If you run an architectural studio you'll know that a single successful lead can guarantee you work for years to come.
There's several ways to go about winning leads for new architectural projects, but today we're focussing on one - SEO - my area of expertise. For the past decade I have worked with property related brands on their SEO and seen the results that it can bring. So, following on from recent posts about SEO for luxury brands, SEO for interior designers, plus SEO for kitchen designers, this time the focus is on SEO for architects and architectural firms.
What follows are 5 SEO tips specific to the world of architecture. However, this post goes into a little more detail about how to really maximise your SEO efforts so you can generate a source of leads which are both the right quality and the right number. Here's what we'll be covering:
THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SEO FOR ARCHITECTS
Running a busy architectural practice means marketing, let alone SEO, is often a neglected area; something that you'll get around to when there's a quiet spell. Yet, a small amount of regular effort can create a consistent pipeline of relevant high value clients.
DEMAND FOR ARCHITECTURE SERVICES ON GOOGLE
Looking at data from 2022 to today (July 2024) we can see that the demand for architecture has remained consistently strong with anywhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 searches a month within the UK for everything that falls under architecture - a healthy market to be tapping into. Throughout the year the market will rise and fall with both January/February and September/October being key months for new business.
LEARNING MORE ABOUT SEO
SEO can sometimes not be all that easy to understand. Labelled as something of a dark art, the term Search Engine Optimisation is actually a narrow term for a broad set tactics. Some of the approaches are creative and some are technical - but all of them, much like a new building, really work well when they're baked into the fabric of a project, rather than layered on top at the last minute.
Learning everything you could about SEO wouldn't be recommended, but understanding the basics is often helpful so you can think about your firms website in a more holistic way. One of the places I always recommend people start with is the Beginners Guide to SEO from Moz. It's a valuable resource, regularly updated and explains everything clear and comprehensive way. And if you don't feel that it's something that you want to pursue yourself, then you can always look at hiring a freelance SEO consultant like myself. Get in touch to organise an initial zero obligation chat.
THE DIFFERENT AREAS OF SEO
For the purposes of this post here's the different areas of SEO which we will touch on throughout:
ON-SITE SEO | A broad term which covers everything you can normally see on your website such as links, images, the copy and your meta data. All of this can all be tweaked and changed to affect performance in Google results.
OFF-SITE SEO | Everything you can find about your business not on your website. This includes links and other brand mentions which Google can look at as a vote of trust, influencing where a website appears in the results.
TECHNICAL SEO | Everything to do with the code of the website to make sure it loads fast, securely and works in a way which means Google can find, read and index the content of your website.
CONTENT MARKETING | In the world of architecture, content marketing can include case studies and blog posts made up of video, images and copy which can help bring in additional people to the website and also underpin the foundations of the rest of the website.
LOCAL SEO | This focusses on the optimisation of your Google My Business listing that when someone searches for something with local intent e.g. 'commercial architects manchester', your firm is more likely to appear.
THE 5 TIPS TO MAXIMISE WEBSITE TRAFFIC FOR ARCHITECTS
Whether you focus on residential or commercial builds, cater to clients in the local area or those with an international property portfolio, these are the most often overlooked areas of SEO on architects websites.
Working on these, or incorporating them into a new site design should help maximise your chances for more traffic and more leads via your website.
TIP 1: CHOOSING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
ON-SITE SEO
Within SEO we talk a lot about keywords. These are the words or phrases that we know from Google that people search for. We can see how many times a month they are searched for, where in the world the searches happen and how these searches change over time.
What these tools don't tell you however is if the keyword is truly relevant for your firm.
Keyword Types: Most architects will focus their SEO efforts on people looking for:
Architects in a specific location - e.g 'architects in oxford' - this could apply to a specific town, county or region
Architects that specialise in a particular property type - e.g 'commercial architects london' - other terms could include residential architects, industrial architects, listed building architects etc
Architects that specialise in a particular specialism - e.g. 'passivhaus architects' - other example terms could include sip architects, RIBA architects, restoration architects etc
The goal is to pick a keyword - and then ensure your keyword aligns perfectly with your business and services offered. If you are based in Kent but are happy to work with clients across the country, then choosing a location based keyword makes little sense. Instead you can focus your keyword on the searches made that distinguish you from the majority of other architectural firms in the country.
