longer.

Scott offered another analogy.

Imagine you’re selling a house. Paid advertising is like putting up the signs, creating the listings, and letting people know the house is available. Those efforts can drive attention quickly because you are actively paying to put the opportunity in front of people.

SEO is more like the work you’re doing to the house itself.

“Your SEO is the work you’re putting into your house to make it more valuable.”

You might finish the basement, improve the rooms, or make the property more attractive so that when people finally arrive for the walkthrough, what they find lives up to the attention that brought them there.

That is why SEO tends to take longer. You’re building value into an asset rather than simply purchasing immediate visibility. Paid search and SEO can both play important roles; they’re simply doing different jobs.

What Should You Expect in 30 Days, 90 Days, and Six Months?

Scott didn’t promise instant rankings. He described SEO as something that develops in stages.

During roughly the first 30 days, the goal is to get the basics under control and begin looking for signs of life. Perhaps a page that didn’t appear for an important search starts showing up on page two. Maybe the camp begins receiving a few more calls about the service or program that was recently prioritized. The changes may be modest, but you should begin seeing indications that Google is recognizing the work.

Around the 90-day mark, Scott said he would expect to see more substantial changes in visibility. In tools such as Google Search Console, the camp may see more impressions and begin appearing for a broader range of relevant searches. The site is starting to build traction around the subjects it has been intentionally strengthening.

By around six months, that effort should be producing much more meaningful results. A camp that began with very little search presence may not instantly outrank organizations that have been investing in SEO for years, but it should be becoming more competitive for the priority searches it has chosen to pursue.

And the work doesn’t simply stop at six months. Like Scott’s house analogy, there is usually another useful improvement to make. Perhaps the next step is publishing clearer pricing information, adding FAQs to answer common guest questions, improving a priority page, or getting the camp included on relevant community calendars and outside websites.

The point isn’t to endlessly create content for the sake of SEO. It’s to keep improving the usefulness, clarity, and credibility of the camp’s online presence around the things that matter most to its guests.

Impressions, Clicks, and Conversions: Measure What Matters

As Scott described what progress might look like over the first six months, Carl stepped in to connect those signs of progress to a simple measurement model.

The easiest way to understand it is to work backward from the outcome the camp actually wants.

Suppose your goal is more summer camp registrations. Before someone can register, they usually need to visit your website. Before they can visit your website from Google, they need to see your website in the search results.

That creates a simple progression:

Impression → Click → Conversion

An impression happens when your website appears in someone’s search results. If a parent searches “summer camps near me” and your website is one of the results Google displays, you’ve received an impression.

A click happens when that parent chooses your result and visits the website.

A conversion happens when the person takes the action you ultimately care about. For a summer camp, that might be a registration. For a retreat center, it could be an inquiry from a church or group interested in booking the facility.

Understanding those stages helps camp leaders avoid measuring SEO by rankings alone. Ranking higher is useful because it can create more visibility. More visibility can generate more website visits. But ultimately, the goal isn’t to accumulate impressions and clicks. The goal is to connect the right people with the camp and move them toward registration or an inquiry.

Carl pointed to Google Search Console as one of the simplest tools for seeing what is happening in the first two stages. Search Console is a free tool from Google that can show which searches are causing your website to appear, how often those impressions occur, which results people click, and which pages are receiving that search traffic.

Without that information, SEO can feel like the black box Mark described at the beginning of the episode. You make changes to the website and hope they’re working. Once Search Console is connected, you can begin seeing whether the site is appearing more frequently for the searches that matter.

If you’ve created or improved a page about church retreats, for example, you can begin watching whether that page is appearing for more retreat-related searches. You can see whether those appearances are turning into clicks. Then you can look at what happens inside the camp’s own registration or inquiry process to determine whether that increased traffic is producing more leads.

The surprising part of this discussion was how few camps Mark, Carl, and Scott encounter that already have Google Search Console set up. Carl estimated only a very small percentage of the camps he encounters have it in place before they begin working together, and Scott noted that he regularly finds himself setting it up for camps as part of the SEO process.

For a camp leader, the lesson isn’t that you need to become an analytics expert. It’s that you need enough information to know whether the work you’re doing is moving in the right direction.

If impressions for important searches are increasing, that’s progress. If more of those impressions become clicks, that’s another positive signal. And if those visitors begin turning into more inquiries, bookings, and registrations, the work is producing the result that matters.

That’s the measurement chain worth paying attention to.

Three SEO Actions Your Camp Can Take This Week

After covering everything from Google rankings and AI recommendations to website structure and measurement, Mark brought the conversation back to the camp director listening to the episode.

Maybe you’ve Googled the services your camp provides and discovered that your competitors are everywhere while your camp is difficult to find. Maybe you’ve never looked before and don’t even know where you stand. Either way, what can you actually do this week?

Scott returned to the practical approach that had run through the entire conversation.

First, run a visibility check.

Go into an incognito browsing window and search without using your camp’s name. Think about the questions parents, pastors, youth leaders, and retreat planners regularly ask your staff, then type those kinds of questions into Google.

