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Attract better-fit projects and grow your practice with SEO for architects.

    What we do / See how you rank / Your SEO ROI / Who we are / FAQs

    What we do

    Planning

    Before we touch anything on your site, we find out exactly where you stand. We look at what your competitors are ranking for, what your potential clients are actually searching, and where the real opportunities are for your firm. Architecture is a niche market with niche search behaviour — the strategy we build for you reflects that.

    Local & regional visibility

    Most architecture commissions start with a local search. We make sure you show up when someone in your area searches for an architect, whether that's a homeowner planning an extension or a developer scouting firms for a commercial project. We cover your city, your surrounding towns, and the specific areas where you want to win work.

    Project pages

    Your portfolio is probably the strongest thing on your website. It's also almost certainly doing nothing for your SEO. We turn your completed projects into properly optimised case study pages that rank for the type of work you actually want more of — whether that's barn conversions, urban residential, commercial fit-outs, or anything in between.

    Technical SEO

    Architecture websites tend to be visually stunning and technically painful for Google. Heavy image files, slow load times, poor mobile performance, each of these issues undermines every other bit of SEO work you do. We go through your site from the ground up, fix what's holding you back, and make sure Google can properly find and rank every page you have.

    Content

    Most people spend weeks researching before they contact an architect. We create content that puts you in front of them during that research phase, answering the questions they're already asking and building trust before you've even spoken. That traffic builds steadily over time, and unlike paid ads, it doesn't stop the moment you turn off the budget.

    Specialism pages

    If you do extensions, new builds, heritage work, commercial projects and school buildings, you shouldn't have one page trying to cover all of them. We build dedicated pages for each specialism you want to grow, so you rank specifically for the type of work that suits your firm rather than showing up vaguely for everything.

    Houzz & Google Business

    Your website is only part of the picture. We make sure your Google Business Profile, Houzz listing, and any other relevant directories are fully optimised, consistent, and actively working alongside your site. These off-site profiles carry real weight in local search and are often the first thing a potential client sees.

    Press coverage

    Links from relevant, credible websites are still one of the strongest trust signals Google uses. We build them through local press coverage, architecture and design publications, and property industry mentions — the kind of authority that takes time to build and is genuinely difficult for competitors to replicate once you have it.

    Reporting

    Every month you get a clear, plain-English report. Where your traffic came from, which keywords improved, and what it all means in terms of real enquiries and project opportunities. Nothing but straight answers on whether your SEO is working and what we're doing next.

    See how you're ranking

    You know which firms are winning the big commissions in your area. But do you know how your website compares to theirs? Search for your practice below and see exactly how you stack up on traffic, rankings, backlinks and site speed with real data.
    We gather data on architecture firms from a combination of sources: Ahrefs for keyword rankings, domain authority and backlink profiles, a direct crawl of each firm’s website, and PageSpeed Insights for load time and technical performance. Traffic figures are modelled from keyword rankings and estimated click-through rates, so they represent a snapshot of organic search visibility rather than verified Analytics data. That said, they’re a very reliable indicator of how a firm is performing in search relative to its competitors.
    It may be that we haven’t indexed your firm yet, particularly if you’re a smaller or newer practice. Get in touch and we’ll add you to the database, or run you a free SEO audit that covers your site and your closest competitors in detail. Similarly, if there’s a competitor missing, let us know who you’d like to compare against and we’ll add them. Alternatively, a free audit will give you an even more detailed picture of where you stand relative to any firm you specify.
    The tool works best when you’re comparing like for like. An eight-person commercial practice and a two-person residential studio serve very different markets, so benchmarking them against each other won’t tell you much. Try to choose firms that compete with you for similar project types, in similar locations, or at a similar scale. If you’re not sure where to start, the “compare to average” toggle gives you a useful sense of where you sit relative to the broader market rather than specific rivals.
    Domain rating is a score out of 100, calculated by Ahrefs, that reflects the strength of a website’s backlink profile: essentially, how many other sites link to it and how credible those sites are. In practical terms, a firm with a higher domain rating is better positioned to rank for competitive search terms like “architect in Leeds” or “heritage architect Manchester.” It’s one of several factors that influence rankings, but it’s one of the most meaningful ones, and it’s very hard to build quickly. If a competitor has a significantly higher domain rating than you, that’s worth understanding.
    Architecture websites are often image-heavy by necessity; you’re showcasing your work, and that work needs to look good. But large image files, unoptimised galleries and bloated page builders can quietly wreck your load times, and slow sites are penalised by Google regardless of how good the content is. A beautiful website that takes four seconds to load will consistently underperform a plainer one that loads in under a second. Site speed sits alongside traffic and authority in this tool because sometimes the gap between you and a competitor has nothing to do with content or links. It’s a technical issue that’s entirely fixable.

