Home / Architecture Firm Marketing
Architects are usually paid a percentage of construction cost. That single fact should change everything about how a practice markets itself, and almost never does.
A firm that doubles its enquiries and keeps the same average project size has doubled its admin, its consultation load and its unpaid proposal writing. A firm that keeps the same number of enquiries and raises average project value has made more money and done less work. Volume is the wrong target in this profession.
If your fee is a percentage of construction cost, a small extension and a whole-house remodel are not the same enquiry with different numbers. They are different businesses. Ten enquiries for small projects can be worth less than one enquiry for the right project, and they consume far more of your time.
An agency reporting "cost per lead" without knowing your average project value is reporting a number that cannot be acted on. The figure that matters is the cost of acquiring the kind of project you actually want more of.
Projects take years. The work on your website is often three to five years old, and the best recent thing may be under an NDA because the client is private. This is normal in architecture and almost unique to it.
Practically it means your website cannot rely on the portfolio alone to do the selling, because your best current work is frequently the work you cannot show. What fills that gap is process: how you handle a difficult site, how you deal with a planning refusal, what happens when the budget moves. Prospective clients read that as competence in a way that another set of finished photographs does not.
A homeowner about to commit a large sum to a design professional judges on images first and everything else second. A beautifully executed project photographed badly loses to a modest project photographed well. This is the most common expensive mistake in the profession and it is entirely fixable.
If a practice has no photography budget, that is the first conversation to have, before any marketing spend. I will say so rather than take the retainer and work around it.
Most practices are built on referrals and repeat developer relationships, which works beautifully until a key relationship ends, a developer pauses, or the market turns. Then the firm discovers it has never had to generate demand and does not know how. The time to build that is while the referrals are still flowing, not after.
Architects who have tried this are consistent about what actually goes wrong, and it is not that too few people enquire. Asked what the most frustrating part of getting new clients is, the most upvoted answer from a practice owner was "non-serious inquiries, people fishing for free information or trying to solicit your services at a heavily discounted fee that would basically put you out of business". Another put it as "weeding out the delusional from the serious".
One owner ranking third on page one described the result plainly: around four low-quality leads a year, of which maybe one signs, against an over 80% conversion rate on referrals. The website was not short of visibility. It was short of qualification.
So the work is filtering, not volume. An enquiry form that asks for location, project type, rough budget range and timeline. Pages that state a minimum project size in writing. Content that answers the fee question honestly enough that people who were never going to proceed leave before they reach you. That is unglamorous and it is the actual job.
If somebody promises you more enquiries without saying a word about which enquiries, they have not understood the complaint.
By the time somebody searches "architect near me", they have usually already decided to build, already spoken to two firms, and are comparing. That search is late and everyone is fighting for it.
The search that happens first looks nothing like it: "do I need a permit to add a second storey", "can I build an ADU on my lot", "how close to the property line can I build", "how long does entitlement take". Those happen six to twelve months earlier, while the homeowner is still deciding whether the project is possible at all.
Now the part most agencies selling this idea will not tell you: the generic version of it is already lost. Search "do I need a permit for a home addition" and you are competing with your own city's planning department, with Angi and HomeAdvisor, with every ADU builder in your metro, and in California with Symbium, which returns an instant address-level feasibility answer with the zoning already encoded. A blog post does not beat a parcel-level answer.
What actually works is narrower and it is the version individual firms already prove out rather than the version agencies sell. It is jurisdiction-specific and it is tied to an offer: a real feasibility assessment for a specific address, in the municipalities you actually practise in, that produces a written answer the homeowner cannot get anywhere else. Firms doing this sell it as a paid feasibility study and it becomes the front end of the design commission.
The genuinely open ground is that no agency serving architects is positioned on this at all. They sell brand, website, social and Houzz. That is the gap, and it is a gap in positioning rather than in keywords.
A practitioner described it as roughly eighteen months end to end: about six months to find a decent client, six more before they have work ready, and six after that before the money actually arrives. Nobody budgets for that, so retainers get cancelled in month four while the pipeline they paid for is still filling.
I would rather say this before you hire me than have you discover it. If you cannot fund twelve months, do not start. And if we are three months in with no enquiries, that is expected rather than evidence of failure, which is a conversation worth having on day one instead of day ninety.
On developer-driven work your fee is paid out of the developer's own equity, before financing arrives. The contractor is paid from the construction loan. As one architect put it on Archinect, that makes every dollar paid to the architect worth several times more to the developer than a dollar paid to the contractor.
That is why the fee negotiation feels disproportionate to the amount. It is not that they undervalue the design. It is that your invoice comes out of a different and much more painful pocket. A practice that understands this argues differently, and so should anyone writing on its behalf.
