How do your architecture website analytics rank against your competitors?
I conducted a website competitor analysis for a client recently, and rather than comparing data across architecture practice websites – like I usually do – I was looking at general architecture, design and building websites that provide advice to consumers.
Sites like HOUZZ, ArchiPro and Your Home (the Australian government website), as well as Undercover Architect, BuildHer Collective and Three Birds, which provide courses and other resources for renovators and homebuilders (and which define the narrative around those activities).
For the purposes of this analysis, I was looking at websites that serve the residential architecture market. And I wanted to share the results with you, because they provide useful insights about how to get your message out to a wider audience.
What’s the best way to ensure your potential clients and customers can find you online?
It’s important to understand how to make your website stand out, so you can get noticed in a sea of content and messaging. Bear in mind that most website content is developed and disseminated by companies and organisations with more funds and marketing resources than most architects and peak bodies invest in marketing.
It’s a simple truism of marketing that the websites of organisations with the deepest pockets get the most eyeballs. And that means – if they offer design services – that they generate more inquiries, initial meetings, and new clients and customers.
Because of this, architects are being left behind and overlooked by the vast majority of potential clients, simply because most architects don’t understand how to compete in this noisy marketplace. (And some don’t even want to!)
Looking at the figures in the comparison table below, you can see why most architects don’t have a lot of traction in the digital marketplace, when it comes to talking about design and building. Effectively, their messaging (such as it is!) is being drowned out in this sea of noise.
Architects – collectively and as individual practices – simply don’t have sufficiently powerful content engines to develop and deliver the right kind of messaging to the right kind of people, ie your potential customers.
What do the figures in the analysis tell us?
Take a look at the table below and pay particular attention to the data in the fourth column, ie Domain traffic. It refers to the number of visitors that arrive at the website via search.
This column is actually measuring visitors that arrive via Google, which accounts for about 94% of all searches in Australia, or approximately 250k searches per day*.
So, it’s not measuring visitors who click a link from an email newsletter, or the “Link in Bio” or a URL in a social media post, or those who already know your website address and type it straight into their browser.
As an aside, you can drill down into these other sources of website traffic via Google Analytics, and I encourage architecture business owners and practice directors to look at their GA metrics at least once per month. That way, you can refine your business development and marketing strategies based on your actual performance data.
For example, do you know how many people actually arrive at your website via your Instagram profile? It’s probably a fairly low proportion of your total visitors, which begs the question: Is social media – and specifically Instagram – the best place for you to invest your marketing time and money?
I can access comparison figures as shown in the table below via Ubersuggest, a free and paid SEO tool (I have the paid version). While they may not be totally accurate – ie they may not be exact representations of what you see on your own Google Analytics – they are useful for comparison purposes: to enable you to review the performance of your website against competitors’ websites, to see broad trends and overall rankings.
I’ve listed the websites in order of highest to lowest results, based on the figures in column four, so you can easily see which are the best performing sites, on the Google search metrics.
Unfortunately, my client’s website (and the other individual firms that I included in their copy of this report, but which I have omitted from this version) were all at the bottom of the list.
And this is not unusual.
When I do this competitor analysis as part of my Review + Reset package for consulting clients, it’s typical to find my clients’ websites at the bottom of the table. Not always, but mostly. That’s why they engage me to help them with business strategy marketing in the first place – to become more visible to their potential clients, and ultimately to win more business!
Table: Competitors’ website traffic analysis ^
(prepared on 15 March 2023)
What can we learn from this analysis?
Results like these are pretty terrible for architecture practices that set aim to use business development and marketing to win more and better projects, but there is some good news: once you have access to these kinds of data and insights, you can start making improvements.
What can you change about your online marketing?:
You can sharpen up messaging so that your prospective clients will understand what you offer and how you can help them.
You can make your website more visible to elevate your Google rankings, by adding more relevant SEO keywords to your website (Ubersuggest provides downloads of the keywords in the paid plan, so you can literally just use the keywords that are driving traffic to your competitors’ sites).
You can ensure that your website is optimised on the technical side – that it’s secure, has fast load times, and no broken links.
You can enhance your other sources of website traffic – social media, email newsletters, referral links – because all of these also help to boost your Google rankings.
You can ensure your website content speaks directly to your clients, using client-centric language (not archi-speak) so that they spend longer on your site, view more pages, and join your subscriber list (these actions on your website help to boost your Google rankings; and adding people to your subscriber list helps to move them towards your practice on their customer journey).
Are you paying attention to your practice website analytics yet?
There are so many ways that you can improve your website performance and your overall business development and marketing activities, once you start paying attention to your data and analytics.
I understand that website performance and SEO and marketing and business development are difficult to grapple with – and even harder to master – and that you are busy running your practice and looking after your clients, and you don’t really have time to delve into this stuff.
But what’s the likely outcome if you choose not to invest time and effort in marketing? If you don’t understand where your new clients come from, and how to get more of the clients you enjoy working with most, how can you actively do more of the work you want to do (rather than have to accept whatever projects incidentally come your way).
If you’d like more information about how to access and use this data, tailored specifically for architects, you can grab my free module on Marketing Metrics here.
It contains a video that outlines the metrics that you need to keep an eye on, and instructions about how to set up your Google Analytics and view your metrics.
And if you’d like to learn more about how I can help you enhance your business development and marketing – so you can win more and better projects – you can find details of my 1:1 consulting package Review + Reset here.
Lastly, if you have a friend or colleague who is grappling with SEO and their website, please send them a link to this article – hopefully they’ll find it helpful too.
References
* Search Engine Market Share in Australia: Statistics for 2023, https://takeatumble.com.au/digital-marketing/search-engine-market-share-australia/, visited Friday 17 March 2023.
^ Figures in the table sourced from Ubersuggest, via the paid plan.