Website Design and Creation: What Decisions About SEO Should You Make?
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Before you ever talk with a web designer and well before the actual pages are built, you need to think carefully about your search engine optimization strategy. No matter what else you may know about marketing and advertising, taking it online means you have to think about how the major search engines will rank your pages. Ask yourself a few questions and make some decisions about how you'll optimize those pages and earn some love from the engines now instead of waiting until the site is up and running. Here are some examples to keep in mind.
Which Consumer Demographics are You Targeting?
Every element of your website will influence how it's ranked by the search engines. Before working on the design, you must decide what consumer groups you want to reach. Do you want to connect with consumers in a certain economic bracket or age range? Maybe people working in a particular industry is your targeted market. Be clear about who you want to reach and one element of the design will be settled.
How Well Do You Know Those Demographics?
It's one thing to decide you want to reach consumers who earn around $100K a year, but how much do you know about those customers? What to they like and what do they tend to hate? Will they be more likely to search on a smartphone or a laptop? What sort of joys, concerns, and other factors will influence their buying habits? If you have the correct answers to those questions, it's possible to further define the bones that your designer needs to come up with.
Who a re Your Main Competitors?
Unless you've stumbled across a customer demographic that's woefully neglected, there will be some competition. Who is it? How are they doing? What market share do they command in terms of online revenues? Identify your competitors, take a look at their sites, and figure out what keeps bringing people back. Some of those elements need to be part of your site design.
Pay attention to how their sites flow and function:
- Do pages load quickly ?
- Is the site properly secured and thus more likely to place higher in search engine results?
- Do internal links make it easy to jump to something of interest? Is everything easy to read and view?
- Does each page look attractive without being crammed with too much data?
All these elements will influence the architectural design of your online home, so don't be shy about identifying these attributes and what they would mean to someone coming to your site for the first time.
How Clear is Your Mission?
If someone stumbled across your site by accident, would that person be able to understand who you are, what you offer, and how you go about accomplishing that mission? Try to step back and think about what would motivate someone doing casual browsing to stop and give your site a good long look. Before the visitor is off the first page, he or she should know exactly what value you bring to the table and have a reason for digging deeper.
Ultimately, you want a design that is easy for visitors to navigate, easy for search engines to rank higher, and offers real value. Take the time to go over these questions and provide serious answers. In the long run, your web designer and builder will have more of what they need to deliver a site that's truly represents your business at its best.
It's one thing to decide you want to reach consumers who earn around $100K a year, but how much do you know about those customers? What to they like and what do they tend to hate? Will they be more likely to search on a smartphone or a laptop? What sort of joys, concerns, and other factors will influence their buying habits? Will they buy more of your products if you offer offline purchases with a ' POS card reader ?
Website Design, Creation & SEO FAQs
How early in the web design process should SEO decisions be made?
SEO choices work best when they shape the first wireframes, not when they are patched in at the end. Early decisions about navigation, content hierarchy, and templates determine how easily search engines can crawl and understand the site. Google’s own SEO Starter Guide frames SEO as a design and architecture concern as much as a content one, not just a final tweak stage, so it makes sense to bring your SEO person into the very first planning meetings and discovery calls, not only into launch prep. You will save time and avoid rework by aligning design, development, and SEO from day one.
How does choosing a content management system affect long term SEO success?
Your choice of CMS influences how easily you can edit titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt text, and internal links without developer help. Some systems provide clean HTML, customizable URLs, and built in XML sitemaps, while others lock you into rigid structures that make technical SEO fixes much harder. It is worth checking whether the CMS supports plugin ecosystems for structured data, multilingual content, and performance optimization. Thinking this through before build means you will not have to migrate platforms just to implement basic SEO improvements later.
What technical foundations should be agreed on with developers before any pages are built?
Ahead of design work, teams benefit from aligning on indexability basics such as robots.txt rules, XML sitemaps, and how canonical tags will be handled. It is also smart to agree on how redirects will be managed, how error pages will be structured, and how templates will expose key elements like headings and breadcrumb navigation. Many technical issues arise because developers optimize for aesthetics while SEOs optimize for crawlability, so shared standards help avoid conflicts. When everyone knows how the code will support search visibility, later audits become about refinement instead of repair.
How can UX and visual design decisions influence SEO outcomes?
Search engines increasingly interpret strong UX signals as indicators of quality, so layout choices matter. Clear typography, adequate contrast, and intuitive content groupings encourage visitors to stay longer and explore more pages, which often aligns with better behavioral metrics. Overly busy hero sections, intrusive popups, or buried calls to action can create high bounce rates even if the content is technically optimized. Treat design reviews as an opportunity to ask whether a first time visitor can understand the offer in seconds and move naturally through the site.
What role do Core Web Vitals play when planning a new website design?
Core Web Vitals focus on loading performance, visual stability, and interactivity, and they are much easier to get right when they are part of the layout and front end strategy from the start. Decisions about image formats, font loading, animation, and JavaScript frameworks strongly affect metrics like Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift, both of which are covered in Google’s performance guidance on web.dev. Treat these metrics as constraints while you design instead of trying to retrofit speed into a heavy layout. That way you end up with pages that feel fast to users and align with modern ranking considerations.
How should URL structure and site architecture be planned for SEO during design?
Before any page is created, it helps to sketch a simple, logical hierarchy that reflects how users think about your services, not just your internal org chart. Short, descriptive URLs grouped into clear categories make it easier for search engines to map topics across the site and for humans to guess where information lives. You can also plan hub pages that act as authoritative entry points for key themes, with subpages that support those hubs. A solid structure like this makes internal linking, breadcrumb trails, and future content expansion far more manageable.
How can content planning be aligned with SEO at the design stage?
Content planning for SEO is not only about keywords, it is about deciding which questions each page will answer better than anyone else. Early in the project you can map user intents to templates, so that service pages, comparison pages, and educational resources each have a defined role. Google’s guidance on people first content emphasizes matching content to user needs rather than stuffing pages with search terms, which is easier to follow when every layout has a clear informational job. When designers know what each page must communicate, it is much simpler to balance visuals with copy that can actually rank.
How do analytics and tracking considerations affect SEO related design choices?
If you want to measure the success of SEO, you need places to track events and goals, which should influence how forms, buttons, and menus are designed. Planning the placement of contact forms, calls to action, and key navigation items around measurement points helps you configure Google Analytics and similar tools effectively. Integrations for Google Search Console can also be considered early so that sitemaps, index coverage, and query data are available as soon as the site launches. This measurement mindset turns your new design into a testable asset instead of a static brochure.
Why should accessibility be part of SEO discussions during website creation?
Accessible sites tend to be more understandable to both users and search engines, since they rely on clean structure, proper headings, alt text, and meaningful link labels. The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative describes accessibility as a way to make content perceivable and operable for all users, which overlaps heavily with good SEO practice. When accessibility is included in design requirements, the result is usually clearer code and better semantics, which help crawlers interpret your pages. It also broadens your audience by ensuring that people using assistive technologies can interact with your content.
How can you future proof SEO when planning a new site design?
Future proofing starts by assuming your site will grow, so templates, navigation, and topic clusters should be flexible enough to accommodate new content without becoming cluttered. It also pays to design systems instead of one off pages, for example reusable components for FAQs, resources, and testimonials that can be expanded across sections without losing consistency. Internationalization, additional locations, or new service lines are easier to support when the original architecture is modular and well documented. Thinking ahead like this reduces the risk that every strategic change will require a disruptive redesign to preserve SEO gains.