Practices doing substantial commercial work usually should not lead with SEO, and I would rather say that here than take a retainer and discover it in month four. Commercial and institutional work is won through relationships, reputation, shortlists and previous delivery. Search plays a supporting role at best.
Where search genuinely earns its place for a larger firm is narrower and worth naming precisely: recruitment, because good architects research firms before applying; credibility, because a client who was referred to you will still search you before the first meeting and what they find decides the tone of it; and the specific residential or specialist arm many mixed firms run alongside the commercial work, which behaves like a small practice and responds to exactly the same levers.
If that is your situation, the useful conversation is which of those three applies, not how many keywords you rank for.
Permits, zoning, setbacks, ADU rules, what triggers a variance, what a project of a given size realistically costs in your area. Written accurately for your jurisdiction, which is the part a national competitor cannot copy.
Your Google Business Profile, the towns and neighbourhoods you genuinely serve, and the project types you want more of. Not fifty thin city pages, which do not rank any more and dilute the pages that could.
The brief, the constraint, the thing that nearly went wrong, and how it was resolved. A gallery shows that you can design. A case study shows that you can be trusted with a difficult site and a nervous client, which is what the enquiry is actually about.
Most practice websites ask a prospective client to write an unstructured email. A short, well-designed enquiry form that asks about location, project type, rough budget range and timeline qualifies the enquiry before it reaches you, and politely filters the ones that were never going to proceed.
Directory dependence. Houzz and its equivalents work, and they are also rent. Every enquiry you buy there is one you did not own, and the moment you stop paying it stops. Use them while your own visibility is built, then reduce the dependence deliberately.
Awards-and-philosophy content. It matters to peers and to juries. It does not answer the question a homeowner types at 11pm when they are wondering whether their loft conversion is even legal.
It should, and that is a reasonable reaction. The people who own this category have trained you to expect a pitch with no substance. The difference I can offer is checkable: before any call I look at your site and your search visibility and tell you what I would fix first, whether or not you hire me. If that conversation is not specific to your business, you will know inside five minutes and you should end it.
I am based in India and I work with clients in the United States, the UK and Israel. Saying that plainly is better than letting you find it out later. What it means in practice: my afternoon and evening covers the whole UK working day and the US morning, so you get same-day replies rather than overnight ones. What it does not mean is a team of juniors. You get me, which is also the limit, because I take a small number of clients at once.
This is the most common thing I hear and usually the story is the same: a long contract, a monthly report full of numbers that went up while the phone did not ring, and no way to leave. So there is no contract here. You can stop at the end of any month, and the site, the content, the tracking and the ad accounts are yours from day one, in your name, not mine.
Because traffic is not what gets reported. The events that matter are phone taps, form submits and booking clicks, tracked from the first week so that by month two we can both see which pages produce enquiries and which produce visits. If a page brings people and no enquiries, that is a finding, not something to bury under a sessions chart.
You should not have to. What I need from you is roughly an hour a month, plus answers when something needs a decision only you can make. If a project needs more of your time than that, I will say so before it starts.
Written out because the fear with any agency is not the price, it is not knowing what happens after you pay.
| When | What happens | What you have to do |
|---|---|---|
| Before the call | I look at your site, your Search Console if you will share it, and the two or three competitors who actually take work from you. | Nothing. |
| The call, 30 minutes | I tell you what I would fix first and roughly what it is worth. If search is the wrong spend for your situation, I say so here. | Answer questions about how enquiries reach you now. |
| Week 1 | Conversion tracking goes in first, so phone taps, form submits and booking clicks are measured from the start. Full technical crawl. You get a written list of what is broken, ordered by what it is costing you. | Access to the site and the analytics. |
| Weeks 2 to 3 | The fixes that need nothing from you: the technical faults, the pages that rank but do not convert, the enquiry path itself. | About an hour, reviewing anything client-facing. |
| Week 4 | First written update. What was done, what moved, what did not, and what is next. Not a dashboard. | Read it and tell me if the priorities are wrong. |
| Month 2 onward | The slower work: content, local visibility, links. Monthly written update in the same format. | An hour a month. |
Who you deal with: me, every time. There is no account manager and no handover to a junior, which is the advantage and also the reason I keep the client list short.
What happens if it is not working: you leave at the end of any month and keep everything. I would rather you did that in month three than stay unhappy for a year, because the referrals I get from people who left on good terms are worth more than one uncomfortable retainer.
I publish this because almost nobody in this field does. Search for marketing help for an architecture practice and you will find a dozen firms asking you to book a call before they will tell you anything. That is not confidentiality, it is a qualification filter, and you are the one paying for it in time.