NEXT STEPS
Use Google Keyword Planner to explore the different keywords available to you. Once chosen, this keyword becomes your most important keyword and should be applied to your home page as it's often the strongest page on a website - most likely to rank. Information for how to do this can be found the Beginner's Guide to SEO from Moz, mentioned earlier.
TIP 2: BUILDING MORE PAGES
CONTENT MARKETING
Generally, architects seem to prefer minimalist website designs - something that is clean and crisp that often ends up as a single webpage promoting a practice.
While this looks good, minimal pages on a website will limit your ability to rank for several different search terms at the same time.
Much like choosing your initial keywords, you will find with keyword research that there are multiple other keywords which would be relevant for your practice. These could be areas the practice specialises in (such as church architecture), specific services (such as sustainability consultancy) or complementary services (such as interior design).
Each service you offer deserves a page. And with the right design, you can ensure that you have multiple pages while still retaining a clean and minimalist look.
These pages can be commercial in nature, or they can be projects you list, or blog posts you write. Regardless, each one of these pages then represents an additional opportunity to rank for something relevant in Google, bringing in separate strands of traffic.
NEXT STEPS
Map out all the different things your architectural practice does. Group them together and compare these to your keyword research to see what pages you could create. Looking at websites from other architects makes this process a lot easier to see how they have structured things.
TIP 3: OPTIMISING YOUR IMAGES & VIDEOS
TECHNICAL SEO
The images and video on an architects site are the selling point to convince prospective customers into making contact. Trying to translate the tactile nature of a build via a digital format is hard though, so naturally architects will opt for big videos and big images that really showcase their work.
Here is just one example from Living Space Architects who have a full width image carousel of 11 different high quality images on their home page.
While this works well visually, the way such images and videos can be uploaded are almost always slowing down your site. Often it isn't surprising to see images which are more than 15mb in size, when in an ideal scenario all images on a page wouldn't be any larger than 3mb.
The speed of a page is one of the many items Google looks at when deciding where to rank a website in its results. This is part of something known as Core Web Vitals. Not only that, slow websites are directly linked to fewer conversions. There's some excellent stats on this from Hubspot here. So, the goal is something which loads fast, without compromising on quality.
Want to see how fast your webpage is loading? Use GTmetrix to test your website speed.
IMAGE OPTIMISATION
With images, you can follow a two-step process of resizing your images and then compressing them. This will make the file size smaller and load time quicker - while keeping images crisp and clear.
Resize your image to fit the image dimensions of the screen you would envisage seeing it on. Loading up an image which would work on a billboard isn't necessary if most people are viewing the page on a smartphone. For reference all images on this post have a width of 1200px.
Play around with different rates of image compression using tools just as Compress Jpg or TinyPNG. These tools will show you the reduced file size you could have without losing the crispness of an image.
Bonus: As well as optimising images for site speed, make sure you call the image file name something relevant. Plus, always add alt-text. Both of these add additional signals for Google to understand what a page is about, hopefully helping the page to rank further.
VIDEO OPTIMISATION
Video optimisation tends to be harder to achieve and will often require the role of a developer. However, before you do this:
Ask yourself, is the video really needed? Often small animations which don't add much to a page can take up a considerable percentage of a pages size. Could it be removed and swapped for an image?
Does it need to be a video? Depending on the content, could the file be switched for something like a GIF?
Could the video be moved? If you still need a video, but its presence could be slowing down a particularly important page, can it be moved to its own separate page and linked to instead? That way, the main page you've worked hard to optimise has the best chance of ranking.
