RX 24 - Reach 100,000 New People With An SEO Content Strategy - Tyler Kime

Transcribed Content

And without further ado, please join me in welcoming to the stage, he's going to present to us digital strategy and communications, reach 100,000 new people with an SEO content strategy. Please welcome Tyler Kaim. Can you hear me with this mic? Now we're on. We're on. Awesome. Well, thanks for signing up for this session in the big room. It's super exciting to have you guys here, seeing this many people. So in 2023 the marketing and digital teams at LCBC decided to go all in on an in house SEO strategy. Since then we've reached over 350,000 users, amassed over 500,000 article reads. And in this session, I'm really going to open the books, kind of outline our strategy, what worked, what didn't work and lay out some action steps that your church could apply immediately after this session. So yeah, thanks for coming everyone. I wanted to start by addressing that 100,000 number, 100,000 number right away. So to some of you that may feel crazy high. Maybe that was a good hook to get you to come to this session. But for some of you, maybe if you're from a larger church and that might feel low. So what I hope that you walk away from this talk remembering and grasping is more than the number but the strategy, the steps, the tools, the things that are available for you to reach 5,200, five hundred, maybe even a million people through this. So why? John talked a lot last night about your why. Our why for LCBC is to introduce people to Jesus and together fully follow him. We do that in a lot of different ways across a lot of different ministries. But through this, I'm going to show you how we do that through an SEO content strategy. So I want to start and introduce myself a little bit. My name is Tyler Kime. I have the opportunity to serve as the content manager on our marketing and more broadly our communications team at LCBC. Massive fan of Philadelphia sports. Is there any Philadelphia sports fans out there? Probably not. Just Adam who also works at LCBC. Follow-up question. Is there any Dallas Cowboys fans? Oh man. So you guys are allowed to leave now. I have nothing for you. There's no information. Actually I don't even want you here. So you guys can just get up. No I'm just kidding. You guys need a lot of help. So I'm here to help you out because it's been tough. Here's a photo of my family. So my wife Mariah and I on our honeymoon in Banff, Canada, highly recommend that if you guys have never been there. It's much better than 110 degrees. It's like 65 degrees in July. It's awesome. Over the last five years, I've been blessed with two kids, Luke and Lily. Luke is three in November and Lily just turned seven months old. So there's a little snapshot of my life. So LCBC Church, as I said earlier, our mission, mission statement across our whole church is to introduce people to Jesus and together fully follow him. If you're unfamiliar with LCBC, a lot of people are like what the heck does that acronym mean? It means lives changed by Christ. So, we're one church across 22 locations in Pennsylvania. It used to be Lancaster County Bible Church. But when we expanded outside of Lancaster, we needed an acronym that fit. So lives changed by Christ. As the content manager, I have the awesome job of getting to oversee our social media team and channels. Pitch various marketing plans with different ministries. Build strategies to reach new people digitally through bible reading plans, articles, anything digitally that goes on our website and app. And that's where I want to focus our time today. Go over the power that written blog style articles can have, especially when you use an SEO strategy to help build that. So for some of you in the room, SEO, that might be another new acronym that maybe you've never heard of. So I want to kind of start with a clean slate to hear and clarify for what that means. SEO as an acronym stands for Search Engine Optimization. So in simple terms what does that mean? It means doing everything in your power to improve your website, to have a higher rank and increase visibility on places, mainly Google but also Bing, DuckDuckGo, any other search engines that are out there. For today's talk we're going to focus on Google because honestly, I don't know if you guys watch the news but they kind of have a monopoly on search. So you guys are prioritizing search, Google is where you want to go. In SEO there's really two types of digital SEO. There's also a third type, local SEO which we can answer questions about that. But really there's two types of digital SEO that I want to focus on. And then most of the talk focus on the content side. So technical SEO. What does technical SEO means? In simple terms, is your website fast? Is your website mobile friendly? Is your website organized well? Is it easy for someone who is a first time user to get to the information that they need, find the information that they are looking for? Even more technically, have you guys submitted your site map to Google so Google can read and crawl your website and understand what's going on, what the code means. Are there any four zero four pages, broken links? So those are the kind of technical things that you're going to want to manage for technical SEO. And I have a QR code on the screen here from an article on SEMRush. And I'll talk a little bit more about what SEMRush is. But in this article it gives even more detail. So feel free to scan that and you can get more elaboration on what that means that I'm not going to talk about too more today. On the other side though, that's where