Why Is My Architecture Practice Not Getting Enquiries?

Work through these in order. The portfolio and project type pages come first because everything else on the list points people towards them.

Open one of your project pages. If it is a title, a location and twelve photographs, Google knows almost nothing about it. It cannot see that it is a barn conversion in Oxfordshire with a difficult planning history and a beautiful outcome. It sees a page with no text.

Clients, oddly, want the words too. A prospective client is trying to work out whether you have done their kind of project and how you handled it. Two or three hundred words on the brief, the site’s constraints, the planning route, the materials and what the client got makes the page useful to them and rankable for Google.

Keep the images exactly where they are. Add the story beneath. Give every image alt text that says what it shows. Start with the six projects that best represent the work you want more of, not all forty.

‘Residential, commercial, conservation, masterplanning’ on one page is how architects describe themselves to each other. Clients type ‘house extension architect’, ‘loft conversion architect’, ‘listed building architect’, ‘new build house architect’ and ‘commercial fit-out architect’. Those are different people with different budgets.

Google needs a page per search to rank you for it, and a client needs a page per project type to see that you do theirs. Write one for each type of work you want more of. What it involves, what the planning route usually is, what it typically costs with you, and three projects of that type from the portfolio.

This is the single biggest change most practices can make. Our guide to why a homepage ranks instead of a service page explains why the homepage cannot do this job for you.

Your footer says you work across three counties. Your client searches ‘architect in Beaconsfield’. Google has nothing to show them from you, because a footer mention is not a page. The practice down the road with a plain page about its Beaconsfield work gets the enquiry.

You do not need a page for every village. Two or three for the places where you want more work, each with the projects you have completed there, the local planning authority you deal with and any conservation area or landscape constraints you know well. That local planning knowledge is exactly what a client in that area wants to hear.

We built our own area pages for FlyPost on the same principle, and the ones that rank are the ones with real local substance, not the ones with the town name swapped in.

A month before a client searches for an architect, they search ‘do I need an architect for an extension’, ‘how much does an architect cost’, ‘architect or architectural technologist’ and ‘how long does planning permission take’. Those searches are where the client decides whether to hire anyone at all.

A practice that answers them plainly, on its own site, meets the client first and is trusted by the time the client is ready. It is also what AI tools cite when somebody asks the same question in ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode.

Write a short, honest page for each. Say when a client does not need an architect. That honesty is what makes the ones who do ring you.

‘How much does an architect cost’ is one of the most searched questions about architects, and almost no practice answers it. So clients guess, usually high, and do not ring.

Explain how you charge. Percentage of construction cost, fixed fee, or by RIBA stage, and a typical range for a typical project. Say what is included at each stage and what is not. Say that the figure depends on the brief and you will confirm after a first meeting.

This does not scare off the right clients. It removes the wrong ones before they take up an afternoon of your time.

For ‘architects near me’ the map result is the result. If your profile has no photos of your work, the wrong category or three reviews from years ago, you are not on the shortlist.

Set the category to Architect, add project photos, ask recent clients to leave reviews and answer every one. Then make sure your name, address and phone number match exactly across the website, the profile, the RIBA and ARB directories and anywhere else you are listed. Google trusts consistent details and distrusts contradictions.

A client at the research stage does not want to fill in a project brief form. They want to know what happens if they get in touch: a phone call, a site visit, a fee proposal, and whether any of that costs anything.

Say it plainly on the contact page and at the bottom of every project type page. A free half-hour call, then a site visit if it makes sense, then a written fee proposal. Explain the first steps and more people take them.

Then track where enquiries come from. If half of them arrive from one project type page, that tells you what to build next.