When Google Traffic Disappears: Human-Written Content, Social Strategy & Building a Coaster Community with John Stevenson

Hey, I’m John Stevenson. I’m based in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m a roller coaster and theme park enthusiast. I just rode my four hundredth roller coaster. I love the industry, and I love talking and writing about it. I also work in marketing for my day job.

I was born and raised in Memphis, which was home to Libertyland Amusement Park and the Zipping Pippin, Elvis Presley’s favourite roller coaster. It operated from 1976 until 2005. I started Coaster101 on a whim on a free website host, as a place to share my passion with the world. Then in September of that year, Libertyland was announced as closed and not reopening. As a subsection of Coaster101, I started what was then part of the Save Libertyland movement, which unfortunately turned into the Remember Libertyland website, and that now exists as its own entity.
Coaster101 has a much larger audience and is more evolving than Libertyland was, but both are very community-driven. Libertyland is history-driven and very specific to the Memphis community. They’re different audiences, but the goal is the same: to build that presence online. It’s an ongoing effort.

It’s an evolving industry with so many facets beyond roller coasters: the history side, the latest and greatest innovations, and the new coasters every year. Our team, which is growing and has ten-plus of us with different backgrounds, locations, careers and skill sets, helps build that authority. So does the time we’ve been online and the representation that gives us.

The benefit of Coaster101 is that we cover a very wide range of the industry, from a new roller coaster opening to what’s at a food festival at a theme park. When brands or parks pitch us, it depends on the scale, the relevancy and the timeliness. We try to promote a lot of what’s going on in the industry even when it isn’t a new coaster. Not everything gets a full review on the website, but we try to have a variety of content. Some things get a smaller mention on social media, whereas a new roller coaster opening might get a long form review and more in-depth coverage on socials.

So much of Coaster101 is content generation that we really try to avoid AI in that sense. We pride ourselves on being human-generated content. But it’s something we can’t ignore. Search and Google have completely changed with the popularity of AI and it is becoming a universal piece of the internet. We used to get a huge amount of our traffic from Google, so we’ve had to adapt. It’s a balance of still prioritizing human-generated content while monitoring the trends and developments and adapting as best we can, which is an ongoing effort.

It’s something we’re continually looking at and fine-tuning. With Google changing so much, recently with AI and previously with algorithm changes, we can no longer rely on organic traffic from search engines. That’s where social really comes into play. We’re not going to publish an in-depth review of a new roller coaster on Facebook or Instagram, so we use that content and those channels as a starting point to hook readers: this is really interesting content and it’s relevant to me.
Some people will just stay on those outlets, which is why we stay very active and post frequently. But we’re also hoping to entice some of that traffic to our website to get the in-depth content that typically isn’t feasible to share on Facebook, Instagram and X.

All of us are very passionate about the industry. We pride ourselves on building relationships with parks, and through that we get to attend some really exciting events and travel for Coaster101. Many of us have also been working on the website together for well over ten years, so there are internal friendships and camaraderie, and we meet up at parks as much as we can. The industry is always changing and there’s always something new. And we try not to be in silos. That team mentality holds us accountable and keeps us moving forward.

Surprisingly to people outside the community, it’s a very large community and it can seem crowded at times, so setting ourselves apart is an ongoing strategy. Some outlets and influencers are able to be even more niche than we are. We really leverage our engineers and technical writers. One of our most popular series, Coasters 101, is a deep dive into roller coaster design and physics. It’s very specific content, and we try not to just regurgitate news. News is a component, but we also go on deep dives and have in-depth interviews on the podcast.
Many outlets focus geographically on one region or even one park, like the Disney and Universal space, which is a different animal. We leverage the range of content we share and the different outlets. We’re very fortunate to have large audiences on our social platforms, and with the size of our team, we cover a lot of areas and parks in the country and overseas.

It varies from park to park. We’ve been very fortunate to build great relationships with some parks, and we’re actively trying to connect with others. For the most part, parks understand that this is a very active and eager community. One thing I try to set as a standard for Coaster101 is that we’re very professional. We’re not here to be advertisements or PR for the park, but we do want to share the great things happening in the industry and what parks are doing beyond building new rides. I can’t speak for every outlet, but I try to show by example that we’re here to support the parks. Coaster101 is definitely not looking to leak anything or get the inside scoop. We want to promote the park and connect our readers, some of whom may not be enthusiasts, with that park, and hopefully bring them more business.

We try to stay tuned in to changes and developments. We’re always going to be focused on human content generation, but AI is something you have to pay attention to, and the same goes for social channels. We want to stay nimble and adaptive. I’d love for us to expand into more overseas coverage, because overseas is a whole other frontier, and we’re doing some of that already. I’d also like to place more emphasis on video content.

We’re on just about every platform, some more actively than others, and you’ll see that we have a really unique range of content, with something for everybody, whether you’re a die-hard coaster enthusiast or just dipping your toes into this crazy world. We’re always interested in feedback, and there’s contact information on our website. We also really enjoy spotlighting and featuring guest content, incorporating additional voices into our content.

Thanks, Stephen. It’s a pleasure to be here.