I want to spend our time today on content focused SEO. So that means any published content on your website that is written on topics that users care about and are searching for. So using search engine tools, it could be anything like articles, blogs, bible reading plans, sermons. I know every church here has sermons so at least that's one that's checked off that you can have some SEO impact for. You might have podcasts, even episodes under your podcast pages, maybe bible studies, helpful PDFs. There's so many different types of content out there and anything that is titled with code can have an SEO impact. So we can talk a little bit more about that today. So what does the end product look like and specifically with article or blog style content focused SEO? So I want to kind of go over a scenario with you guys today. Let's say someone is a newer Christian. Maybe they trusted Jesus for the first time. They have thousands of new questions. What does it mean to be a Christian? What are my next steps? Right? Their life is different now. What are they supposed to do? What does that verse in Leviticus actually mean? I don't know what that says. Do I really have to give up eating meat? Why would I do that? Am I allowed to have 20 wives like Solomon did in the bible? That doesn't seem right. Like the comedian. That's definitely wrong, right? What did Jesus look like? How do I parent differently now that my kids are teenagers? How do I find peace for my anxiety and my negative thinking? How do I grow in my faith? So when there is a person who in this scenario is a new Christian they have all these questions, Where do they go? Do they go to Wikipedia? Do they go to CNN's website? Fox News website? Reddit? TikTok? No. The number one place that we go and that they go is to Google. Secondary is YouTube. That's probably another talk for another time here that I would love to give. But we're going to focus our time again on Google. So what if in this scenario we as the big church globally or even better the local church that you guys have in your states, in your area can meet people where they're at with these questions that they have, right? What if we can get them the answers that they need to live their life to the fullest with clear understanding and directions on how to follow Jesus from the thousands of ideas that they have. The thousands of questions that they have. What could that look like? So I don't know about you but even me as someone who isn't a new believer still wrestles with a lot of questions. I still have so many things that we as a church can collectively put our minds together and try and best support them and answer those questions. So for LCBC, that scenario that I just went over was at the forefront of our digital ministry to reach new people, meet them where they're at in their faith and be a resource to answer all the questions that they have. So where do we even start, right? There's millions of questions. How can we possibly answer all of them? What questions are the right ones to answer? What if I don't have the resources on my staff to do it? How much time and energy does that take? Those are some of the questions that we were asking three years ago and that maybe you guys are asking here in this talk for the first time. So in January 2022, soon after I was hired, our team was tasked to add more focus, time and energy to this. We saw that there was a huge advantageous strategic opportunity as I stated earlier to meet people where they're at, right? To expand our digital reach as a church. We had been working with an outside vendor for years who were paying to support us with some of the knowledge of what people were searching for. But honestly it wasn't sustainable and it wasn't cost effective. So we decided to make a big change to the strategy that took us to a level of success that kind of led us to why we're here presenting today. And we decided to bring it all in house. So what did that look like tangibly? There are six steps to success which is kind of a tongue twister so I'm going try and say it as many times as I can. That kind of created the strategy for us. And these are kind of the core things that I want to outline as a strategy for SEO today. So one, finding writers, gathering SEO information, then writing, publishing, being patient, adjusting and repeating. So let's kind of break down what those mean, what our strategy is behind that and how we made that work. So for writers, for us that meant starting with staff members, right? You guys all have a team of staff members who some of them may be actually really gifted at writing and leveraging free time they had. This is something that they maybe do as a hobby or on the side. They're just really gifted at taking content and creating written forms from that. So that's what we did. We tried to identify if there were certain people in maybe student ministry, kid ministry, other ministry teams or even just people on our staff who they had that gift and they had some free time and they were willing to give it to us. The next thing that we did is we created a volunteer writing team. So people who attend our church that maybe are writers in their free time. Maybe their career involves writing, copy editing, different things like that. Who maybe they don't have time to volunteer in traditional ways like holding babies in a kid environment or helping out in a student environment. But they would be willing to give their time to write an article maybe once a week for us or once a month. So meaning and finding volunteers where they are that they can give those gifts and use them for this