SEO is often an afterthought, once the site is live and the traffic is slow to come. Yet part of what Google understands about your site is decided while it is being designed. Careful website design won’t rank you first: Google itself says there is no secret that puts a site at the top of the results. Above all, it avoids the obstacles that keep Google from reading your pages properly. It’s a foundation, and it should be included in every site, not sold as an option.
What website design decides
Clear, stable addresses, first. Each page has its own, readable one (/en/services/maintenance/ rather than /?p=378), and it doesn’t change with every reorganization. An address that changes without a redirect is a page Google has to rediscover, and a link that leads nowhere.
A structure Google understands. Menus, links between pages and each page’s headings draw a map of the site. An important page linked from the home page and neighbouring pages is seen as important. An orphan page, linked from nowhere, struggles to exist.
Titles and descriptions you can edit, page by page. The title shown in the browser tab and in Google’s results, and the short description below it, must be editable for every page, without asking the developer. On our WordPress sites, they are two fields in the editor.
A fast site, especially on phones. Google indexes the mobile version of your site, so that’s the one that counts. It also uses the Core Web Vitals, its measures of a page’s speed and stability, in its ranking systems. With a caveat it spells out itself: relevant content comes first. A fast site doesn’t make up for a page that doesn’t answer the question.
Structured data, finally. This is information arranged in a format Google reads directly: the business’s name and contact details, an article’s author and date, the breadcrumb trail. It makes a page eligible for rich results, without guaranteeing them, as Google points out.
For a bilingual site, design also decides how each version is declared to Google. We explain it in our Polylang or WPML comparison.
What poor design can hide from Google
Some building mistakes make content invisible, without anyone noticing on screen.
Links that aren’t links. Google follows links written as real HTML links, with an address. A menu whose items respond to clicks through a script, with no address behind them, can take visitors everywhere and Google nowhere.
Content that only appears after an action. Text loaded only when someone swipes a carousel or clicks a button may never be read: Google points out that its crawler doesn’t click or swipe. Tabs and accordions that already contain the text in the page don’t have this problem.
Text in images. A heading or a list of services drawn into an image is readable to the eye, not to a search engine, nor to a screen reader.
And a working copy left open. If the test version of the site gets indexed, Google finds two identical sites and has to guess which one to show. It is protected by a password, and the final site opens to search engines on launch day, not before.
What design doesn’t decide
Content, first. Google looks for the page that best answers a question. A well-built page that says nothing useful is still a page that says nothing useful. What you write, how you answer your clients’ questions and how regularly you do it weigh more than any setting.
Reputation, next. Links from other sites to yours, mentions of your business, your reviews: all of that is built over time, outside the site.
And competition. In some industries, ten serious businesses target the same search. Design puts you on the starting line, not on the podium.
We lay the foundation, and we say it plainly: content strategy and link building aren’t part of our services. That’s a job for an SEO specialist, and we are happy to work with yours.
SEO myths to set aside
Google’s SEO Starter Guide settles several stubborn beliefs:
- The “meta keywords” tag is useless: Google doesn’t use it.
- A keyword in the domain name or the address has hardly any effect on its own.
- The length of a text, on its own, doesn’t count for ranking.
- Duplicate content doesn’t earn a penalty, even if it wastes Google’s time.
- The order of headings on the page doesn’t matter to the search engine.
That last point deserves a clarification. For Google, headings out of order change nothing. For a person browsing with a screen reader, they change everything: that’s how they jump from one section to the next. So we keep a single main heading per page and a clean hierarchy, for accessibility first. Google benefits along the way.
The same guide reminds us that it takes time. Some changes show up within hours, others take months, and it advises waiting a few weeks before judging a result. Be wary of anyone who promises you a position in Google: nobody can guarantee one.
What we deliver on every site
On every site we build, this foundation is included by default, like the seat belt in a car: a clean heading structure, readable addresses, titles and descriptions editable page by page, structured data, a sitemap for Google, planned redirects if the site replaces another, and a fast, accessible site. At launch, the site is added to Search Console, as described in our pre-launch checklist.
Want to know where a page of your current site stands? Our free SEO checker checks its title, description, tags and structured data in a few seconds. For a full review of the site, speed and accessibility included, there is the website audit. And if you are starting from a blank page, it’s the starting point of our WordPress sites.
