Run these twelve checks before you talk to anyone selling seo services for architects. Half of them you can fix yourself in a weekend. The other half need either technical skill or more hours than a practice principal has, and those are the ones worth paying for. Knowing which is which before the first sales call changes the entire conversation.
Score each check as pass or fail. Anything you fail in the first group is homework. Anything you fail in the second group is a brief.
Six Checks You Can Fix Yourself This Month
These need no agency, no budget, and no code. Most practices fail at least three.
- Google Search Console installed? If you cannot answer this, it is not. Everything else in the audit depends on having the data, so start here.
- Google Business Profile claimed and complete? Categories, service areas, hours, photos of actual projects. A half finished profile is why competitors appear in the local map and you do not.
- Does every project page have a proper heading? Not “Project 14” or the client’s surname. Something naming what the building is and where it sits.
- Do your images carry descriptive text? Open any gallery and check. If the files are still named by your camera, search engines are looking at your best work and seeing nothing.
- At least ten reviews from the last two years? Reviews age. Ten from 2019 reads worse than four from this spring.
- Can a visitor enquire from a project page without navigating away? Someone has just fallen for a project. Making them hunt for the contact page is where interest quietly dies.
See also: Why Choosing A Family Dentist Builds Lifelong Healthy Smiles
Six Checks That Usually Need Paying For
Different category. These require tooling, technical access, or sustained outreach.
| Check | What you are looking for | Why it is not a DIY job |
| Site speed on mobile | Portfolio pages loading in under three seconds on a phone connection | Fixing it properly means code level work, not just compressing images |
| Schema markup | Structured data identifying your firm and your projects | Needs implementation and validation, and breaks silently when a theme updates |
| Residential and commercial separation | Different paths for homeowners and developers, organised by project scope and budget | Requires restructuring, not just adding pages |
| Location pages for real markets | Genuine pages for places you actually build in | Thin duplicated city pages do more harm than none |
| Authority from outside your site | Design publication coverage, award recognition, contractor and association links | Slow outreach work with no shortcut |
| AI citation visibility | Whether ChatGPT, Gemini, or AI Overviews mention you at all | Needs monitoring tools and regular prompt testing |
On that last one, a rough manual version costs nothing. Ask an AI assistant to recommend architects in your city and see what comes back. If your practice is absent while three competitors are named, you have your answer. Proper tracking across platforms is the paid version, and Big Hunt reports most clients see initial movement in citation tracking within 60 to 90 days, while stating plainly that no agency can guarantee a placement inside a specific AI answer.
How to Read Your Score
Rough guide, not a science:
- Failing mostly in the first group: do not hire anyone yet. Spend a month on the basics and run the audit again. You may find you need far less than you thought.
- Passing the first group, failing the second: this is the right moment to bring someone in. The foundation is there and the work compounds from a better starting point.
- Failing nearly everything: the site itself is probably the issue, not your visibility. A retainer on a broken foundation is the most common way practices waste a year.
When the Answer Is Broader Than SEO
Worth naming a case the audit does not cover. Some practices pass most checks, rank reasonably, and still have an enquiry problem, because search was never going to be the whole answer for them.
A new practice with no project history has nothing to rank yet. A studio entering a market where it has never built has no local signals to work with. In both cases paid search produces leads within about two weeks while organic takes three to six months to deliver sustainable growth, which is the honest sequencing most agencies will confirm if you ask them directly.
That is the argument for a full stack digital marketing agency over a single channel specialist. Keyword data from paid campaigns tells you which terms actually convert, and that feeds the organic work instead of running parallel to it. Big Hunt Digital frames its own setup as five channels built into one system rather than five departments, with performance tracked through lead quality and closed revenue rather than impressions.
What Good Looks Like After a Few Years
For context on where this leads, Extension Architecture has worked with the same team since 2016 and now sits at 11.6K organic traffic, a 31 authority score, 8K organic keywords, and 1.5K referring domains. Eugene Kim from the studio describes the arrangement simply: “We’ve worked with Nik since 2016, and his SEO and Google Ads strategies have consistently generated quality enquiries for our business.”
London Design and Build shows the earlier stage: organic traffic up 12%, 344 keywords, 1.4K backlinks, with first citations appearing across AI platforms.
Neither happened in a quarter. Both started with the same twelve checks.
Work through the audit this week and bring the failed items to your next agency conversation. You will get a far more specific proposal than anyone would have sent you otherwise.
Big Hunt Digital runs a free audit covering SEO, AI visibility, paid ads, and conversion gaps, delivered in two to three working days, if you would rather have someone else score it.
