SEO for Churches
Every week, people in your area type “Catholic church near me” or “Mass times” into Google. Some of them are new to the town. Some have been away from the Church for twenty years. If your parish doesn’t appear, that moment passes — and they find somewhere else, or nowhere at all.
A parish website can look perfectly good and still be unfindable. It happens quietly, and it usually happens for the same handful of reasons:
None of this shows up as a problem you can see. The site is up. The pages load. It simply never comes back when someone searches — and no one ever tells you.
Every Expanse site is built on foundations that search engines can read: clean page structure, fast loading, proper headings, sensible URLs, and a sitemap that updates itself. That’s the baseline, and it’s included on every plan, at no extra cost.
On top of that, Ian sets up the things that actually move a parish in local search — the Google Business Profile, the structured data, the location signals — and on the Complete plan, keeps watching them.
There is no separate SEO invoice. There is no agency. It’s part of what you’re already paying for.
Book a free visibility call
Google Business Profile, properly configured Your profile is claimed, verified, and filled in — correct parish name, address, phone, the “Catholic Church” category, Mass times in the opening hours, and real photographs of the church. This is the single highest-impact thing a parish can do for local search, and it’s free. Most parishes either haven’t done it or did it once and never came back.
Structured data for religious organisations Your site is marked up with schema.org Church data, so search engines are explicitly told your location, contact details, service times, and the diocese you belong to — rather than left to guess. This is what allows your details to appear directly in a search result.
Mass times as readable web content Your Mass and confession times are published as structured content on the page, not buried in a PDF. If your times are managed in ChurchSuite, they’re pulled through automatically, so what Google sees is never out of date. See ChurchSuite integration.
Page titles and descriptions written for search Every page gets a unique, descriptive title and description — “Mass Times — St Mark’s RC Parish, Ipswich” rather than “Home.” You can edit them yourself through clearly labelled fields, or leave them alone and they’ll stay correct.
Local and diocesan signals Your town, parish name and diocese appear naturally through the site’s content. Ian will also help you request a link from your diocesan website if one isn’t already there — high-authority diocesan links are among the most valuable a parish can hold.
Analytics you can actually read Google Analytics is configured on every plan so you can see how many people are finding you and what they’re looking for. On the Complete plan, you get a plain-English monthly report instead of a dashboard you’ll never open.
1. A free visibility call. Ian looks at where your parish currently appears — or doesn’t — and tells you honestly what’s holding it back. No obligation, no report to buy.
2. Setup. Google Business Profile, structured data, page titles, Mass times, analytics. Handled entirely by Ian as part of your site build or as an addition to your existing Expanse site.
3. It stays done. On Essentials, the configuration stays in place and correct. On Complete, Ian monitors it monthly and tells you what’s changing.
Plans
Parish Essentials
£59/mo
SEO configuration + Google Analytics
Structured data & clean URLs
Google Business Profile setup
Parish Complete
£99/mo
SEO configuration + Google Analytics
Structured data & clean URLs
Google Business Profile setup
Ongoing SEO monitoring & reporting
Monthly performance report
Quarterly review call
In short: every plan gets the SEO set up correctly. The Complete plan is for parishes who want someone keeping an eye on it.
It’s a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer.
Search engine optimisation sounds like marketing language, and in most contexts it is. For a parish it’s something plainer: making sure that a person who is already looking for you can find you. Nobody is being persuaded of anything. They typed the words themselves.
The people who search are often the ones least likely to walk in unannounced — the family who has just moved, the young adult working out whether they’d be welcome, the bereaved relative who needs to reach a priest today. Being findable is the digital equivalent of leaving the church door unlocked.
If you want to understand the mechanics yourself rather than hand it over, that’s a perfectly good option too — Chapter 7 of the Parish Website Guide covers it in full, free, with no requirement to become a client.
Common questions
No, and be wary of anyone who promises it. Nobody controls Google’s rankings. What can be promised is that the things within your control are done properly and kept correct — and for local searches in your own town, where the competition is a handful of nearby churches rather than the whole internet, that is usually enough to make a real difference.
Google Business Profile changes can show within days. Changes to how your website ranks typically take six to twelve weeks to settle. Anyone quoting faster than that is guessing.
Very little. Ian needs your correct parish details, your Mass times, and access to your Google Business Profile if one already exists. After that it’s handled. The one thing worth doing yourself is encouraging parishioners to leave a Google review and responding when they do — that genuinely helps, and only you can do it.
It’s a good start, and it’s often the problem. Most parish listings are unverified, have the wrong category, list opening hours that aren’t Mass times, or show a photograph taken on a phone in 2015. Ian will audit what’s there and fix it rather than starting again.
SEO isn’t sold as a standalone service — it’s part of the managed platform, because most of what makes a parish site findable is built into how the site itself is constructed. If you’re on another platform and want an honest opinion on what’s wrong, Ian is still happy to have the conversation.
That’s exactly what the structured data is for. It won’t happen on every search, because Google decides what to display — but marking the data up correctly is the only way to make it possible, and most parish websites don’t.
No. The setup is the same on every plan and that’s the part that matters most. Complete adds ongoing monitoring, a monthly report, and a quarterly call — useful if you want to see the effect, unnecessary if you’d rather it just quietly worked.
Get in touch
No contract. Monthly rolling. One month’s notice, and full content export on request if you ever leave.