It was on the proposal, somewhere between “fully responsive” and “bespoke design”. SEO friendly website. You read it, nodded, signed, and paid the deposit. Six months later you’re on the phone to somebody (possibly me) asking why the new site is nowhere on Google when it was meant to be SEO friendly.
It probably is SEO friendly. That doesn’t mean anybody can find it, and I’ll try to explain why.
I’ve had a go before at designers who charge two grand extra for installing a plugin and calling it SEO. I’m being fairer to designers this time, because most of them aren’t conning anybody. What goes wrong is that nobody sat down and agreed where the design job stops and the SEO job starts. You didn’t, the designer didn’t, and your SEO (if you’ve even got one yet) wasn’t in the room. Everything that falls into that gap is the stuff keeping you off page one.
This is the written version of episode 46 of SEO Fucking What? – if you’d rather listen, click on the player above.
What does SEO friendly mean on a web design proposal?
SEO friendly means the site won’t get in Google’s way. Google can find the pages, read them, tell a heading from a paragraph, and load the whole thing on a phone without it falling over. It’s a site that is able to rank.
The phrase has turned into marketing copy, though. Every theme says it, every page builder says it, and Wix, Squarespace, and that bloke on Fiverr all say it too. It means so little now that I’ve seen sites sold as SEO friendly that were still telling Google not to index them (friendly my arse), which is about as unfriendly as a website can get.
What search engine optimised means, and why it’s a separate job from web design
Search engine optimised means the site has been built around what your customers type into Google. Somebody has looked at the searches and decided which page goes after which search. They’ve written the titles, headings, and copy to match, and worked out how the site earns enough trust to push past whoever’s sat at the top already.
Those are big decisions, and they’re made with search data your designer usually hasn’t got. Nobody asked them to get it, either (don’t worry, most people never think to ask).
An analogy – you know I love an analogy: A kitchen fitter can give you a cracking kitchen. Worktops level, oven wired properly, drawers that shut without a bang. They’re not cooking your dinner, though, and if you never hired anyone to cook, you can’t really blame the fitter that you’re starving. An SEO friendly site with no optimisation is a gorgeous kitchen with fuck all in the fridge. It’s ready to go, and nothing’s happening in it.
If you’re a web designer reading this and wincing a bit, I’ve put together the SEO Build Pack for web designers for exactly this. It’s £35 and covers the parts of SEO that belong in the build, so the site you hand over is ready to rank.
Who is responsible for SEO on a new website, the web designer or the SEO?
This is where I’d draw the line. You’re welcome to argue with me about it, but at least we’ll be arguing about something that’s written down.
What your web designer should be responsible for
The designer owns the build. That starts with headings used for structure rather than for making text big: one H1 per page, and H2s that mark real sections. If the designer picks an H2 because they like the font size, that’s a build fault, and I went into it properly in episode 21 – Your Headers are killing your SEO.
Speed sits with the build too. Hosting, image sizes, the forty plugins, and the theme that loads everything on every page are all design decisions, and together they decide whether a page loads on a phone or takes a fortnight. URLs belong here as well. You want /services/hr-consultancy/, not ?page_id=4471 or copy-of-home-2.
Then there’s the setting that keeps a site out of Google while it’s being built. Every platform has a version of it (Google calls it noindex), and somebody has to switch it off when the site goes live. You’d be amazed how often nobody does.
If an old site is being replaced, the designer should build the redirect map, so every old address points at its new home. Google’s own guide to moving a site starts with exactly that mapping, and I ranted about it at length in episode 11 – Let your SEO help with your website migration.
The sitemap should list the real pages rather than tag pages, test pages, and that thing called Sample Page that’s been there since 2019.
Search Console, Analytics, and the domain should all sit in your name, not the designer’s, which I covered in episode 2 on account ownership.
What your SEO should be responsible for
The SEO owns the strategy. That starts with keyword research: finding out what people search and how they phrase it (which is never how you’d phrase it). Then they decide which page targets which search, so you haven’t got three pages fighting each other for the same thing. From that research, the SEO writes or briefs the meta titles, H1s, and Content.
After launch, the SEO owns the content plan, plus the links and reputation work that make Google trust you more than the next bugger. They also own watching the site, fixing it, and reporting on it month after month. A site doesn’t rank on launch day. It ranks over months, if somebody keeps working on it.
