Proposals for architect seo services are written in a dialect that sounds technical and commits to very little. Most practice owners nod through the first call, sign, and only work out what the terms meant around month four when they are trying to judge whether anything happened.
So here is a translation. What each phrase means, what good execution of it looks like, and the question that exposes a vague version.
“Technical SEO”
What it means: making sure search engines can reach, read, and understand your site at all.
In practice that covers crawlability, indexation, Core Web Vitals, and schema markup. For architecture sites the performance element matters more than in most sectors, because high resolution project photography is heavy and galleries are easy to build badly.
Ask: which specific technical issues did you find on our site, and which will you fix in the first month?
A real answer names problems. A vague one describes the discipline.
See also: What a Design and Build London Team Gets Right on a Kitchen Extension
“On Page Optimisation”
What it means: rewriting the parts of a page that tell search engines what it is about.
Headings, titles, internal links, and page structure. The useful version is built around what your buyers type, not what your practice calls things internally. Clients search for loft conversions and rear extensions. Nobody searches for your service taxonomy.
Ask: which pages, in what order, over the first quarter?
Six named pages with a sequence is a plan. “Ongoing on page work” is a line item.
“Content Creation”
What it means: writing new pages, usually to capture searches you currently miss entirely.
For a practice, the pages that earn their keep are the ones answering questions people ask long before they commission anyone. Planning requirements. What a particular project type involves. How long approval takes in a specific borough. That is how you enter someone’s research months before the shortlist exists.
Ask: who writes it, and do they interview anyone here?
Content written without talking to an architect reads like content written without talking to an architect.
“Link Building” or “Off Page Work”
What it means: getting other websites to link to yours, which remains one of the hardest signals to fake and therefore one of the most valuable.
The architecture version worth paying for is coverage in design publications, award listings, university and association pages, and links from contractors, suppliers, and developers you already work with. Slow, manual, genuinely difficult.
Ask: where do the links come from, and can I see examples from the last three months?
If the answer involves directory submissions or a fixed monthly quantity at a low price, you are buying volume rather than authority.
“Local SEO”
What it means: appearing for searches that include a place, and showing up in the map results.
Covers Google Business Profile management, citation consistency so your name and address match across directories, and content for the places you actually build in. That last qualifier matters. Pages for twenty cities you have never worked in are a liability, not coverage.
Ask: which locations are we targeting and what evidence do we have in each?
“AI SEO”, “GEO”, “AEO” and “LLM Visibility”
What it means: all four describe the same practice, and agencies pick different acronyms for it. Structuring content, data, and authority signals so systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews can find, trust, and cite your firm in their answers.
This matters now because clients genuinely ask those systems which practices to consider. Being cited is a different bar from ranking. A page can sit at position four and get skipped because its content is not structured for extraction, the schema is missing, or no independent source has ever mentioned the firm by name.
The work involves answer first content structure, entity clarity so models associate your firm with the right category, and checking that AI crawlers are actually permitted to read your site, which portfolio platforms sometimes block by default. Proper AI SEO also includes monitoring, because the only way to know whether it is working is to test real buyer prompts across platforms repeatedly.
Ask: is citation tracking included, how often does it run, and what do I get to see?
Expect roughly 60 to 90 days for initial movement in citation tracking, and treat any guarantee of placement inside a specific AI answer as a red flag, since nobody controls those systems.
“Schema Markup”
What it means: code in the background telling search engines and AI systems what kind of entity you are and what your pages describe.
Invisible to visitors, significant to machines. It is also the thing most likely to break silently when a theme updates, which is why validation should be ongoing rather than a one off task.
Ask: which schema types are you implementing, and who checks they are still valid in six months?
“Reporting” and “KPIs”
What it means: how you will find out whether any of this worked.
The weak version is rankings and traffic, both easy to present and close to meaningless on their own. A page can perform beautifully for a cost question and produce no briefs at all, because the people reading it are years from building anything.
The version worth insisting on splits enquiries by project type, budget band, and source. That is what tells you where next quarter’s effort should go.
Ask: can I see a sample report before we start?
Two Phrases That Should Make You Pause
“Guaranteed rankings.” Nobody controls Google’s algorithm. A guarantee is either meaningless, scoped to terms nobody searches, or a sign of someone willing to take risks with your domain.
“SEO friendly content.” Usually means content written for search engines rather than people, which is exactly the thing Google has spent years devaluing. Content should be useful first and structured well second.
Reading Your Proposal Again
Take the document you have and put a question mark next to every phrase above that appears without specifics attached.
Count them. Three or four is normal and worth a conversation. Ten means the proposal was written for nobody in particular, and you should ask for a version written for your practice before you commit to anything.
The agencies who respond well to that request are usually the ones worth hiring.
