Incorporating SEO into web design process

Most businesses treat SEO as something to fix after a website is finished. The site gets designed, built, and launched, and only then do they think about Google. At that point, many important choices have already been made, and changing them later takes more time and money.

Websites that rank well usually have SEO included from the start. It is part of the planning, design, content, and build not something added at the end. This page explains what that looks like in real projects.

Stage 1: Planning and research

Before any pages are designed, keyword research needs to be done. But this is often skipped. Keyword research is about finding out what people actually type into Google. If you run a property business in London, people might search for luxury estate agent London or something different like high end property London. What people search for should set the direction of your website.

Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and SEMrush show how many people search for these terms. You want a list of around 20 to 30 useful keywords, a mix of general and specific ones. This list then guides your page structure, URLs and content.

It also helps to look at competitors. See who is ranking for your keywords, what their websites include and what pages they have that you don’t. The point is not to copy them, but to understand the competition.

Stage 2: Site map and wireframes

Once you have your keywords, you can plan your site map. Each main keyword should match one page, and each page should focus on one clear topic. A common mistake is trying to fit too many topics onto a single page. For example, web design, branding and digital marketing should not sit on one page. They should be separate pages, each targeting their own keyword. One page trying to cover everything usually ends up ranking for nothing.

After that comes wireframes. These are simple black and white layouts that show where everything will go on a page before any design work starts. This is the stage where SEO decisions should be made early, not after the site is built.

Think about basics like where the H1 heading goes. There should only be one per page and it should include the main keyword. Plan where H2 and H3 headings sit so the page is easy to follow. Check if there is space for internal links to other pages and make sure there is enough written content. Pages with very little text rarely rank well. Sort all of this in the wireframe before the design starts.

Stage 3: How does web design affect SEO?

Designers often treat SEO as someone else’s job. It isn’t. A lot of design decisions affect how a site ranks.

Headings are one example. If you style normal text to look like a heading, or use the wrong heading level, it makes it harder for search engines to understand the page. Headings should follow the content, not just what looks good.

Images are another. Big hero images and background videos can look nice, but they slow the page down. Slow pages rank worse. Images should be compressed, use the right format like WebP, and have clear alt text.

Mobile matters most. Google looks at the mobile version first. If your mobile site hides content, breaks navigation, or loads slowly, your rankings will drop, no matter how good the desktop version looks.

Get the designer and the SEO person working together early. Most SEO problems on new sites come from web design choices that no one questioned.

Stage 4: Writing content with search in mind

Once the design is done, you can write the content. Good SEO content isn’t stuffed with keywords. It’s written for people first, then checked against your keyword research. Each page should focus on one main keyword and a few related ones. Put the main keyword in the H1, the page title, the meta description and in the first paragraph. Use the related ones naturally in subheadings and the main text.

How long it is depends on the page. A contact page can be short. A service page usually needs 600 to 1,000 words to cover what people want to know. A blog post or guide often needs more. Don’t repeat the same content across pages. If two pages say the same thing, neither will rank well. Each page should have a clear purpose.

Stage 5: What technical SEO needs sorting before you build?

Before development starts, sort the basics so you’re not fixing them later:

• Set the site up on HTTPS from the start
• Plan redirects from any old URLs
• Keep URLs short, clean and based on keywords
• Decide where to use structured data like services, reviews, FAQs and local pages
• Make sure the hosting is fast enough for the traffic you expect
• Include XML and HTML sitemaps as part of the build

All of this is much easier to do during web development than after launch. Skip it now and you will end up fixing it later, usually with more time and cost.

Stage 6: What needs to happen on launch day?

Launch is where a lot of SEO problems start. A simple checklist helps avoid them:

• Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
• Check that robots.txt is not blocking your live site
• Make sure the staging site is no longer visible to search engines
• Set up 301 redirects from old URLs to the new ones
• Install Google Analytics 4 and Search Console
• Run a crawl with Screaming Frog to find broken links and missing data

If you miss any of these, your traffic can drop quickly and take time to recover.

Stage 7: What should you do in the first 90 days after launch?

The first three months after launch are when Google re-evaluates the site. Rankings will move up and down, and sometimes drop before they settle. That’s normal. What’s not normal is ignoring it.

Check Search Console every week for crawl errors, indexing problems and pages losing impressions. Use GA4 to see if organic traffic is going up, down or staying flat. Compare it to the keywords from Stage 1. If a keyword is sitting around position 15, a small content update or a few internal links can often move it onto page one.

This is also when you see which early assumptions were wrong. Some keywords won’t convert like expected. Some pages will rank for different terms than planned. Adjust based on what the data is actually showing.

Why is it cheaper to build SEO in from the start?

Adding SEO after launch always costs more than doing it from the start. Changing a live site means setting up redirects, waiting for Google to re-index pages, and sometimes losing rankings in the process. If you change URLs that already have backlinks, you can lose some of that value. Updating navigation can also mean changing the design, which sends you back into earlier work. Things like schema, speed fixes and heading structure are all harder once the site is live.

Final thoughts about SEO friendly web design techniques

SEO isn’t something you add at the end of a project. It runs through the whole thing, from early keyword research to the first few months after launch. Miss any of those stages and the site will underperform, no matter how good it looks.

If you want a website where SEO is built in from day one rather than bolted on later, contact us. We design and build sites that work for your business and for search engines from the moment they go live.