The SEO jobs nobody owns, which is why your new site isn’t ranking
Then there’s the bit in the middle, where things fall to pieces. Take the H1 on your main service page. The designer drops in your tagline because it looks lovely, when an SEO would have used the phrase people search for. Neither of them was asked. Your copy goes the same way: you wrote it, the designer pasted it in, and nobody compared a single word of it to a single search.
Meta titles are a classic. The plugin generates “Home – Company Name” and nobody touches it again for five years, even though Google’s guidance on title links specifically says to avoid vague titles like “Home”. Launch week is the worst of the lot. The site goes live, the designer invoices, the SEO hasn’t been hired yet, and nobody opens Search Console for a month. None of this is hard or expensive, but it belongs to nobody, and stuff that belongs to nobody doesn’t get done.
Questions to ask your web designer before the website build starts
Before anybody opens Figma, get these answered. In writing, please, rather than over a nice coffee that everyone remembers differently afterwards.
Start with who’s doing the keyword research, and when. It needs to happen before design, because if the answer is nobody, your page plan is a guess with a nice font. Then ask who writes the H1 and meta title on each page. “We’ll sort it” isn’t an answer. You want a name.
Ask who switches off the noindex at launch and who checks it’s gone. Ideally that’s two different people, because the person who forgot is the person least likely to notice. The same goes for the redirect map: one person builds it and another tests it.
Ask whose name Search Console, Analytics, and the domain are in (yours, every time).
Ask what happens in the week after launch, including who’s watching for errors and who’s checking that pages are getting indexed.
Finally, ask when the designer’s job ends and what’s in the handover. You want a date and a document, so everybody knows when the baton’s passed and who’s holding it.
If your designer says “oh don’t worry, it’s all SEO friendly”, don’t argue. Ask which of those things they’re doing. You’re not trying to catch anyone out. You need to know what’s left over and who you’ll have to hire to do it.
How to check if your new website is hidden from Google
OK, homework. None of this needs you to be technical, and you can get through it with one cup of tea.
Check whether Google can see your site
Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google, with no space after the colon. The site: search operator shows you the pages Google has indexed from your domain. It isn’t a complete count, but if hardly anything comes back, you’ve got a problem. Next, go to your homepage, right click, choose view source, and search the page for noindex. If it’s sitting on a page you want people to find, ring somebody today, not next week.
Check your homepage H1 and title
Do the thirty second H1 check from episode 21. Then search for your business and look at how your homepage appears in Google’s results. If the title says Home, or just your company name, that’s one of the jobs nobody owned.
Ask for the redirect map
If you’ve had a new site in the last couple of years, ask whoever built it for the redirect map. If the answer is “the what?”, that tells you most of what you need to know. Open the Page indexing report in Search Console and look at how many pages are showing as Not found (404).
Write down who owns what
Make a one-page list with a column each for the designer, the SEO, and you. Put every job from this post in one of those columns, then stick the list somewhere you’ll find it again. The next time something breaks, it stops a three-way blame argument before it starts.
Web designers, say where your SEO job ends at the quote stage
If you’re a designer and you’ve got this far without throwing your laptop, thank you. I’ve said before that a designer who says “I’ll build it properly, but you’ll need someone else for the SEO” is worth their weight in gold, and I still think that. You don’t have to do the SEO. Say so when you quote, say what you will do, and name who picks up the rest. Clients trust a designer who does that more, because they know where they stand.
None of this is a dig at designers. Good ones are worth every penny, and the best I’ve worked with know exactly where their job stops. The phrase on the proposal was always the problem, because it sounds like a promise and isn’t one.
That gap is why I built the SEO Build Pack for web designers. It’s the stuff I wish every designer had before they handed a site over:
- a client SEO brief to fill in before you design anything
- a page plan with a worked example, so every page has a search to go after
- build and launch checklists
- a redirect map spreadsheet
- a plain English handover document you can put your own logo on
- a cheat sheet answering the SEO questions clients always ask
It works on WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, Shopify, Framer, or whatever else you build on, because it’s about what the finished site needs rather than which buttons to press. It’s £35, one payment, and you can use it on every project. There’s no subscription and nothing to upsell you to.
It won’t turn anybody into an SEO, and it doesn’t pretend to. What it does is make sure the site you hand over can rank, so you don’t get the “why aren’t we on Google?” phone call six months later.
Business owners, send the link to your designer. They’ll either thank you or get very defensive. Either response tells you a lot about the person you’re working with.
