Why good architecture practices are invisible in search
A portfolio site can be beautiful and still be functionally blank to a search engine. The causes are structural, and none of them require compromising the design.
There is a particular frustration in this sector: a practice doing genuinely excellent work, with a portfolio anyone would be proud of, that cannot be found by anybody who does not already know its name.
It is almost always the same handful of causes, and they are structural rather than a matter of effort. Practices build websites the way they present work, and presenting work and being found are not the same job.
The image-first website problem
A practice website is usually a portfolio: full-bleed photography, minimal text, a project name and perhaps a location. It looks exactly right, and it is close to invisible to a search engine, because there is almost nothing on it to read.
Search engines and AI systems work with text. A project page carrying nine beautiful photographs and eleven words of caption offers nothing to index. The building may be extraordinary. The page is blank.
The second problem is that project names are not searches. Nobody types the name of a scheme they have never heard of. They type the building type, the sector, the constraint and the place: a conservation architect in Bristol, a practice for a SEND school, retrofit of a listed mill.
A page carrying nine beautiful photographs and eleven words of caption is, to a search engine, functionally blank.
What to write on a project page
The brief, in a paragraph
What the client needed and why. This is the part a future client recognises themselves in, which is what makes them enquire.
The constraint
Listed status, a tight site, a live building, difficult ground, a planning history. Constraints are what people search for, because constraints are what they are worried about.
The type and the numbers
Building type, floor area, budget band, programme. Factual, unglamorous, and precisely what a real search contains.
How it was resolved
Two or three paragraphs on the approach. This is where judgement shows, and judgement is what a client is appointing.
Who else was involved
Contractor, engineers, consultants. Naming them is good practice, and it quietly creates the relationships that produce links later.
The pages that do not exist yet
Beyond the projects, most practice sites are missing the pages that answer the question a prospective client is actually asking, which is rarely who are you and almost always can you do the thing I need.
Those are sector and service pages: conservation and listed buildings, education, healthcare, residential retrofit, planning appeals. Each written properly, using the practice's own work as the evidence. They are unglamorous next to a portfolio, and they are what gets found.
None of this compromises the design. The portfolio stays exactly as it is. The written pages sit alongside it and do a different job, in the same way a practice keeps both a monograph and a capability statement without confusing the two.
The authority problem
Architecture has an advantage almost nothing else in this sector enjoys: the press genuinely wants to publish the work. Practices routinely fail to convert that into anything durable, because coverage gets celebrated and then forgotten rather than being linked back to a project page that actually exists.
The sequence that works is straightforward. Write the project up on your own site first. Then approach the press with the images and the story, with somewhere to point them. A piece of coverage linking to a page you own is worth many times one that mentions you and links nowhere.
Who is searching, and for what
It helps to be specific about the audience, because practices often assume search means members of the public typing architect near me, and dismiss the whole subject on that basis. Some of it is exactly that. Most of the valuable traffic is not.
Clients with a building type
A trust procuring a health centre, a school seeking a designer for an expansion, a developer looking for residential retrofit experience. They search the building type, not the profession.
Clients with a constraint
Listed consent, a conservation area, a difficult planning history, a live occupied building. These are anxious searches, and the practice that has written about the constraint gets the call.
Other consultants
Engineers, project managers and contractors recommending a practice will check you first. What they find decides whether the recommendation is made confidently or hedged.
Prospective staff
Architects choose practices by the work. A portfolio with no written context tells a candidate very little about what it is actually like to work there.
Each of those groups is looking for something specific, and each is served by writing rather than by images alone. That is the whole argument, and none of it requires compromising how the work itself is presented.
It also explains why practice websites so often show respectable traffic and almost no enquiries. The traffic is people who already knew the name. The enquiries would come from the people who do not, and there is nothing on the site for them to find.
None of this asks a practice to write differently about architecture. It asks it to write at all, in the places where somebody looking for exactly this work would stand a chance of finding it.
There is one more thing worth saying, about tone. Writing plainly about a building does not cheapen it. The practices that describe their work in clear, specific language read as more confident rather than less, and they are considerably easier for a client to quote back to a board that has to approve the appointment.
Doing great work nobody can find?
Send us your practice website. We will tell you what is invisible, why, and what we would write first.
Get a practice audit →
