Most practices that commission seo for architect companies sign a twelve month retainer and get a rough sketch of month one. Everything after that is described in verbs. Optimise, build, improve, monitor. By month four nobody can say whether things are on track, because nothing specific was ever promised.
There is a simple way around this, and it costs you nothing. Ask for the first ninety days in writing, broken into three blocks, before you sign.
Big Hunt Digital builds this into its own process, where the strategy stage is defined as a 90 day plan tied to revenue rather than vanity metrics, followed by weekly execution sprints. The idea is not unique to one agency. What matters is that you insist on it, because the agencies who cannot produce one usually cannot produce results either.
Here is what each block should contain, and what a weak answer looks like.
Days 1 to 30: The Diagnosis Nobody Wants to Pay For
The first month should produce findings, not activity. If an agency is publishing blog posts in week two, they skipped this.
What you want back is an audit covering four areas. Technical health, which means crawl errors, speed on your image heavy portfolio pages, broken links, and project pages nobody can reach. Your current keyword position, honestly stated, including which searches you rank for that bring nothing. A competitive picture showing which studios outrank you in your markets and on what. And an AI visibility check, which is newer and increasingly the one that surprises people.
That last one deserves a sentence. If ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google’s AI Overviews are already recommending studios in your area and never mentioning yours, you want to know in month one, not month nine.
A weak version of this stage is a PDF of automated tool output with no interpretation. You can run that yourself for free.
By day thirty you should be able to answer one question: what is the single biggest reason enquiries are not arriving from search?
Days 31 to 60: Fixing the Pages That Already Exist
This is where most of the real gain sits, and where impatient agencies go wrong by jumping straight to new content.
Your existing project pages are the asset. Each completed project is capable of ranking for its own searches once it has a heading naming the project type and location, image information that describes materials and context rather than IMG file numbers, and schema markup identifying what kind of firm you are. That work is unglamorous and it compounds.
The structural piece belongs here too. A homeowner planning a loft conversion and a developer commissioning a mixed use scheme should not be landing on the same page. Separating residential and commercial paths, each organised around project scope and budget range rather than a flat service list, changes the character of what arrives in your inbox.
Ask specifically which pages get touched in this window and in what order. “On page optimisation” as a line item means nothing. “These six project pages, these two service pages, in this sequence” means something.
Days 61 to 90: Authority, Tracking and the First Honest Read
The last block does two jobs. It starts building outside credibility, and it sets up the measurement you will live with for the next year.
On authority, the architecture specific version is coverage in design publications like Dezeen and ArchDaily, award recognition turned into something citable, and links from the contractors, developers, and trade associations you already work with. This is slow work. Ninety days gets it started, not finished.
On tracking, insist that enquiries get broken down by project type, budget band, and source. Rankings and traffic are easy to present and tell you very little. A page can pull good numbers for “how much does a loft conversion cost” while producing no briefs at all, because almost nobody searching that is ready to commission anyone.
As a full stack digital marketing agency handles it, this is also the point where channels start reinforcing each other. Keyword data from paid search tells you which terms actually convert, which then shapes the organic work. If you are running ads separately through someone else, that feedback loop does not exist.
What You Should Realistically See by Day 90
Be sceptical of anyone promising competitive rankings in three months. That is not how architecture searches behave.
What you should see is quieter. Project pages indexed properly. Impressions climbing in Google Search Console for searches combining a project type with a place name. Possibly a first enquiry from someone who found you through content rather than a referral.
For AI visibility there is a slightly firmer benchmark. Big Hunt reports most clients see initial movement in citation tracking within 60 to 90 days, while stating plainly that no agency can guarantee placement inside a specific AI answer because those systems change constantly. An agency that promises guaranteed AI citations is telling you something about itself.
The longer picture is easier to judge from finished work than from pitches. Extension Architecture, a London studio working with the same team since 2016, now sits at 11.6K organic traffic with a 31 authority score, 8K organic keywords, 1.5K referring domains, and direct citations in Google’s AI Overview. Eugene Kim from the studio describes it in plain terms: “his SEO and Google Ads strategies have consistently generated quality enquiries for our business.”
That took years, not quarters. The ninety day plan is how you check you are on the right road early enough to change direction.
How to Use This When You Are Comparing Agencies
Send this to every agency on your shortlist and ask them to fill it in for your practice specifically.
The responses will separate themselves quickly. Some will come back with your project pages named, your markets identified, and a sequence that makes sense. Others will send a generic package description with the word architecture inserted.
You will have your answer before anyone invoices you.
If you want a starting point, Big Hunt Digital runs a free audit covering SEO, AI visibility, paid ads, and conversion gaps, delivered in two to three working days.
