Typology is the site architecture
Most practice websites have a tab called Projects, a filter with four chips, and a grid. It reads as a portfolio and ranks as one page. Meanwhile every serious commission starts with someone searching a building type — hospital architect in Hyderabad, factory architect Coimbatore, farmhouse architect near Delhi, school design architects India.
Those searchers are different people with different anxieties, different budgets and different decision committees. A single Projects grid asks all of them to do the sorting themselves, which most won't.
Build a page per typology you genuinely want more of. Not fifteen. Three to six, with the work to back each one.
| Typology | Who is searching | What the page must show |
|---|---|---|
| Residential — villas, farmhouses, apartment interiors | An individual owner, often the couple, spending their own money | Photographs, plot sizes, budget ranges, timeline, how many site visits they get, who handles sanction drawings. |
| Healthcare — hospitals, diagnostic centres, clinics | A promoter or a project committee, usually with a consultant advising | Bed counts, NABH-oriented planning, department adjacencies, statutory approvals handled, referenceable completed builds. |
| Institutional — schools, universities, hostels | A trust or society board, on a fixed academic deadline | Student capacity, phasing across academic years, cost per seat, campus master planning experience. |
| Hospitality — hotels, resorts, restaurants | An operator or an owner working to a brand standard | Key counts, brand-standard experience, F&B planning, back-of-house planning, delivery under an operator's programme. |
| Industrial — factories, warehouses, cold storage | A plant head or promoter with a production deadline | Built-up area, clear heights, expansion planning, statutory and fire approvals, coordination with plant engineers. |
The Council of Architecture rules, and what they actually stop you doing
Architecture is a regulated profession in India. "Architect" is a protected title under the Architects Act, 1972, and professional conduct sits under the Architects (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 1989, which have long restricted advertising and the soliciting of work — while generally permitting things like listing in directories, a signboard, notices for staff recruitment, and the publication of your work in the press and in journals.
That distinction is the whole game for SEO, and it's more permissive than most practices assume. Explaining a building typology, publishing a project with drawings and photographs, writing about approvals in your state, describing your fee structure — that's information. Claiming you are the leading, award-winning, number-one practice in the city is a superiority claim, and that's the category the rules bite on.
Which is convenient, because superlatives don't rank anyway. Google's helpful-content stance has been pushing against unsupported self-praise for years. Writing like a professional and writing for search have converged.
Publish the fee structure, even if you won't publish the fee
The most-asked question in every architecture enquiry is some version of "what will this cost me?" and almost no practice website answers any part of it. So the enquiry becomes a phone call, then a meeting, then a proposal, and a third of them were never viable.
You don't have to publish a rate. You do have to publish the shape of it, and the shape is standard enough in Indian practice to write down without giving anything away.
A page that explains fees is charged as a percentage of project cost, that it's billed across defined stages, what's included, what's charged separately — statutory fees, structural and MEP consultants, surveys, soil investigation, 3D visualisation, site supervision beyond an agreed number of visits — and what your minimum project size is, will do more qualification work than any brochure. It will also rank, because architect fees in India and architect charges per square feet are real searches with real volume and almost nobody credible is answering them.
- State the basis — percentage of project cost, per square foot, or lump sum — and when each applies.
- State the stages: concept, schematic, statutory drawings and sanction, GFC and tender documents, construction-stage services. Buyers don't know these exist and it's why they think architects are expensive.
- State the exclusions plainly. Reimbursables surprise clients more often than fees do.
- State a minimum project value or size, so the ₹40 lakh house doesn't ring a practice that takes ₹15 crore commissions.
- State what happens if the project stalls — the single most common source of client-architect disputes in India.
Awards, publications and citations do your link building
Architecture is one of the few industries where genuine, editorially-earned links are structurally available. Design publications exist, they publish projects, and they link. That's what most industries pay digital PR agencies to try to manufacture.
So treat publication as an SEO channel with a schedule, not as something that happens when a photographer happens to submit something.
- Photograph and write up every completed project properly, with drawings, a project data block and a 400-word design note. Publications want a ready package; the practice that supplies one gets published more often.
- Submit consistently. Indian and international design press, IIA and other professional awards, material-brand case studies, product manufacturers' project galleries. Each placement is a citation, most of them link.
- Publish the project on your own site first, so the version that gets indexed as canonical is yours and the feature links back to it rather than replacing it.
- Claim the professional directories and keep name, address, registration and phone consistent across them. Boring, and it is the part that affects
architect near me. - Put the practice's COA registration and the principals' credentials on an author or team page. Verifiable credentials are the strongest E-E-A-T signal available in a regulated profession, and most practices bury them in a PDF.
Where do you actually work?
Architects travel. A Bengaluru practice may have built three resorts in Coorg, a factory in Hosur and a house in Chennai — and its website says "Bengaluru" in the footer and nothing else.
Geography needs stating explicitly, because a client in Mysuru will not assume you'll come. Say which cities and regions you take work in, say what happens to site supervision when the site is 400 km away — how often you visit, who represents you locally, how that's charged — and build a location page only where you have actually built something to show. A page for a city you've never worked in is a template with a place name swapped, and that pattern gets classified as scaled content whether or not it was written by hand.
For most practices this means three or four honest location pages, each carrying real projects, rather than the thirty a keyword tool suggested. Our local SEO work covers the profile and citation side of that.
Budget, timeline and what we guarantee
Our SEO starts at ₹75,000 a month, with smaller practice sites from ₹40,000, ex-GST. Architecture sits mid-range on effort but high on review: every project write-up needs a principal's sign-off, and the conduct-rules read means copy moves slower than in an unregulated category. That's a real constraint on cadence and we plan for it rather than pretending otherwise. Full numbers are on pricing.
The honest timeline: typology plus city long tail — industrial architect in Coimbatore, hospital architect Hyderabad — usually moves inside 90 days, because the competition is a portfolio grid with no text. Broad national terms take a year and mostly bring students and job applicants, not commissions.
We freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified enquiries from organic search on day one — enquiries that match your typology and minimum project size, not every contact form. If we haven't beaten it in 90 days we keep working free until we do. We never promise a specific ranking position for a specific keyword, because nobody controls Google's index, and a promise like that would sit badly with your own conduct rules anyway. Three clients a month.