NEXT STEPS
Work through the key pages on your website to see how your images and video are affecting your load times. From there, try to reduce the file size of these elements either by using these tools or hiring a website developer.
TIP 4: OPTIMISING YOUR GOOGLE MY BUSINESS LISTING
LOCAL SEO
Any well-established architectural practice is also going to have a Google My Business listing. It's critical for giving the right impression for a brand before someone has even clicked through to a website.
Your Google My Business listing also has the opportunity to rank on Google in its own right, particularly with local searches such as 'architects near farringdon' for instance. There are a stack of different elements which can be adjusted on a Google My Business listing to help it to rank more often and more highly for relevant search terms. There's advice on that here with a guide from Backlinko.
However, one of the most important elements which seem to influence rankings is reviews - and lots of them.
Not only does a large number of reviews defend against that almost inevitable 1 star rating from someone with an axe to grind, these reviews strongly power an architects listing helping them to appear more often in the map pack, of which only 3 results are ever shown at any one time.
Acquiring reviews is harder than in other industries though. The number of clients you may work with annually is never going to be many and even when a project has been successfully signed off clients privacy may make them reluctant to participate. If this is a challenge, you can ask the various suppliers you work with to contribute instead. With so many different companies involved in a build from the groundworkers, window specialists, interior designers and landscapers there should be an ample supply of people to contact.
NEXT STEPS
Compare how many reviews you have to that of your competitors for your keywords. From there, contact the various suppliers you collaborate with on projects to go about getting more 5* reviews for your firm.
TIP 5: APPEARING ON OTHER WEBSITES FOR LINKS AND TRAFFIC
OFFSITE SEO
When I work on any website, I have to be realistic about the possibilities of it being able to rank in the top spots on Google, particularly for competitive phrases. One of the many areas clients and I work on together is off-site SEO, which you may also have heard of as link building.
Building links is a crucial part of any SEO strategy but how much you need to do it and in what way you approach it is very much dependent on your individual circumstances. However, I can say with certainty that more links from relevant high quality websites is always better.
Winning more links from other websites give architects two advantages:
A firms website receives a link from another relevant website - this is seen as a vote of trust in the eyes of Google helping to influence where a page ranks in the search results.
A firm receive more eyes and traffic from visitors on other websites who are able to rank pages in the search results which they wouldn't be rank for by themselves.
Where to win links for an architects website can be broadly divided into 3 areas:
Architectural directories, journals and websites -
RIBA Journal, Dezeen, Archdaily, Architect's Journal, Design Boom, Wallpaper*, Building Design, Houzz.
Design & Lifestyle websites -
Surrey Life (or your local equivalent). House & Garden, Grand Designs Magazine, Homes & Gardens, Country Life.
Websites of your suppliers and collaborators -
This could include Acoustic Consultants, Artists, Sculptors and Photographers, Bathroom & Kitchen Suppliers, Civil Engineers, HVAC Specialists, Interior Designers, IT and Communications Consultants, Land Agents, Landscape Gardeners, Lighting Designers, Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing (MEP) Engineers, Quantity Surveyors, Relocation Consultants, Structural Engineers, Surveyors, Sustainability Consultants.
Not all of these will be possible and not all of these will be relevant. However, by winning just a few links from websites such as these can help a website gain more authority as well as tap into a rich source of relevant customers.
NEXT STEPS
Draw up a list of people and websites you could potentially contact for the chance of gaining a link. Next think about what angles would work well for each website. Could a recent project be showcased, or a quote given about something in the news? Are you doing something innovate with materials or do you have stats or data which would be of interest to the wider market? All of this could be valuable to the right people in order for them to feature you.
These 5 areas of SEO are some of the more common areas which are often neglected by architects. However, there's a lot more when it comes to websites that can also be worked on.
If you're aware that SEO is something your firm should be investing in to win new projects but aren't sure where to start then send me a message. With over a decade of experience working in SEO I've been able to see first hand how much it can help generate new enquiries. Get in touch to organise an initial zero obligation chat.
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