The strategic function of SEO for designers — how to achieve the top ranking on your website.
From an outside perspective, designers remain the ones tasked with making the experience more ‘beautiful’. In cross-disciplinary meetings, however, it’s not uncommon for marketers to push back on your ideas, with clients sometimes favoring their input over yours. Understanding the strategic role of SEO is part of bridging this gap, an importance you’re probably familiar with and feel ready to take a deeper dive into.
Story time: At the start of my career as a professional bachelored’ up UX Designer (2016, sheesh), the power of design was almost palpable in the air; you saw those with great design principles reign supreme at the coveted #1 position on Google. What could surpass them? A bottomless ad campaign budget, most likely. All manner of hacks and tweaks would be sent our way “CamelCase titles convert better?”, “Split up the about-us page in 6 different pages?”. In terms of design hierarchy, they were not particularly logical, so it prompted me to investigate SEO strategies and extrapolate the truly requisite components. Because for sure I wouldn’t want my client to think that a pushback was based on feeling alone.
There’s good news: good design, good copywriting and a healthy social media strategy — remain prevalent over hacks and love bombing your users with content. In the ever-evolving landscape of web design, understanding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become crucial for developing successful websites. This guide aims to empower designers with essential SEO knowledge, seamlessly incorporating it into the design process from the outset. Here’s 4 steps you can integrate in your user experience (UX) design process...
1. SEO used when starting up the project
2. Reviewing the architecture according to the SEO basics
3. Tracking & experimenting + which tools to use
It all starts with the search engine
Your project starts with a preexisting brand and website
Similarly to the end user, you are getting accustomed to the brand. Sure, from the other side of the fence (as a designer) but almost identical, there is an exploratory phase. The process begins with utilising a designated search engine to discover what’s related to the offering, whether for the designer or the client. This serves as the initial phase of the audit and scope definition.
The UX audit can contain:
- Job stories related to search behaviour and expectations (image 1)
- Popular keyword usage
- Most frequent search queries
- Questions addressed to customer care (often found in public FAQ’s)
- The back-linking structure that connects the live website (in addition, you can visualise the flows of the competitor’s navigation structures)
- Social media presence
- Click-through rate (CTR) (clicks vs impression of link)
Any further steps that can occur due to this audit:
- Rewrite keywords to better suit the brand and suggest new communication efforts
- Target localised users through physical media, f.e. flyers, print-outs, banners, posters, mail, etc.
- Start a new social media channel if one is lacking
- Create additional templated landing pages and sections for topics in demand
- Invite the correct guest speakers, influencers, and writers that adhere to the correct standards.
If the CTR is lacking, your audit can give recommendations to improve conversion performance in both SERP and on landing page: improvements on copywriting, metadata and descriptive UI, and scoring higher on Google Web Vitals rules (which involve design and development improvements)
Which ‘advanced’ tool to dive into to get started?
Two great tools are the Google Search Console and Ahrefs. Even through their free plans, it’s possible to discover keyword usage, the presence of deep links*, and organic click-through rates. These metrics can indicate the likelihood of users choosing a competitor’s link over another.
* Deep links are custom URL schemes to direct users to specific pages within an app, enhancing user engagement and retention and improving conversion rates. They are easier to track.
You start with a blank-slate client project
Projects for start-ups, new side hustles, and personal ideas can feel like starting with a blank canvas. Starting a project without a preexisting domain rating DR (domain rating), offers more creative freedom, as there’s no immediate need to dive into data, allowing for an unbiased perspective. However, in this initial research phase, there’s an inherent advantage, even in highly competitive markets like AI, crypto, or fintech. Tools like Ahrefs or the Pinterest Trends dashboard can reveal globally popular search terms and trending topics. The Google Keyword Planner provides the year-over-year (YoY) percentile change of trends, showing shifts such as #ecommerce declining while #instagrambusiness rises. This micro-trend cycle can become a valuable tool, enabling clear mapping of the broader ecosystem.
Though oddly named, ScreamingFrog is a recommended tool for analyzing competitors’ sitemaps. It enables the discovery of all URLs listed in an XML Sitemap. According to trafficthinktank.com, it’s possible to identify URLs where competitors have not optimized their meta titles and descriptions. For shared target keywords, refining metadata can boost CTR and attract more organic traffic to the website.
For designers, this advantage may not mean much, but it’s good padding for your research. What is intersting is that at it’s core, you’re designing products structurally optimised for the Web.
Conducting a UX audit for a blank-slate project can look like
- Create topic clusters with your client (image 5: Hubspot has a really great article on this)
- Research relevant trends
- Research hashtags and influencers/actors that can be a part of your virality 🦠
- Start an ad campaign which vaguely offers to test your hypothesis on different social platforms. You can make public or community posts in groups. Check your engagement numbers on Reddit vs. Facebook, TikTok vs. Snapchat, etc. through their respective analytics or create your own dashboards with Notion or Google Sheets.
Mind you: this is a whole entire service in and of itself; it’s not a 1-hour sit-down sifting through dashboards; you can create a new service package that helps your clients. For Bolden, we’ve set up CXO Design Services for specifically this knowledge gap.
Think back on other successful campaigns in the past and how they launched. Brands and social cohesion behaviours that we regard as normal everyday products have had a long, sustained development process; Uber Eats, Airbnb, Estonia’s digital passport, recycling disposables in Germany, etc.
