Meta Descriptions on Your Catholic Parish Website: A Simple How-To Guide

Your parish website helps people find Mass times, register for events, learn about your parish’s important ministries, contact your staff, and just generally feel more connected to your community. Before someone clicks on your website after doing a Google search, though, they often see one small piece of text first: your website’s meta description.

For parish staff trying to make their church website easier to find and use, meta descriptions are an important part of website design to grasp. Let’s dive in!

What Is a Meta Description?

A meta description is a short summary of what a specific webpage is about. It usually appears underneath your website title in search engine results when people search on, for example, Google or Yahoo.

Think of your website’s meta description as a little preview. When someone searches for your parish, a ministry, Mass schedule, faith formation program, or Catholic church near them, the meta description gives them a quick reason to click when your church’s listing appears. We’ll share some good examples of meta descriptions a little later in this article.

Why Meta Descriptions Matter for Your Parish’s Website

A good meta description helps people understand what they’ll find on the page before they visit it. For example, imagine if someone is searching Google for “Catholic churches near me” and 3 options popped up as a result of the search — your parish, and two others. Now imagine if only one of the parishes had a friendly meta description while the others didn’t.

In a case like this, it’s very likely the one with the meta description (hopefully yours!) would get selected first because it would be more attractive to the person doing the searching.

A meta description is your first opportunity to “market” your website in people’s search results. This will go a long way toward showing people that your parish has the information they are searching for and will draw more visitors to your website.

Did you know that if you don’t write your own meta description, Google typically creates one for you based on the text you already have on your website? When that happens, the results might not be entirely accurate, since they’re generated by a Google bot rather than by you! You can avoid this by simply writing your own description.

Writing your own meta descriptions is a parish website best practice because it gives search engines a clear, helpful summary to work with that gives you all the control.

What Should You Include in Your Website Meta Description?

In a perfect world, every page on your website would get its own custom meta description. Many website building applications, like WeConnect, make this process pretty easy. In WeConnect, for example, there is a text box to write a meta description attached to every page inside the builder and even an AI option available in case you need help getting started.

To write a good meta description, let’s start with your parish’s homepage. First, consider the main point of the page. Ask yourself: “What is this page really about?” Then, be sure that your description includes some of the words people might type into Google if they were searching for your parish. These are called “keywords” and are very important in helping guide people using a search engine like Google to your page.

Some of those words and phrases might include:

• Catholic church in [city name]
• Mass times in [city name]
• parish bulletin
• online giving
• faith formation
• Catholic school
• Confession times
• parish ministries
• sacramental preparation

Your parish’s homepage meta description would be successful if it included your parish name, location, and a short note about key information like Mass times, ministries, and ways to connect.

Keep It Short and Useful — Examples of Parish Website Meta Descriptions

Most meta descriptions should be around 150 to 160 characters (including spaces) long. The problem with a meta description that is too long is that part of it may be cut off in the search results. We don’t want that!

Here are a few examples of what a solid parish homepage meta description might look like. Remember, your meta description should be unique to your community, so make sure you add your parish’s content and don’t simply copy and paste these ideas.

Parish Homepage Meta Description Examples:

1. Visit St. Mary Parish in [City] online for Mass and Confession times, parish news, ministries, online giving, and ways to grow in your faith.
   
   
2. Find a friendly parish home at St. James in [City]. View Mass times, upcoming events, ministries, sacrament details, and ways to get involved.
   
   
3. St. Brigid Parish in [City] is a welcoming Catholic community. Explore Mass times, events, sacramental information, and formation for all ages. God bless!

These examples are simple, clear, and built around what people are likely already searching for.

When/How Should You Update Your Parish’s Website Meta Descriptions?

If you’re a parish website editor, you should update a page’s meta description any time major changes are made to that webpage. Finish editing the page first, then write or revise the page title and meta description last. This helps you stay focused on the page’s real purpose. If you cannot summarize the page clearly, it may indicate that the page itself may need to be simplified.

You do not need to write or rewrite your meta description for every single page on your website today. Start with your most important pages. Depending on how you have laid out your website, those most important pages might include the pages that have the following information on them:

• Mass Times
• Contact Us
• Bulletins
• Online Giving
• Faith Formation
• Sacraments
• Ministries
• Blog

Then, once these meta descriptions are written, you can mostly “set them and forget them” until those pages are updated in the future! And even then, with things like your homepage’s meta description, it’s unlikely you will change it much at all, even with updates, unless you choose to do a whole website makeover and end up with different information on your homepage that you want reflected in your meta description.

Your parish website should be the perfect home for your church online. It should help people find what they need and feel invited into your community. A clear meta description for your webpages is one way to accomplish this goal.

How to Make Parish Website Updates Easier

Website work can feel intimidating, especially when your parish staff member already wears many different hats. That’s why LPi created WeConnect, websites designed for busy parish teams. WeConnect offers easy editing, drag-and-drop sections, professional help with content transfer, training, ongoing support from real people who care, and options for sponsor-funded websites so that there’s no cost to the parish!

Feeling inspired? LPi has a plethora of articles published especially for parish staff responsible for keeping their church’s website top-notch. These can be found on the special “Web & Social Media” section of our blog.  If you want articles like this emailed directly to your email inbox every month, sign up for our free Vibrant Community Newsletter.

See you there!