Most advice about seo for architects is written as though every practice is at the same point, which is why so much of it feels useless. A two person studio with a Squarespace site and a forty person firm with a decade of case studies need almost nothing in common. What follows is organised by where you actually are, so you can skip to your own situation and ignore the rest.
Four stages. Most practices recognise themselves within the first paragraph of one of them.
Stage One: You Have a Website But Nothing Arrives From Search
Symptoms are easy to spot. All your work comes from referrals and repeat clients. Your site exists mainly so people who already know your name can check you are real.
The work at this stage is unglamorous and almost all of it is yours to do.
Install Google Search Console, because every decision after this needs that data. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile, with real project photography rather than stock images. Then go through your project pages and give each one a heading that names what the building is and where it sits, because “Project 14” tells a search engine nothing.
Ask five past clients for reviews this month. Not a campaign, just five emails.
Nobody needs hiring at this stage. If an agency pitches you a retainer while these basics are missing, they are selling you optimisation on top of nothing.
Stage Two: You Appear for Your Own Name But Nothing Else
This is the most common place for a practice to sit, often for years.
Search your practice name and you rank first. Search “architect” plus your city and you are nowhere. The site works, it is simply invisible for anything that is not already a name someone knows.
Three pieces of work matter here, roughly in this order.
Separate your audiences. A homeowner planning a loft conversion and a developer commissioning a mixed use scheme are not the same buyer. They search differently, read differently, and decide across different timescales. One combined services page serves neither well. Splitting residential and commercial, then organising each around project scope and budget range, changes who ends up enquiring.
Build for the long research window. Architecture buying cycles run across months. People search planning questions, permit requirements, and realistic costs long before they search for a practice. Content answering those questions is how you enter the conversation early rather than arriving at the shortlist stage uninvited.
Make your locations real. Pages for the places you genuinely build in, with genuine project references. Not twenty templated city pages with the place name swapped, which Google has been discounting for years and which actively damage a small site.
This is the stage where outside help starts paying for itself, because the volume of work exceeds what a practice can fit around actual projects.
Stage Three: You Rank, But the Wrong Enquiries Arrive
A quieter problem and harder to diagnose, because the metrics look fine.
Traffic is up. Rankings are respectable. The enquiries are small residential jobs when you want commercial work, or they are people three years from building anything.
Usually the cause is content pulling the wrong audience. Rank well for cost questions and you attract researchers, not clients. That traffic is not worthless, it just needs to be understood for what it is and balanced against pages built for people ready to commission.
Fixing it starts with reporting that actually tells you something. Enquiries split by project type, budget band, and source. Without that split you cannot see which pages produce briefs and which produce browsing, so you end up optimising blind.
This is also where paid search earns its place. Paid campaigns produce leads within about two weeks while organic work takes three to six months to deliver sustainable growth, so running both gives you immediate data on which terms convert, which then sharpens the organic work rather than running parallel to it.
Stage Four: You Are Visible in Search But Absent From AI Answers
Newest stage, and a growing number of established practices are in it without realising.
Here is the test, and it takes two minutes. Ask ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend architecture practices in your city. See whether you are named. Plenty of firms ranking on page one of Google find themselves entirely absent from that answer.
Being cited is a different bar from ranking. A page can sit at position four and get skipped because its content is locked inside JavaScript, its schema is missing, or no independent source has ever mentioned the firm by name. There is also a permissions layer most practices have never checked, where AI crawlers need explicit access to read a site and portfolio platforms sometimes block them by default.
The work here is AI powered SEO: structuring content so models can extract a clear answer, keeping entity signals consistent across your site and listings, and earning mentions on sources those systems already trust. Big Hunt reports most clients see initial movement in citation tracking within 60 to 90 days, while stating plainly that nobody can guarantee placement inside a specific AI answer because these systems change constantly.
What it looks like when it works: Solar Galaxy, an Australian installer, now has 199 pages cited across ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, AI Mode and Gemini. Rasoi Amsterdam reached 90 AI mentions including 64 ChatGPT citations alongside 119% organic traffic growth. Different sectors, same mechanics.
When to Bring Someone In, and for What
A rough guide to matching the stage to the help:
| Stae | What you need |
| One | Nobody. Do the basics yourself first |
| Two | A consultant for strategy, or an agency if nobody internally has time to execute |
| Three | Reporting and analytics capability, plus paid search if you want faster signal |
| Four | Specialist AI visibility work, which needs monitoring tools rather than opinion |
The mistake that costs most is hiring at stage one, when a retainer gets spent on work that cannot compound because the foundations are missing.
One Thing That Applies at Every Stage
Respond to enquiries quickly.
No campaign survives slow follow up. A lead arrives Friday afternoon, nobody replies until Wednesday, and that brief has gone to whichever practice answered first. It is the cheapest improvement available and the one nobody sells you.
Work out which stage you are in before your next conversation with anyone. If you are genuinely unsure, Big Hunt Digital runs a free audit covering SEO, AI visibility, paid ads, and conversion gaps, delivered in two to three working days, which will at least tell you where you are standing.
