Design Decisions That Improve Your SEO (and How I Help My Clients)
SEO isn’t just about keywords—it’s about how your website is designed to support visibility and client conversion. In this episode, Samantha breaks down how design choices like layout, load speed, accessibility, and heading hierarchy directly impact your search rankings. Whether you’re updating your own site or hiring a designer, you’ll learn what actually matters for SEO and what your designer should really be doing behind the scenes to make sure your website gets found (and brings in the right clients).
Key Takeaways
Your website should feel like working with you — not just look professional or polished.
When your site, social media, and in-person experience feel disconnected, it quietly breaks trust.
The design, colors, and photos you use should reflect your true personality and client experience.
Your website copy should sound like your voice, not like a template or AI wrote it.
Clear navigation and calls-to-action should guide visitors the way you guide your clients.
Small updates — like authentic photos or refreshed colors — can instantly make your site feel more aligned and welcoming.
Resources & Links
Transcript
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: I am Samantha Mabe, website designer and founder of Lemon and the Sea, and this is Elevate your practice. If you're a holistic health practitioner ready to grow your practice without wasting time on things that don't work, you're in the right place. Each week I share a website, SEO, and marketing advice along with guest experts so you can bring in the right clients and feel confident about how you are showing up and serving the people that you help. Let's get started.
Why Website Design Impacts SEO
[00:00:39] SEO isn't just about keywords, it's also about design. If your site looks outdated, loads slowly or confuses people, Google notices that. I am not going to tell you to spend your time chasing algorithms and trying to rank number one for every keyword you can think of, but what I do want to talk about in this episode is how you can design a site that works for both your patients and so that you get rewarded in search, whether that is Google or AI, as we have talked about previously. So let's talk first about how design impacts SEO and why the two really do go hand in hand, and then what your designer should be doing for you if you're hiring them to work on your website.
[00:01:28] First, let's talk about how your website design actually impacts SEO. If you're not familiar, SEO means search engine optimization. That's the work that you are doing on your website to make sure that search engines like Google and ChatGPT can actually find your website and put it in front of the right people.
[00:01:53] This work happens on your website, which is something that you can control or hand off to a designer, and there are pieces that live elsewhere. Things like backlinks and making sure that you have trust and authority in your field. I'm not gonna be talking about those external factors of SEO today, but I'm gonna link to some previous episodes in the show notes that you can listen to. We're gonna be focusing on the internal SEO factors that are impacted by the design of your site.
1. Improve SEO with a Fast-Loading Website
[00:02:31] One of the very first things that you can do to improve your SEO is to make sure that your site loads quickly. Load time is a huge deal because people do not have very long attention spans and they spend less than half a second on your website before deciding if they're in the right place. Which means that search engines aren't going to show people your website if they know that it's slow to load- and they do know. If you run a PageSpeed Insights test, it will show you how quickly your website loads, and that is a factor in where it puts you on their search results. Slow sites lose visitors, which means that your ranking drops because people aren't sticking around even long enough to let the site load.
[00:03:24] There are things you can do to improve your load time, no matter what platform you're on. Things like making sure you have compressed your images as much as possible, that you are not including too much extra code on the site, and that you're using a platform that is SEO friendly.
[00:03:47] Now every drag and drop platform is going to load slower than if you were to get someone to code something from scratch and host it on your own server, but that's just not a reality for most people. And so something like WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace is okay. We just want to control the things we can by making sure that we are not slowing down our website through the choices that we're making.
[00:04:16] The biggest one here is really image size. You wanna make sure your images are sized correctly in the dimensions and that you're compressing them for web and using a web friendly format. I recommend not having your images be more than 2,500 pixels wide. They can be even smaller if you are not using them as a full width background on your site. And then you want to run it through a tool like TinyPNG that is going to compress your website and make it the smallest file size possible without losing quality.
[00:04:55] The other thing you can do is to choose a file type that is smaller. Squarespace recently started allowing you to upload WebP images, which is your best bet, and tools like TinyPNG will actually convert those for you as you are compressing your images, which is one of the things I do for all of my clients.
2. Accessibility as an SEO Essential
[00:05:19] The second part of SEO when it comes to design is accessibility. Search engines want to make sure people can actually read your site, and that means that you are following accessibility guidelines. This means that you have readable fonts, you have a high enough color contrast, and that you are including alt text for all of your images. You can also make sure that you have captions on your videos and that the site doesn't move and change as it's loading. These are all pieces, if you go into a PageSpeed Insights test, that it is going to look at.
[00:06:01] The biggest mistake I see here is in color contrast, and it's something I am always recommending people fix when I do website reviews. We're not using a high enough color contrast because we are prioritizing a pretty website over an accessible and user friendly one. There are lots of tools out there that will help you to make sure you are meeting accessibility guidelines for this like WebAIM's Contrast Checker. The Color Palette Studio has some cool tools to do this as well.
3. Heading Hierarchy and SEO Structure
[00:06:37] The third thing that you should think about when it comes to SEO is your heading hierarchy. So what does this mean? It means that you want to use your Heading One, Two, and Three correctly. You may also see them as H1, H2, and H3. Those tell Google and humans what's most important, and it should be laid out like you are outlining a paper. There's going to be one Heading One at the top of your page that is your main headline. It's gonna include keywords, and from there you're going to go into Heading Twos. These are going to be the title of the different sections on your website. You may have some Heading Threes under there that kind of define more of that section. You may even go into Heading Four, although most people aren't using that on their general website pages, and then you go back to heading two when you get to the next section.