strategy. So now that we found our writers, next part of the strategy is gathering information, right. Specifically SEO information. So there's a lot of tools on the market that you can get data from on which topics are better, right? With all the millions of the questions that we talked about, where do we start? Which ones do we choose? Which one is there a unique opportunity for our church to meet them where they're at? We did some research. Some of the tools out there are, they're called SEMRush, MAZ, HREFs. There's others out there. Maybe you guys have heard of them or researched them or worked with other teams who have. We made this strategic decision to go with a tool called SEMRush based on its price, its user friendliness, its toolset and the connection that we have to working with them and partnering with them. So what I have for you here is a screenshot of kind of what that looks like. And at the end when we have time for questions I can even open up the tool and kind of showcase a little bit more about how it works and how it operates. But one of the awesome features that we use this a lot for is called the Keyword Magic Tool. And basically what it does is a keyword like we talk about is a phrase. It's not just one word. Sometimes it's a couple words that somebody is searching for in the Google search bar. And what this allows you to do is plug it into the tool and then it will give you basically the idea of hey, does this rank really high? Is there a lot of opportunity? Maybe I should tweak it and do this one. If I set it differently in this way that will give me a longer chance to reach more people. It's more opportunistic. So again at the end we can kind of dive into this and open it up and kind of work with it and answer any questions that you have with that. So yeah. And also there's a free version of this as well. So that's something that you guys can test out as you're looking for new tools. There's a free version that if you scan this QR code here, this will give you an article that will link to, hey, here's the opportunities for what a free version of this tool can look like. So yeah, it's really cool. And that's where we started as well too. We tested it with a free version for a couple months. We said hey, could this actually work with us for a larger scale that we'd be willing to spend some money on and get the full package for it. You can kind of see here it's a little bit blocked with the QR code. But what the tool does is if you search for bible verses on anxiety it's going to give you a lot of options. You'll see to the right of the QR code what the volume is for that. So let's just say that means 4,400 people a month are searching for that. A keyword difficulty right to the right of that is 54%. So that means 54 out of 100 times over time you'll be able to be the first search on Google for that. So that's kind of what we did. We spent a lot of time trying different things and seeing. So how do we know what to write on, right? That's the next step in this. We found our writers. We found a tool to gather SEO information. And then we have to write. So at LCBC there's three big buckets that we choose to write on. Series related, ministry focused support, and then again strategic SEO opportunities and questions. So what does that mean? Series related. That's pretty simple as pull through content from your weekend. And that's honestly a great place to start. Your pastor, your communicator has already created the content for you. All you have to do is take transcript that he speaks from or the notes that he gives and turn that into a shorter article that maybe you can pull out three of the main steps that they have and be more focused on that. There is a message on how to overcome anxiety. And in this sermon, here's three steps that you can do. So take those three steps. They've already created the content for you. Use a volunteer writer, a staff member and then create a content, an article from that that's its own piece of content. You can go back into the tool and say hey if I title it this way I'm going to have more opportunities compared if I title it this way. Which is the awesome advantage that having a tool like that gives you so you really know what is the exact keyword that people are searching for that you can meet them where they're at and not guess and hope and pray that it will work. It's just super helpful data. So starting from scratch can be overwhelming But really using series related content is a great way to piggyback off something that's already been created. Ministry focused support. What that means is if your next steps ministry, your adult ministry, your student ministry has something going on that there is a felt need in your community and church that, hey, we need to write an article to support parents in this way. Kids are going back to school soon. That's something that, hey, how can we support your kids going back to school in these three steps? There's a lot of things that could fit under that bucket. But that's really the goal of bucket number two. And then number three like I talked about is this, strategic SEO opportunities. Like you'll see here in SEMrush where it really doesn't have to do with anything that's going on in your church or ministry function. But there is an opportunity that like we talked about in this scenario before, a lot of people are searching for this on Google. How do we as the big church show up for them or you as a local church show up for them that maybe instead of searching for something to help them with anxiety and getting a WebMD article, they get an article from their church. They