About the Company
Archmark is a marketing, branding, and business coaching agency with a highly specific niche: architects. Founded by Bryon McCartney and his wife, the agency helps architecture firms become more visible, build authority in their market, and develop the kind of online presence that attracts ideal clients rather than just any clients.
The niche was not planned. Around 2015, an architect working two doors down from Archmark in a co-working space asked Bryon for help with his branding. The relationship worked well — Bryon had studied graphic design and found strong parallels between his process and the way architects are trained to think. One client became a focus, a focus became a speciality, and ten years later it has stuck.
Archmark has been using SEOptimer for 7 years and has built its entire lead generation and thought leadership strategy around it.
The Problem Architects Have With Their Websites
Most architects treat their website as a portfolio rather than a business tool. They load it with beautiful images, keep the text minimal, and leave it at that.
"Their portfolio is not for other architects — it is for clients. In order for it to work for clients, you have to talk about yourself, what you do, the value you create, and the outcomes people are going to get from working with you."
Most architecture websites also have significant technical problems underneath the surface. Missing SSL certificates, poor page performance, weak or misdirected SEO, no calls to action. The website is sitting there doing almost nothing — and the firm has no idea, because nobody has ever shown them the data.
That gap is exactly where Archmark found its opportunity.
How They Use SEOptimer
Archmark uses SEOptimer in three distinct ways, each building on the last.
- The embed tool. Bryon has a landing page on the Archmark website where architects can test their own website and get an instant report. The form is connected via Zapier to ActiveCampaign, so every person who runs a report is automatically added to the database and entered into a follow-up email sequence. It runs without any manual involvement. With roughly 1,200 to 1,400 visitors a month to a niche website, the tool has generated over 50 leads in the last eight months alone — all of them warm, because they arrived having already engaged with the content and chosen to test their own site.
- The bulk reporting capability. Over the last 10 years, Archmark has used SEOptimer to test more than 10,000 architecture firm websites. This is not a small-scale experiment — it is a systematic, ongoing effort to understand the state of digital marketing across an entire profession.
- Thought leadership. Last year, Archmark partnered with a software company in the architecture industry and used SEOptimer's bulk reporting tool to analyse 2,300 of that partner's clients. Combined with scraped Google Business data, the project produced approximately 250 data points per firm. That data was fed into AI and used to author a 25-page industry report on the state of architecture firm websites — shared through webinars, direct outreach, and as a downloadable lead magnet.
The headline finding: 85% of architecture firms score below 50 on SEOptimer.
"That was the real reveal. As an industry, architects are not taking their websites seriously. There are a lot of technical symptoms, but those are symptoms of a greater problem — firms are not using their websites as real platforms to showcase what they're capable of. That's what the report was trying to highlight."
The Client Story: From 5% to 60% Conversion Rate
The most concrete illustration of what SEOptimer makes possible for Archmark is the story of Mike Sweebe, an architect based in Montclair, New Jersey, who has been a client since 2019.
Mike's practice focuses exclusively on single-family homes — new builds and major remodels. His website was getting traffic and generating inquiries, so on the surface things looked fine. But when he tested his site using Archmark's SEOptimer embed form, the picture that emerged was more complicated.
In the year before working with Archmark, Mike received 500 inquiries through his website and by phone. That sounds impressive. The problem was that 95% of those inquiries were completely wrong for his practice — commercial clients, nail salons, restaurants, people wanting a deck or a garage. Not a single-family home in sight. The cost of that misdirected traffic was not just lost revenue from bad-fit enquiries. Bryon and Mike calculated that he had lost two full weeks of working time that year — emails back and forth, phone calls, and even site visits where Mike would drive out only to discover the project was not something he did.
"He was getting really good SEO. But it was the wrong kind of SEO. The keywords he was ranking for were attracting completely the wrong clients."
Archmark used SEOptimer to audit the site in detail, identify what was driving the misdirected traffic, and diagnose the underlying messaging problems. The technical issues were fixed, and more importantly, the website's content was restructured to speak directly to the families Mike actually wanted to work with.
Six months later, the results were stark. Mike went from 500 mostly irrelevant enquiries to 20 qualified consultations — and 12 of those 20 became clients. His conversion rate went from 5% to 60% in six months.
"He got a lot fewer calls. But they were a lot better."
The Automation Stack
One of the things that makes Archmark's use of SEOptimer particularly effective is how tightly it is integrated into the rest of their systems. The embed form on their website feeds directly into Zapier, which routes every new lead into ActiveCampaign with the report attached. Follow-up emails go out automatically. The whole sequence runs without anyone at Archmark having to touch it.
"That has been huge for us. Being able to integrate it into our existing workflows, have people come in, go into ActiveCampaign, get follow-up emails — it just works."
Bryon's content team also uses SEOptimer's broader toolset regularly — the keyword generator, meta tag generator, and backlink tools — making it a platform used across the business rather than a single-function audit tool.
Why SEOptimer
Bryon used other tools before SEOptimer and found them overcomplicated. One required him to fill in pages of parameters just to run a basic test and produce a white-labelled report. He actually discovered SEOptimer by noticing a competitor using it on their website — emailed them to ask what the tool was, and switched immediately.
"I went to their website, I saw it, and I said, okay, I'm getting rid of this other complicated tool and I'm going to try this. I'm really glad I did."
7 years later, the tool is still in the stack. Even as Archmark evolves toward more coaching and consulting work and less direct website delivery, SEOptimer remains useful — as a diagnostic for clients working with other web designers, as a before-and-after benchmark, and as a way to quickly surface the technical symptoms that point to deeper strategic problems.
"A tool like SEOptimer is great for getting a snapshot of where a website is at. Even if it's not us doing the website, we can still take that snapshot before and after. And as long as I'm helping architects, I'll have this in my tool bag."