Your information architecture is your links.
After the research phase, the puzzle pieces are ready to be laid out on the canvas. To maintain a clear view of the structure, placing it in a low-fidelity tool like a sitemap is recommended. This approach allows stakeholders of all types — technical, non-technical, and others — to easily understand the framework.
Sitemap
Maintaining oversight of the internal linking structure is essential, though embedding external domains can also be beneficial. A hierarchical sitemap is ideal, as it reveals the main flows. According to Backlinko, keeping crawl depth to a maximum of 3 clicks is optimal, although there is some debate regarding the well-known The 3-Click Rule for Navigation. From a data perspective, crawling beyond 4 pages rarely proves advantageous. If the FAQ, blog, or community is hosted on a separate platform, it’s best to index those sections as well.
User Flow
A document showcasing all user journey steps and how users might click through your sitemap to find what they need to know. User flows help increase the time spent on a page, reduce bounce rates, and encourage return visits. Additionally, many user flow techniques, such as optimising page speed, are also SEO techniques. There are many direct benefits to focusing on user flow.
Dynamic content examples
- Weather forecasting
- Stock trading
Dynamic content best practices
- Don’t add more dynamic elements than are necessary. It might feel exciting to add those elements, but don’t create more work for yourself if it isn’t really adding value to your site or brand. Stick to your pillars.
- Ensure titles and title tags with keywords are static to avoid cloaking. You can also put an FAQ at the bottom. This is great for dynamic product pages.
- Use canonical tags to avoid keyword cannibalisation. These tags tell the bot that another page is the original to rank. For instance, pages with different colour items will point back to the main item page.
- Compress static elements to reduce page size.
Lo-Fi sketching
Showcase early on where the metadata, links and structure will be on the page. This can be achieved in co-creation with teams, clients, stakeholders and even users. Find a fun angle;
Conducting a “future headlines” brainstorm with the creative team or peers can help address significant questions, such as predicting the viral hashtags a user base might adopt. Though it sounds simple, brands and musicians often establish their presence on distinct platforms. Phrases like ‘to Google’, Q-tips, Hot Girl Summer, ‘Potato Salad Kickstarter’,the wizard installer, and the carbon footprint represent vocabulary that has been crafted and pre-packaged for everyday use.
SEO markup
Integrating SEO into the architecture requires ensuring the website is crawlable by Googlebot. Address the searcher’s query on a primary or secondary page, optimize the site for fast loading, and make content easy to share with a ready-made thumbnail. This includes having the page title, shortened URL, description, thumbnail, and snippet information prepared.
A great tool for preparing SEO assets is Creatopy which can automatically scale banners, thumbnails, and text, which can then be used in your MARCOM efforts.
Organic traffic (users that land on your website without a paid ad) happens thanks to:
- Wayfinding
- Link building and easy discovery of more related content
- Search
- Finding the right target audience
While finding the tone of voice for the brand, keywords and positioning are already top of mind. Using the correct tone, elements will have unique names that the user base understands, further lowering the barrier to interaction.
Buidling easy-to-navigate pages with meaningful topic clusters will allow content discoverability, which in turn fosters more engagement and impact. Organic traffic builds as users follow these paths over time, solidifying the domain within its niche. Thanks to the TikTok algorithm, finding a niche has become easier; similar content appears depending on the group a user belongs to. It’s wise to be cautious with these algorithms to avoid creating filter bubbles or echo chambers that exclude healthy discussions. The benefit, however, is that this helps bring the proposition to the right audience.
In addition, you can spend time on display ad campaigns to further the brand awareness and reach. This is also useful for tweaking your target audience points of interests. Be open and curious about “what happens to the reach of this Instagram Reel if I focus on the user’s interest in cooking over business content’ — this data will be advantageous again and again.
“Be open and curious — ‘what happens to the reach of this Instagram Reel if I focus on the user’ interest in cooking over business content?’ — this data will be useful again, and again.”
Client Case
For Farmer Gracy, one of our clients, a challenge that arose during the UX research phase was to uncover the truly biggest direct competitors and their landing pages. It gave the team a data-driven, research-based approach to design research. A North Star.
What’s most effective is to build a community that surrounds your product. One that turns shoppers into brand advocates. One where an app can make changes in the real world instead of glueing people to their phones; genuine connection.
Start up the keyword tool of choice, integrate content creation into the design skillset, and embrace the role of a brand influencer on social media. The true foundation of effective design and SEO alignment lies with the user in the real world. Plus, this approach adds a valuable link back to the domain. Just have fun out there. 👾👾👾👾
With this final point, we’ve covered the foundational aspects of SEO strategy that integrate seamlessly with design. These are just the tip of the iceberg — an introduction to how SEO can strengthen your work in accessible, multidisciplinary ways. Hopefully, you feel equipped to approach design with a broader perspective, where every creative choice is backed by strategic, data-driven insights. By uniting data-driven SEO techniques with thoughtful design, you’ll position your work one step ahead, creating more impactful, user-centered experiences.
As Alonzo, our co-founder at Bolden, puts it:
To stand out in today’s ever-expanding landscape of online experiences, SEO and UI design must work in tandem. We always strive to be strategic, pragmatic, and data-driven in our design work by incorporating a crucial element of objectivity to achieve this.
Want to know more? Subscribe to our Medium collective to be ready for Part 2, which dives into more advanced SEO methodology and tracking experiments.
