Architect nearby: licensed where the site is, not the shortest drive

What does nearby mean to a client with a site to build on?

Three things, and the distance is the least of them. The client's lot sits in a jurisdiction with its own licensing and in a municipality with its own permits, zoning and reviews. For that client, a firm two hours away whose principal holds a license there and has taken projects through the town's design review is nearer than one across the street that has done neither.

None of the three can be read off a map, so each has to be written on the site: where each principal is licensed, which municipalities the firm has built in, which approvals it has been through there, and how far it travels. When an AI assistant with web search fetches your pages, those sentences are what it can find; without them, the page offers an address and little else.

This article covers those location facts. Which of the firm's names an answer uses is in AI visibility for architects, the questions owners ask as a project moves forward are in what building owners ask, and the rest of a firm's site is on the page for architecture firms.

Licenses, stated by the people who hold them

Put each license on the page of the principal who holds it, in text: the jurisdiction, the license as the issuing board words it, the number where the board publishes one, and a link to the board's public lookup where there is one. The lookup lets a client, or anyone checking on their behalf, confirm the license where it is kept.

State the licenses held on the day the page is dated, and nothing about what a license permits. Who may use the title architect, what a license covers and where it is valid are set differently in each jurisdiction, and the board or regulator is the one to say. If the firm itself holds a registration anywhere, state it the same way on the about page. Leave out "licensed nationwide", and any list of states with no person's name beside it.

The structured data repeats the text. schema.org defines hasCredential on both Person and Organization as a credential awarded to them, with a Credential as its value. The JSON-LD below uses EducationalOccupationalCredential, the subtype for occupational credentials, with the board in recognizedBy and the issuing jurisdiction in validIn. schema.org lists the Credential types in its new area, where definitions can still change as sites use them, so the text on the page is what carries the license.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/people/[name]#person",
  "name": "[The name the person uses professionally]",
  "worksFor": { "@id": "https://www.example.com/#firm" },
  "hasCredential": [
    {
      "@type": "EducationalOccupationalCredential",
      "credentialCategory": "license",
      "name": "[The license, as the board words it]",
      "identifier": "[The number, where the board publishes it]",
      "recognizedBy": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "[The board, as it names itself]",
        "url": "[The board's public lookup]"
      },
      "validIn": { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "[The state, province, emirate or country that issued it]" }
    }
  ]
}

Where you have built: one page, and every project tagged by municipality

Name the municipality on every project page: the town or city, plus the county or district where locals use it. Then keep one page that lists the places you have built, each with its projects linked and the approvals they went through. A client in [town] who finds three completed projects there has the answer to whether you know the town.

One page, not a page per place. Google's spam policies name doorway abuse, and among its examples are pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page. Twenty pages that differ only by a town's name are that pattern, and each tells a client in its town nothing the other nineteen did not.

Update the page when a project completes, and date it. A town where the firm last built a decade ago stays on the list, with its year.

Approvals: what you took through, never what the rule is

A client asking about a town's approvals wants to know whether you have been through them. Say so project by project: which approvals each one needed, from which body, and when each was granted. Keep the rule itself off the page. Thresholds, review steps and fees are the municipality's to state, they differ from one municipality to the next, and a sentence of yours that states one goes out of date the day the rule changes.

Link the municipality's own page for the rule, if you want the reader to have it. How long each approval took is a separate question, answered from your own dated record in the article on owners' questions.

One address, one phone and one name come first

None of this helps if the basics disagree. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros in the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026), 34.1% had no postal address a machine could parse, 36.9% listed more than one phone number across their own three main pages, and 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across those pages. Those figures are sample-wide, for all 40 trades; we publish no architects-only cut.

For a firm whose case rests on place, the office address comes first: in postal form, in text, on the contact page and in the footer, with one main number and the same firm name beside both. Two addresses for one firm give any reader a question to settle before the firm's experience counts for anything, so settle it on your side and let the firm read as one entity from every page. The free visibility check reads what your site serves and reports within 48 hours whether Claude names you, and what on the site is likeliest to be in the way.

The Business Profile, set to match the site

The profile repeats the site's facts, office by office. Google's Business Profile guidelines say the category completes the statement "this business IS a", so choose the one for the firm's core work. Each office gets one profile and no more, every office carries the same name, and offices doing the same work share a category. A firm that receives clients at its office and also works at their sites is what the guidelines call a hybrid: it shows the office address and sets a service area.

Google's guide to optimizing for its generative AI search says a Business Profile can help local details appear in AI responses as well as in other results, which puts the profile on the same upkeep as the site: when an office's phone or hours change, change both that day. Your Google Business Profile and AI visibility goes field by field, and local AI search with more than one location covers firms with offices in several cities.

The markup: LocalBusiness or Organization, with areaServed

schema.org has no type for an architecture firm, and ProfessionalService, once the parent of several trade types, is deprecated. Use LocalBusiness for a firm with an office clients visit and Organization for one without. Google's local business documentation lists an address among the required properties, and a firm with no office has no true address to give, which is the reason for Organization.

Either type takes areaServed, the geographic area a service covers, as a list of places. Name the places you take work now: the municipalities, counties, states or provinces your licenses and your projects support. Every place in the list is a claim, so each should have a license, a project or a stated travel policy behind it. The LocalBusiness node below does this for a firm with one office; for a firm with none, change the type to Organization and drop the address.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "@id": "https://www.example.com/#firm",
  "name": "[The firm's name, as on every other page]",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "telephone": "[The one main number]",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "[Street, number and suite]",
    "addressLocality": "[City]",
    "addressRegion": "[State or province]",
    "postalCode": "[Postal code]",
    "addressCountry": "[Country code]"
  },
  "areaServed": [
    { "@type": "City", "name": "[A municipality you take work in]" },
    { "@type": "AdministrativeArea", "name": "[A county, state or province]" }
  ],
  "employee": [{ "@id": "https://www.example.com/people/[name]#person" }]
}