get a spiritually Christ centered focused answer to what they're searching for which is really cool and something we've seen a lot of success with. So now that you guys have chosen what to write about, you have the writer, you have the keywords, how do you actually get this to publish on your website or your app? And we're at the Rock Conference so we obviously choose Rock which we've had awesome success with. We use different content channels and I'm not the expert on all the technical stuff here. We have a member from our digital team that if you guys have any questions on some of the technical aspects of this, we can work together to answer for you. But basically we have articles as its own content channel, Viber reading plans as its own content channel. And then we add different types of content underneath that. That will show up like in some of these other slides you saw here. This is what it looks like as an end product on our website. So when you go to our website we have a whole articles tab. And through creating it on the content channel it'll show up like this. We can tag it based on the topic that it is. So yeah. As you can see on the left side, this is what it looks like when we input it to Rock. You can add the title, the date that you want it to publish, use the tool to create copy headlines, select your topic here, the category that it fits under, an excerpt for what it will show up as a description for it. And then on the right that kind of gives you more of an idea of what it will look like in totality. So from that article this is what it looks like on the website. You take this, You kind of plug in all the information. You fill in all the boxes. And then this is what it looks like on the end product on our website. So now that you've written it and you've published it, we've used rock to get it out there. The next step is to be patient. So ranking on Google after you publish takes time. We've seen some of our articles gain traction in two months. But honestly it can take four, six, sometimes even longer for that really to get picked up. And that's okay. Because if I'm honest, I come from social media background and you want that instant success, right? You post a video. You post a post. You want to see how many likes you get, how many shares you get. But this takes time and that's Okay. It's extremely rare. In fact I would almost say nonexistent that we see immediate fruit from doing something like this. So that's why I have one here. Step number five is just be patient. You post it and then over time as you check analytics, which I'll go over that too, you can see which ones start to bubble up right. In the tool that we have, Semrush, you can start to see which ones are bubbling up. Getting answers to why it bubbled up. If the strategy that you worked actually did work. And sometimes they don't gain any traction. And that's Okay too because you still created a great piece of content that can be helpful for your attendees, that you know your pastor or your leadership can give this to someone who is struggling with this, even if it doesn't gain traction through Google or SEO means. So it's still a success, right? But like I showcased earlier, using a tool like SEMrush can really help you get the best chance of success when you're not sure, when you have questions of will this work, won't this work, that can kind of give you hard data that hey, a lot of people actually do search for this. Or on the contrary, nobody is really asking this question. We may think that a lot of people are asking for it. But in reality, maybe if you frame it this way, that will help you out a little bit better. So then what's the last step? Adjusting and repeating. So being consistent. But be realistic based on the bandwidth that you and your team have. If you want to if this is something that's totally new to your church and you haven't done this before, maybe you found that hey I have one writer who could commit to doing one article a week. That's awesome. Like that's a huge success that you guys should be proud of as a church. Maybe you found that there's one staff member and two volunteers and you can commit to doing two a week or four times a month. Whatever that is, it's different for everyone. Take time to just find whatever works for your guys' flow. Don't feel the need to benchmark against anyone else. Whatever works best for your guys' rhythm and schedule is awesome. And then make adjustments as you build out this strategy, right? Steps that work for your church, your process might not work for this church or this process but it works for you, right? Take time to innovate. Do retrospectives and see hey, if we connect with this person more often or this person here or this topic is really resonating, Keep doing stuff like that. So adjust and repeat. So then like I talked about a little bit ago, how do you know if this is working, right? A couple of things that we've seen. We use Google Analytics and SEMRush. And I kind of want to walk you through some of how that looks right now. This is some of the charts that we've seen to kind of prove that hey that 100,000 number wasn't just like a dumb sales pitch. We actually have seen some awesome results from that. And that's available for you guys today that you guys can do as your church. SEMrush is awesome because it allows you to see how many keywords in totality you rank for. How much traffic you've gotten to your website based on this strategy compared to traffic from your sermons, traffic from other things. The traffic cost number is not a number that we've paid for. That just says that if you would pay