Rank for the projects you actually want. Illumae gives independent architecture practices the SEO tools to get found online — without the agency price tag.
Most architecture practices win work through referrals and reputation — but an increasing number of clients start their search online, comparing portfolios and reading about services before they ever make contact. If your website isn't ranking for the terms those clients are using, you're invisible at the moment it matters most. Illumae is an SEO and content platform built for small businesses, including architecture practices that want to grow their organic presence without hiring a full-time marketing team. From auditing your site's technical health to drafting keyword-targeted content about your services, Illumae gives you a clear, prioritised path to better search visibility — at a fixed monthly cost.
Before you can rank, you need to know what potential clients are typing into Google — and whether those searches are worth targeting. Illumae's keyword research and rank tracking gives you real search volume, keyword difficulty scores, and intent data so you can see exactly which terms are worth pursuing for your practice. You might discover that 'residential architect' is fiercely competitive while 'listed building architect' or 'passive house design' has meaningful search volume and far less competition. Once you've identified the right targets, Illumae tracks your organic Google rankings for those keywords over time so you can see whether your efforts are moving the needle.
A beautifully designed architecture website can still perform poorly in search if it has technical problems underneath. Illumae's site audit tool crawls your entire site and returns a health score alongside a prioritised, page-by-page fix list. It flags broken links that frustrate visitors and waste crawl budget, missing meta tags that leave Google guessing what your pages are about, slow-loading pages that push potential clients away before they've seen your portfolio, and images without alt text — a common issue on image-heavy architecture sites that also affects accessibility. You get a clear list of what to fix first, not a wall of jargon.
Architecture clients often spend weeks researching before they commission anyone. A practice that publishes useful, well-optimised content — explaining planning permission processes, the difference between a full architectural service and a design-only package, or what to expect from a listed building project — builds trust before the first conversation. Illumae's AI content generation drafts articles from a target keyword you provide, then runs every draft through a fact-consistency audit that checks for heading-to-body mismatches, arithmetic errors, and unhedged claims before anything is published. You review and refine the draft with your own professional knowledge before it goes live — the tool handles the structure and SEO scaffolding, you bring the expertise.
Backlinks from other websites are still one of Google's strongest ranking signals, and the quality of those links matters as much as the quantity. Illumae's backlink checker shows you every backlink pointing to your domain, with a domain authority score and a spam-risk banding for each one. If you've accumulated low-quality or spammy links — perhaps from old directory listings or link schemes — Illumae can generate a properly formatted disavow file ready to submit to Google's Search Console. Note that Illumae generates the file for you; submitting it to Google is a manual step you complete directly in Search Console, as no API exists for automated submission.
Schema markup is code added to your website that tells search engines exactly what kind of business you are, where you're located, and when you're open. Illumae's schema generator produces valid JSON-LD markup for your practice using the ProfessionalService LocalBusiness type — the appropriate schema category for architecture firms. It includes your structured address, opening hours, and price range, all in the format Google recommends. You copy the generated code and paste it into your site's page head — no developer required for the generation step, though you'll need basic access to your site's HTML or CMS to add it. Structured data won't guarantee a rich result, but it gives Google the clearest possible signal about your practice.
That depends on your specialism, location, and the competition in your market — which is exactly what Illumae's keyword research tool is designed to help you work out. It returns real search volume, difficulty scores, and intent data for any keyword you enter. In practice, many architecture firms find that broad terms like 'architect' are dominated by large directories and aggregators, while more specific terms — relating to building type, planning stage, or design approach — have meaningful search volume with far less competition. Illumae helps you identify those opportunities and then tracks your organic Google rankings for the terms you decide to pursue.
Every draft produced by Illumae's AI content generator is run through a fact-consistency audit before it's ready for review. That audit checks for internal inconsistencies — mismatches between headings and body text, arithmetic errors, and unhedged claims about specific or volatile figures. What it doesn't do is independently verify subject-matter accuracy for architecture or any other specialist field. It won't catch a technical error about structural engineering, planning policy, or building regulations that is internally consistent but factually wrong. That's why the workflow is designed for you to review and edit every draft with your own professional knowledge before publishing. The tool handles keyword structure and content scaffolding; you supply the expertise.
Illumae's keyword tracking covers organic Google search rankings — the blue link results that appear below any ads and map results. It does not track your position in the Google Maps local pack (the map with three business listings that appears for many local searches). Managing your Google Business Profile, which is the primary lever for local-pack visibility, is outside Illumae's scope. If local-pack rankings are important to your practice, you'll want to keep your Google Business Profile up to date separately alongside using Illumae for your organic search presence.
Illumae's site audit crawls every page of your website and returns a health score along with a prioritised, page-by-page fix list. It checks for broken links, missing or duplicate meta titles and descriptions, slow-loading pages, and images without alt text — the last of which is particularly common on portfolio-heavy architecture sites. The results are presented in priority order, so you know which issues are most likely to be affecting your rankings and user experience. You can work through the list yourself or hand it to a developer or web designer; either way, you have a concrete action list rather than a vague recommendation to 'improve your SEO'.
Illumae's schema generator produces JSON-LD markup using the ProfessionalService LocalBusiness schema type, which is the appropriate structured data category for architecture firms. The output includes your structured address (street, city, region, postcode, and country), opening hours, and price range — all formatted to Google's specification. You copy the generated code and paste it into the head section of your website's HTML, or into the relevant field in your CMS if it supports custom code. Illumae generates the markup; adding it to your site is a manual step. Once it's in place, it gives Google a clear, machine-readable description of your practice, which can support richer search result appearances over time.
No credit card required. See real output for your own business before you pay anything.