For practices with twelve beautiful project pages and nothing to read
Clients read for months before they contact anybody, and most sites give them one reason to visit.
A report on your own site, showing whether it gives somebody a reason to come back a second time.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
4 minutes
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Architecture is bought after the longest research phase of any service in this list. A client reads for months, often years, before any practice is contacted.
That length is the opportunity, because it means the practice a client eventually rings is almost always one whose work they have been quietly following, and following is something a website can cause.
Somebody considering a new house or a significant renovation returns to the same handful of practice websites repeatedly over a long period. They are not converting on a first visit and no call to action will make them.
This changes what the site is for entirely. It is not capturing a lead, it is sustaining an interest, which means it has to have something new to look at and something worth reading beyond the portfolio.
Practices that write about their process, their material choices, planning problems they have solved and what a project actually costs are the ones people keep returning to. Practices with twelve beautiful project pages and nothing else are looked at once.
The commercial consequence is direct. A client who has read your thinking for six months arrives already persuaded and price-insensitive. A client who found you last week is comparing three fee proposals.
What does an architect cost, what percentage, what is included, and is it worth it compared with a draftsperson or a project home. These are searched constantly and almost no practice website addresses any of them.
The reluctance is understandable, because fees genuinely vary. It is also why the searches are dominated by generic content sites and forums, which means the answer people find has nothing to do with your practice.
A practice that explains its own fee structure honestly, what the percentage covers, what the stages are, what a client pays before anything is drawn, wins the person who was about to conclude that architects are unaffordable.
The comparison against a draftsperson is the specific one worth answering directly. It is the most common objection in residential work, it is asked privately, and a practice that answers it plainly rather than defensively is far more convincing.
Most clients are more frightened of council than of cost. Heritage overlays, setbacks, neighbour objections, flood or bushfire controls and how long approval takes are searched heavily by people with a specific site and a specific problem.
This is the strongest and least contested subject available to a practice, because the answers are genuinely local. Planning controls differ by council, and a practice that writes about the councils it actually works in is answering a question nobody else can.
It also demonstrates competence more effectively than any image. A client reading a clear explanation of how you got a difficult approval through a specific council learns more about whether to hire you than a portfolio can convey.
Project pages should carry the same thing. What the site's constraints were, what the planning problem was, what the solution cost and what it involved, rather than a caption naming the timber.
Write about fees honestly, write about the councils you work in, give every project a real story rather than a caption, and publish something regularly enough that a long-considering client has a reason to return.
The council pages are the highest-return work and the most underused. They are local, specific, searched by people with a real problem, and they cannot be written by a practice that does not work there.
The fee page is the one that converts, because it reaches the person who was about to decide an architect was out of reach. Answering it plainly costs nothing and separates you from a field that stays silent.
Then the project pages, which most practices treat as a gallery and which work far better as case studies: the brief, the constraint, the problem, the decision, the outcome, and what it cost to build.
The client who rings your practice has usually been reading it for months without you knowing. Everything on the site is either giving them a reason to keep reading or a reason to stop.
Related reading from us: seo for medical clinics and seo for podiatrists.
Longer than most, six months and beyond, because the client's own decision takes that long. The compensation is that the pages age extremely well and keep bringing enquiries for years.
The structure at least. The searches about architects' fees are currently answered by generic content sites and forums, which means people are forming a view of your profession's cost with no input from you.
The constraint and the decision. A photograph shows what it looks like; a client is trying to learn whether you can solve a problem like theirs, and only the story tells them that.
Council planning controls. They are local, heavily searched by people with a specific problem, they demonstrate competence better than images, and a practice that does not work there cannot write them.