    SEO ROI calculator

    Architecture firms spend years building a reputation through word of mouth and referrals. SEO builds the same kind of trust online, except it compounds over time and you own it outright. Put your numbers in below and see what a steady increase in organic traffic could realistically mean for your practice.
    Search for your practice in the box at the top to pull in your estimated monthly organic traffic. Then add your average monthly enquiries from the website, your typical project value, and the traffic increase you want to target. The calculator works out how long it would take for the additional revenue to cover the cost of an SEO campaign.
    The calculator uses your own inputs alongside projected growth figures based on how SEO typically performs for architecture practices. It models that growth across twelve months, reflecting the reality that early months involve a lot of groundwork before rankings start to shift. The projections are structured estimates rather than guarantees, but the assumptions are consistent and the model reflects what we actually see with clients.
    Estimated traffic figures come from Ahrefs and Semrush, which model organic search visibility using keyword rankings and click-through rates. If you have access to Google Analytics or Search Console for your practice website, entering your verified monthly traffic figure will give you a more precise calculation than the estimate.
    Architecture SEO tends to have a longer runway than some other industries, partly because project values are high and search volumes are lower, and partly because the work involved in ranking for terms like “residential architect in York” or “heritage conversion specialist” requires building genuine authority over time. The calculator shows the month where cumulative revenue from additional traffic overtakes the cumulative cost of the campaign. For most practices that point falls somewhere between months six and ten.
    A modest traffic uplift might involve technical fixes and optimising your existing project pages. A more ambitious target means sustained content production around your specialisms, link building through architecture press and industry directories, and ongoing authority work. The bigger the goal, the more the work involved. Our pricing for architecture SEO is straightforward and you can get a clear sense of it when you run your numbers above.

    Who we are

    Rooted in Manchester

    Maybe you’ve tried doing SEO yourself instead of focusing on what you do best. Maybe you’ve invested in SEO and been given the runaround by an agency that knows how to send invoices and not much else. Or maybe you’re just not seeing the kind of return you want to see from your website. We speak to business owners just like you every day.

    We’re based in North Manchester, between Prestwich, Blackley and Cheetham Hill, right next to Heaton Park. From here, our team works with businesses just like yours across the city and beyond, putting clear plans in place, doing the work properly, and reporting on progress in a way that makes sense. 

    Your local SEO partner

    From Salford to Stockport, Oldham to Wigan, businesses across Greater Manchester trust us to make them more visible online. So whether you run a dental practice in Denton, an estate agent in Eccles, or some other business that starts with the same letter as where it is, our local SEO strategies can help you get found.

    We optimise Google Business Profiles, create location-focused content, build the right local backlinks, and structure websites to perform wherever you operate across Greater Manchester. 

    Click the interactive map to find out more about SEO where you’re based.

    Jamie Fallon

    My name's Jamie, I've been in SEO since 2016. Since then I've worked freelance, at agencies, and in-house as well as on my own websites - and now at Pollinate!

    Emily Shepherd

    Hi, I'm Emily! 👋🏻 I'm a passionate SEO content manager and writer with 6 years' agency and in-house experience. I'm in charge of content here at Pollinate.

    Latest posts

    Architect SEO FAQs

    Yes, and it tends to work particularly well for architecture. Most people spend a long time researching before they contact a firm, looking at portfolios, reading about different approaches, trying to understand costs and timelines. SEO puts you in front of those people during that research phase, on the searches that indicate genuine intent. A homeowner searching “architects for house extension in Leeds” is not browsing casually. Ranking for searches like that, consistently, generates real enquiries from people who are already partway through their decision.
    The honest answer is that trying to rank everywhere with a single page rarely works. Google wants to see that your content is genuinely relevant to a specific location, not just that you’ve mentioned a few place names. The most effective approach is building dedicated pages for each area you work in, each one written with real local relevance rather than a find-and-replace job. Done properly, those pages become some of your highest-performing assets and compound in value over time.
    More often than you might expect, yes. Large national firms tend to optimise for broad, high-competition terms and often neglect local search almost entirely. That’s where smaller regional firms can genuinely win. Someone searching for “architects in Sheffield” or “listed building specialist in York” wants a local firm with local knowledge, and Google knows that. A focused local SEO strategy targets the searches where you already have a natural advantage, rather than trying to out-muscle firms with ten times your budget.
    The main reason architecture firms don’t have many reviews is simply that nobody ever asks. Most satisfied clients are happy to leave one, they just need a prompt and a direct link that makes it as easy as possible. Timing matters too. Asking at the right moment, when a project has just completed and the client is pleased with the result, makes a significant difference to how many people actually follow through. A steady stream of recent, genuine reviews also carries more weight with Google than a batch of old ones, so building it into your process consistently is worth the small effort it takes.
    The most valuable content answers the questions your potential clients are already searching for, things like planning permission, build costs, what the design process actually looks like, and how to choose the right architect for a particular type of project. Case studies of completed work are also powerful, especially when they’re written to rank for the type of project rather than just to look good in a portfolio. The goal is to be genuinely useful to someone who is still making up their mind, so that by the time they contact you, they already feel like they know and trust your firm.
    Those star ratings come from something called review schema, a small piece of structured code added to your website that tells Google your review data is there and how to display it. Without it, Google either can’t show your ratings or won’t bother. It’s a technical implementation rather than something you can switch on from your Google account, but once it’s in place it makes a noticeable difference to how your listing looks compared to competitors, and a better-looking listing gets more clicks even when the ranking position is the same.
    Rankings are a useful indicator but they’re not the whole story. What you really want to see is whether the right kind of traffic is arriving at your site and whether that traffic is turning into enquiries. A good SEO report will show you which searches are bringing people to your site, how that has changed month on month, and most importantly, whether those visits are resulting in contact form submissions, calls, or other meaningful actions. If your reporting doesn’t connect SEO activity to real business outcomes, it’s not telling you enough.