Where you land above that depends on scope. A two person residential practice and a fifteen person firm doing mixed commercial work need completely different amounts of work, and a practice already booked for two years needs pricing advice rather than marketing. What I will not do is quote the top of a range before I have looked at your site.
What is fixed regardless of scope: it is a monthly retainer starting at $800, there is no contract, you can cancel any month, and everything I build stays yours including the site, the content and the ad accounts. If we run ads, that spend goes to Google in your own account and I do not mark it up.
These are not packages and there is no tier you get upsold into. It is simply what the work looks like at different sizes of practice, so you can see where you probably sit before we speak.
| If your practice looks like this | The work is mostly |
|---|---|
| One or two people, one municipality, residential | Google Business Profile, the enquiry path, and permit and feasibility answers for your single jurisdiction. This is where $800 a month sits. |
| Established practice, several municipalities, mixed residential | The above across each jurisdiction you actually work in, plus project pages rebuilt as case studies and a steady content cadence. More municipalities is more work, and that is the honest driver of the number. |
| Larger firm, commercial or mixed, multiple project types | A different problem entirely. Commercial work is won on relationships and reputation rather than local search, so the honest answer is usually less SEO and more positioning, case studies and the site itself. If that is you, say so on the call and I will tell you whether search is even the right spend. |
For context on the top of that range: a practice running several municipalities with an ongoing content programme and a feasibility offer built for it is a low four figures a month, not $800. I am telling you that rather than letting you find out on the call, because the opposite approach is what the whole field does and it wastes everybody's time.
The reason the floor is published at all is that on a field of seventeen agencies serving this profession, only two publish any number whatsoever. Everyone else requires a call before they will tell you what anything costs. That is not confidentiality. It is a qualification filter, and you are the one paying for it in time.
What the first call is: 30 minutes, no deck. I will have looked at your site and your search visibility before we speak, so I can tell you what I would do first and roughly what it is worth. If the honest answer is that you do not need me, I will say so on that call rather than three months in.
I currently work with one architecture practice, in the Pacific Northwest. One is not a pattern and I am not going to present it as one, and the client is not named because that is their call to make rather than mine.
What transfers directly is the diagnostic work, which is not sector specific: finding where a local professional service is losing people between the search and the enquiry. A local search rescue that moved a service business from position seven to position two in the map pack over 90 days, and a form rebuild that took conversion from 1.4% to 12.3% on the same traffic, are both written up lever by lever, including the levers that did nothing, on my case studies page.
You can also check me independently, and this is the part I cannot edit: my public Upwork record shows 225 jobs at a 100% Job Success Score.
Before you talk to anyone, including me, it helps to know what you are actually buying. These are free and there is no signup:
Historically through referral, repeat developer relationships and word of mouth, which is why most practices have never built a demand engine. The firms that add a second channel usually do it through local search and through answering the practical questions homeowners ask long before they are ready to hire: permits, zoning, feasibility and realistic cost.
It depends on whether you work in a defined geography and whether you want a different mix of project. If you are a two person practice already booked for two years, the honest answer is no, and you should be raising fees instead. If you want larger or different projects, local search is one of the few channels where a small firm can outrank a large one, because the large one is not writing about your city.
It starts at $800 a month. I publish that because almost nobody in this field will, and being made to sit through a sales call to learn a number wastes your time. Where you land above $800 depends on scope, because a two person residential practice and a fifteen person mixed firm need different work. Fixed regardless: no contract, cancel any month, and everything built stays yours.
Local search usually shows first movement in roughly 60 to 90 days, which is an estimate and not a guarantee. But architecture has an unusually long consideration period, so an enquiry arriving in month four may have first read your site in month one. If you need results inside 90 days, this is the wrong channel and I would say so.
It works, and it is rent. Every enquiry you get there is one you do not own, and it stops the day you stop paying. It is a reasonable stopgap while your own visibility is built and a poor permanent strategy. The goal is to reduce the dependence deliberately rather than to pretend the platform has no value.
Yes, and usually in your favour. Design-build removes the handover between architect and contractor, which is one of the things homeowners are most anxious about. That is a genuine selling point most design-build firms bury rather than lead with.
That is normal in this profession, particularly in private residential. It is why the content has to carry process rather than only images: how you handled a constrained site, a planning refusal, or a budget that moved. Clients read process as competence, and it is publishable when the photographs are not.
I do. Sprout Sage Solutions is founder led, so the person reading your Search Console on Monday morning is the person you spoke to on the call.
Thirty minutes. Tell me where your last few customers came from and what you could handle more of. I will tell you whether marketing is your constraint or whether something else is, and I will say so plainly if it is not.