for this much organic growth that we're doing organically, this is how much it would have cost an ad dollar. So don't want that number to falsely alarm you in any way. But over time it works, right? Like I said, be patient. We started this in 2022. And in the first really year, we didn't see much different traction. But over time, the algorithm picked it up. Google started to realize that people are finding this type of content valuable. So it's going to show it to more people. And then that in turn shows more articles on your website to different people. And then you become a trusted source that has authority. And that's really the goal for Google is they want to give people pieces of content that they know has authority on this topic and this subject and they'll keep showing it more in different ways. Some of what we've ranked for over the last ninety days just to give you an idea on what are the types of things that we have. A lot of articles that have to do with listicles. Sometimes it's bible verses. People want to know like hey, what are the top 10 bible verses on leadership? People want to know what does the bible say about ghosts. I don't know about you. I don't really know what it says but a lot of people are interested in that. People want to know what's our purpose on earth. Right? Maybe they're going through a tough time. Maybe there's a transition in their life and they just feel like they don't have purpose. So how can we as a church meet them where they're at to give them those answers, right? Especially locally. A lot of SEO article content is locally too. How do I find my identity in Christ? That's a big answer, right? That's a big topic that people go to Google for first instead of other ways or other websites or even talking to people. So again, just cool to see the growth that we've seen from this strategy and meeting people where they're at. So again, the six steps to success. Find writers. For us at LCBC that means three staff members. One who is a copywriter, that's her full time job. But also two staff members who are gifted in writing. We've been fortunate and blessed to have a team of 10 volunteers who's helped us write this content. And we hope to continue to grow and steward that. Gathering SEO information. For us that means SEMrush. But for you guys that might be a different tool. It might be the free version of SEMRush. It might be Ahrefs or Moz or other tools that are out there. See what works best for your organization, your budget, and your schedule. Writing and publishing. We trust Rock, the content channels that it provides, to not only publish on our app but our website as well. It's been really cool to see as we've gone all in on Rock mobile, the way that article content can show up for people on their phone as they're reading in church. If they're listening to a sermon, they go on their app and they say hey, we can filter so content related to the weekend message also shows up for them there. And then be patient. Again, like I said, this takes time. Immediate success is super rare and I would honestly say it doesn't happen with this. But it's really cool to see over time when you're consistent for whatever strategy and whatever amount that you guys can have the success that comes over time. And then again, adjust, repeat. See what's working for you guys. Tweak this here. Innovate this here. Find this new opportunity here. So action steps for you guys. If I was sitting in your chair for the first time, this is something that's new to me. This is a new opportunity. You may be considering hey is this something that we could do? Is this something that we could bring back to our church? What could that look like? One I would just say evaluate your digital strategy as a whole. Right? See what you guys have going on as a church. What your leadership values. And see if there is opportunity to bring article or blog content that you guys could have a seat at the table. What do you prioritize? What are strategic opportunities? What are ways that, hey, maybe digital reach is something that you guys are really starting to value. And this could be a simple way that you could do that. Action step number two. Find staff members or attendees with skill sets and the gifts or passions to write. People that want to do this. That this is enjoyable for them. That this isn't a burden. A lot of what we do in working for our volunteer team is we're really flexible on hey, what do you like to write about? What are you passionate about? We identify that this person really loves to talk about marriage and family stuff. So when we know we have a series coming up about that, when we know that there's a strategic opportunity, we tap into that person to do it. Or this person is really passionate about mental health. That's awesome. So anytime we have something like that we can use it for you, your skill set and your passions. And then start with sermon content. There's a lot of things you can write about. There's millions of things that you can write about. But my hunch would be that every church in this room has a sermon on the weekend that you could pull content from. That you could create at least one article per week because there is a weekly message going on. And then I'm not a salesperson for Semrush. They're not paying me to do this. I really like the tool. They probably should give me some money but try it for free. We found a lot of success just trialing it for a month and seeing hey was there actually a lot of opportunity bringing this in house for the first time that then we could go and pay for more of it to get the full resources of it.