If you host retreats, don’t search for your camp and congratulate yourself when it appears. Search the way someone would search if they had never heard of you. Look at which organizations Google surfaces and what those organizations are doing differently.

This is essentially an extension of Carl’s quick marketing tip from the beginning of the episode. Before deciding what needs to change, get an accurate picture of where you are.

Second, choose one priority page and improve it.

This is where Scott’s advice becomes especially manageable. You don’t need to decide that the entire website must be rebuilt by Friday. Pick the thing your camp most needs to fill.

“Pick the thing you have to fill the most.”

If you need more guest-group retreats, start with the retreat page. If you need more summer camp registrations, start with the summer camp page. If one particular type of retreat represents a significant growth opportunity, look at whether that audience has enough information to understand what you offer and take the next step.

Read the page like a guest rather than the person who helped create it. Is it obvious what the program or experience is? Does the page answer the questions people regularly ask? Can someone quickly understand who it’s for, where you are, what is included, and what they should do next?

Improving one strategically important page is more useful than vaguely deciding that the camp needs to “work on SEO.”

Third, clean up the online presence you already control.

Go to your Google Business Profile. Is the information accurate? Are the right categories selected? If you offer retreats, is Retreat Center included where appropriate? Are there current photos that show people what the property and experience are actually like?

Look at your reviews, too. If guests have taken the time to leave a review, respond to them. Check that your address and contact information are consistent with what’s listed on your website and elsewhere online.

None of those actions require a camp director to become an SEO specialist. They’re simply ways of making the camp easier to understand and easier to find.

That simplicity was one of the strongest themes running through Scott’s advice. SEO can become deeply technical, but camp leaders don’t have to begin with the technical weeds. Begin by understanding what people are searching for, make one important part of your website more useful, and make sure the information you control around the web is accurate and complete.

What This Means for Your Camp

At the beginning of the episode, Mark imagined a camp with everything going for it: a beautiful property, great staff, meaningful programs, happy campers, and memorable retreats.

The problem was that the right people might never find it.

After an hour of talking about SEO, that’s still the problem worth remembering. Search optimization isn’t ultimately about winning a technical competition with Google. It’s about making sure parents and retreat planners who are already looking for what you provide have a reasonable chance of discovering you.

That matters when organic search accounts for such a significant portion of camp website traffic. As Carl reminded listeners in the closing, for many camps at least half of website traffic comes through organic search, while some see numbers closer to 80%. Something responsible for that much of your visibility deserves intentional attention.

But intentional doesn’t have to mean complicated.

Start by seeing your camp the way a stranger sees it. Search your name and look at the story Google tells about you. Then remove your name from the search and find out whether you’re visible to someone who doesn’t already know you exist. Ask ChatGPT the kinds of questions your prospective guests might ask and see which camps it recommends.

Then look at your website. Does it clearly communicate the things you’re actually trying to grow? If retreats are a major source of year-round revenue, can a church leader immediately see that you host guest groups? If summer camp registrations are the priority, does the summer camp page answer the questions a parent needs answered? If you’re trying to attract a particular audience, have you created enough useful information for that audience to understand why your camp could be a fit?

From there, strengthen the signals around the website. Complete the Google Business Profile. Use accurate categories. Keep contact information consistent. Add current photos. Respond to reviews. Make sure the directories and other websites that mention your camp accurately represent what you do.

And then measure whether those improvements are producing something meaningful.

Impressions are useful. Clicks are useful. Rankings are useful. But they are steps along the way to the outcomes that matter to a camp: another registration, another retreat inquiry, another group booking, another filled bed.

That last part is what keeps SEO connected to the larger purpose of the Grow Your Camp Podcast. As Mark put it during Scott’s camp story, camps can’t minister to empty beds. The goal isn’t visibility for visibility’s sake. It’s helping more people find their way into the experiences camps have worked so hard to create.

Scott’s childhood memories from Camp of the Woods are a fitting reminder of what’s on the other side of that search result. A family discovers a camp. They make the trip. Kids spend time with counselors and activities while parents have their own experiences. A dad takes his family driving around the Adirondacks at night looking for bears. Decades later, those moments are still part of the family’s story.

Your camp has the opportunity to create those kinds of stories too. But first, people have to find you.

As camps move into planning season, Carl encouraged leaders to make sure their marketing efforts are aligned with the growth goals that matter most for the coming year. That could mean increasing summer camp registrations, filling more retreat dates, strengthening fundraising, recruiting staff, or addressing another important growth priority.

For camps that want help putting those priorities into a practical plan, Mark and Carl offer a Growth Action Plan built around the camp’s specific goals, market, and data rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy. You can learn more at GrowYourCampPodcast.com and click Get Help to start a conversation.

You can also visit GrowYourCampPodcast.com to subscribe to future episodes, explore the videos and blog articles from previous conversations, and submit questions or topics you’d like Mark and Carl to cover in the future.

Because whether the work involves SEO, websites, retreat bookings, registrations, or another part of camp marketing, the reason behind it remains the same: create more opportunities for people to experience the impact of camp.

And, as always, let’s grow camp together.