Give the photographs a story
Every project on your site should answer three questions in a few sentences: what was the brief, what made it hard, and what did you do about it. The steep block, the heritage overlay, the budget that could not move, the client who wanted a Queenslander that felt modern. These are the details that let a prospective client see themselves in the work, and they are what separates an architect’s portfolio from a real estate listing.
Invilla Architecture rebuilt its portfolio around twenty-five project pages, each filterable by new build, renovation and development, each with the design response written down. Project pages now rank in their own right for searches like “modern queenslander house” and “luxury house plans australia”.
Be clear about how you work and what it costs to start
The question every prospective client has and almost no architecture website answers is “what will this cost me?”. Studios avoid it because the honest answer is “it depends”. But “it depends” can still be structured. Invilla charges a fixed fee agreed up front, typically a percentage of the construction budget. Rather than hide that, the site has a four-step project estimator: location, budget tier, project type and style, returning a genuine quote range drawn from the studio’s own projects and a drafted brief.
The effect is not just more enquiries. It is enquiries that arrive knowing the fee model, with a budget tier selected and a brief already half-written. First meetings start further along.
Separate your services so the right client finds the right door
A developer testing a site’s yield, a family renovating a post-war home and a couple planning a new build on the Sunshine Coast are three different clients with three different questions. If your services page says “residential architecture” and stops, all three have to guess. Invilla split architectural design, interior design and pre-development analysis into distinct pathways, each with its own process and next step. Nobody has to read the wrong page to find the right one.
Put the proof where people can see it
Awards, publications and reviews are the most under-used assets in architecture marketing. They sit in a CV or an Instagram highlight and never make it onto the website in a form Google or a prospective client can find. A dedicated awards and media page (eight industry awards, three national television features, nine publications in Invilla’s case), named Google reviews on a testimonials page and registration details in the footer are not vanity. They are the answer to “can I trust this studio with a million dollars?”.
Show up for the searches that happen before someone looks for an architect
Nobody searches “architect” on day one. They search “modern queenslander style homes”, “knock down rebuild cost calculator”, “how much does it cost to demolish a house”, “downward sloping block house designs”, “clerestory windows”. Those are the people who will need an architect in six months. Very few studios are there.
Invilla’s guides on Queenslander renovations, knock-down rebuild costs, demolition costs and natural light now draw roughly seventy percent of the site’s organic clicks. The studio ranks in the top five for “knock down rebuild cost calculator” and “modern queenslander house”. This did not require a content machine: one well-researched guide a month, written from the studio’s own expertise, with the estimator as the next step.
A studio-sized plan
- Rewrite your five best project pages with brief, constraints and design response. Two paragraphs each.
- Add a “how we work and what it costs” page. If your fees are structured, say how. If you can build an estimator, do.
- Split services into distinct pages with distinct next steps.
- Create an awards, media and reviews page. Link to it from the home page.
- Pick one question clients ask on every first call and write the definitive answer on your site.
- Open Google Search Console monthly and write next month’s guide based on what people are already finding you for.