Home / SEO for Architects
Most SEO advice aimed at architects is about ranking for "architect in [city]". That term matters, it is also late, contested, and it reaches someone who is already comparing two firms.
The larger and almost entirely unserved opportunity sits upstream, in the practical questions a homeowner asks while they are still deciding whether the project is possible at all.
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.
Your city's permit process, setback rules, height limits, ADU allowances, historic district constraints and what actually triggers a variance. Write it accurately for the municipalities you work in. A national site cannot compete with you on this and your local competitors are not writing it.
The practical test for whether a page is worth writing: could someone in another state have written it? If yes, it will not rank and it will not convert. If no, it is exactly right.
For a locally-serving practice this is frequently the highest return hour available, and it is free. Correct categories, real service areas, project photographs with sensible file names, and reviews requested as part of project closeout rather than remembered occasionally.
A gallery entry shows the outcome. A project page that states the brief, the site constraint, the obstacle and the resolution ranks for the searches people actually run, and it does the selling that photographs alone cannot. It also gives you something publishable when the client will not allow photography.
Architecture sites are image heavy by nature, and most are slow because of it. Uncompressed hero images, no lazy loading, and a gallery that loads forty full-resolution photographs at once. Fixing that is unglamorous and it is often the single biggest measurable improvement available on a practice website.
Ignore total sessions. A practice does not need traffic, it needs a small number of the right enquiries.
Measure enquiries by project type and by location, how many reached the point of a fee proposal, and what an enquiry from each source is actually worth given your fee model. If your fee is a percentage of construction cost, an enquiry for a whole-house project and one for a small extension are not comparable events and should never be counted in the same total.
Everything above is doable in-house if someone can write and has the time. The reason it usually does not happen is not difficulty, it is that content never beats billable work when both are on the same desk.
If you want it done rather than planned, this is the approach I take with architecture practices, and you can book a 30 minute call. No contract, cancel any month, and everything I build stays yours.
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 coverage. A single-municipality residential practice and a firm working across a metro with several project types need very different amounts of work, and the jurisdiction content is the part that scales the scope.
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.
One architecture client, in the Pacific Northwest. One is not a pattern and I am not going to imply otherwise.
The transferable proof is local search work that is not sector specific: a move from position seven to position two in the map pack over 90 days for a service business, and a form rebuild that took conversion from 1.4% to 12.3% on the same traffic. Written up lever by lever, including what did not work, on my case studies page.
Publicly verifiable and not editable by me: 225 Upwork 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:
It works when the practice serves a defined geography and wants a particular kind of project. It works poorly as a volume play, because a practice does not need traffic, it needs a small number of the right enquiries. The strongest angle is usually permit, zoning and feasibility content for your specific municipalities, which national competitors cannot write accurately.
Three groups. Local intent such as "architect in [city]" and "[project type] architect [city]". Feasibility questions such as "can I build an ADU in [city]" or "do I need a permit to add a second storey". And cost questions for the project types you want more of. The second group has the least competition and reaches people earliest.
Almost always images. Practice sites are image heavy by nature, and the common pattern is uncompressed hero images, no lazy loading, and galleries that load every full-resolution photograph at once. It is unglamorous to fix and frequently the single biggest measurable improvement available.
Mostly through your Google Business Profile rather than your website: correct categories, genuine service areas, real project photographs and a steady flow of reviews. Proximity to the searcher is a factor you cannot control, which is why feasibility and permit content matters so much. It reaches people who are not yet searching that way.
For peers, juries and recruitment, yes. For search, it does very little, because homeowners do not search for design philosophy. Publish it because it is true to the practice, not because it will bring enquiries.
Fewer than most agencies will tell you. A clear services structure, one page per project type you want more of, genuine location coverage for where you actually work, real case studies, and a growing set of jurisdiction-specific answers. Thin city pages built at scale do not rank and dilute the pages that could.
Locally, often yes. Large firms compete nationally and rarely write about a specific municipality's zoning code. That is precisely where a small practice has an advantage, because the content that wins requires local knowledge rather than budget.
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.