There is a familiar sequence in web projects. The site is designed, built and launched. A few months later, somebody asks why it is not showing up on Google. An SEO specialist is brought in, looks at the site, and explains that most of what they would change was decided in week one, by people who were not thinking about search at all.
I design websites and I do SEO, and the longer I do both the more convinced I am that they are the same job seen from two ends. Here is why, and what it means for how a site should be planned.
The decisions that decide rankings are design decisions
Which pages exist
Google ranks pages, not websites. If a business does five things and its website has one “Services” page, it has one chance to rank for five different searches, and it will usually rank for none of them. The decision to give each service its own page, each with one clear topic, is a sitemap decision made at the start of design. It is also the most important SEO decision on the entire project.
What the pages are called
The words in a page’s heading, address and title are the strongest signal of what it is about. “Bathroom fitting in Totnes” is a page Google understands; “What we do” is not. Choosing those words means knowing how customers search, which is research that belongs before the wireframes, not after the launch.
How the pages link to each other
Navigation, footers, related links and the links inside the copy tell search engines which pages matter and how they relate. A site where every service page links to the relevant case studies, area pages and guides, with descriptive link text, is a site that explains itself. That structure is designed; it does not happen by accident.
How fast it loads
Speed is a ranking factor and, more importantly, a conversion factor. It is set by design choices: how many images, how large, how many fonts, whether there is a video at the top, how heavy the theme and plugins are. A site designed to a performance budget is fast on launch day. A site designed without one is fast after someone is paid to strip things out. More on speed and Core Web Vitals.
Whether the words were written to be found
Copy written on lorem ipsum wireframes and squeezed in later never fits. Copy written with the page plan, around the searches each page targets and the questions it should answer, fits the design because the design was built for it. The headline length, the amount of body copy, the position of the FAQ: all of it is easier when the words and the layout grow together.
What goes wrong when SEO comes last
- Beautiful pages about nothing. Short on words, long on imagery, with headings like “Our passion” that no customer has ever typed.
- One page doing five jobs, ranking for none of them.
- Images where text should be: headlines baked into graphics, menus as PDFs, address details in a picture.
- A slow, heavy build that needs a second project to fix.
- Lost rankings in a redesign because old addresses changed and nobody set up redirects.
- A retrofit budget spent undoing decisions that would have cost nothing to get right.
What it looks like when they work together
Research first
Before any design, the project starts with what customers actually search for, how competitors answer it, and what the business does best. The output is a keyword map: a list of pages, each with one topic, the search it targets and the questions it must answer.
Structure before style
The sitemap and the navigation come from the keyword map. Every page has a reason to exist and a route to it. Pages that would have no topic are not built.
Copy with the design
Headlines, body copy and calls to action are written to the plan and the design is shaped around real words. Titles and descriptions for search results are written at the same time, not bolted on by a plugin later.
Built to a budget
A performance budget from the first template. Images sized and compressed per device. No third-party scripts without a reason. Accessibility built in, which search engines also reward.
Launched with care
Redirects for every old address, an XML sitemap, Search Console set up and checked, structured data for the business, and measurement of enquiries from day one.
Where ongoing SEO fits
None of this makes an ongoing SEO service unnecessary; it makes it effective. Once the foundations are right, SEO work can concentrate on what moves a business up the results: new content for the questions customers ask, local visibility, reviews, links from relevant sites, and the steady technical care that keeps a site healthy. Without the foundations, that work is pushing a heavy site uphill.
If you are planning a new site, the web design page describes how I run a project with search built in from the start. If you already have a site that nobody finds, the redesign process begins with an audit of what is already working, so it is kept. Either way, SEO and web design happen together.