[00:07:41] The reason I see people not following this is because they are choosing the heading type based on what it looks like instead of what it is doing to the code. And we want to, again, prioritize user experience, prioritize good practices, over pretty design. It's much better to go in and change your font sizes so that you can use Heading One, and it's not way too big. Then it is to start with a Heading Two, because you didn't want to make the small design tweaks.
4. Choosing the Right Platform for SEO
[00:08:19] The fourth way that website design impacts SEO is through your platform choice. Now, I talked earlier about slower sites losing visitors and that many of the drag and drop platforms we are using can be slower than if you were to custom code a site from scratch. That is less important than making sure that you are choosing a platform that is set up for SEO. Something like SimplePractice, while it tells you it can host a website, is not actually a website platform. All it is doing is giving you a landing page where you can fill in the blanks and send people to it, but you are not getting the SEO benefit. You are not able to link to different pages on your site. You aren't able to control all of the pieces to make sure you are actually getting an SEO benefit from your site. It basically acts as a flyer for your practice.
[00:09:24] I really like Squarespace because it is both easy to design on and it is SEO friendly. Wix and WordPress are good at this as well. If you've heard that WordPress is the best platform if you wanna focus on SEO, that is old and outdated advice. The platform doesn't matter as much as the work you're putting into it as long as you are able to make those SEO adjustments and control what your search engines are seeing.
5. Designing for User Experience (UX)
[00:09:58] The fifth thing you wanna consider when your design and how it impacts SEO is user experience or UX. Things like clear navigation and really obvious calls to action mean that people stay on your site longer, they bounce off of the site less, and that helps you rank higher in Google.
[00:10:19] I have a client who recently told me that she gets compliments all the time on her site because it's really easy for people to find exactly what they're looking for and then book a consultation with her. That's the goal. And it helps both the people who are interested in working with us and the search engines that are trying to answer people's questions with the best resources possible.
[00:10:44] Now, you may have noticed that I didn't mention anything about actually doing SEO, and that's on purpose because that is not part of the overall design. Things like site titles, page titles, meta descriptions are all very, very important for SEO. Even image alt text, and file names, and the copy that you're using all go into how you're going to rank, but those aren't designed things as much as they are the other work that you are doing on your site. And it all works hand in hand to make sure that you are showing up in front of the right people and that they are ready to become clients when they find you.
What SEO Work Should Your Website Designer Do?
[00:11:32] If you work with a designer, what are the things they should actually be doing? Your designer is probably not a copywriter, they're probably not a an SEO strategist, but they should be making sure that the design foundations are solid so that all of the other work that you're doing in keyword research and in copy are starting from a really solid place. That the design of your website isn't hurting your SEO ranking and any work you're doing is just going to continue to build on the foundation you already have.
[00:12:12] Most designers stop at making a pretty website, but you need to have strategy baked in from the very beginning. That means thinking through the journey that somebody is going to take on your website to make sure that you have the pages that you need, that they are being sent to the right call to action, and that you can lay things out to answer their questions and make it really easy to say yes.
SEO Elements I Include in Every Website Project
[00:12:43] Some of the things I include in all of my one week design projects, and in many of my refresh VIP days, are basic keyword research, making sure we're trying to show up for keywords that people are actually searching for making sure that your metadata, those SEO titles and descriptions, are filled in for every page and post on your website.
[00:13:07] I also spend time making sure your images are optimized for size and that the file names contain keywords and I make sure that we're adding alt text to those images that describe the images and include more of that keyword research that you've been doing.
[00:13:24] Another piece of my design process is making sure we are setting up redirects for any pages that we might be changing or moving. This happens a lot when you're redesigning because we might be getting rid of old pages, or we might be renaming a URL. When I first sit down on a website, I make a note of every URL on that site, and then I go through to make sure that each of those links go to the correct place on the new site. This is a piece that a lot of people forget, which means that somebody clicking on an old link might end up on a 404 page or a Page Not Found, and we wanna prevent that because that is something that tells search engines that your site is not up to date and that it's not trustworthy.
[00:14:14] I also take the time to make sure that you have an accessible color palette. Even if you've worked with a brand designer before, I always run an accessibility test to make sure that we have enough color combinations that meet accessibility standards to use on the website and if we don't, we'll make some adjustments. And then in your website platform, especially on Squarespace, I make sure that each design type is set up so that it already meets those accessibility standards and is really easy for you to then go and switch color backgrounds or add new pages because you know that that part of the work is already done.
[00:15:00] Another piece of what I do is make sure that we are linking pages internally on the site, making sure that each page has links to it and from it, that nothing is a dead end and that we can get everywhere on the site. That's part of the strategy work that we're doing. When we think about the user journey somebody who takes on your site.
[00:15:25] And I make sure to submit your site map to Google Search Console. That is something I have seen even big marketing companies ignore, and it's a simple step that helps you to make sure you are showing up on Google and are seeing what they see and that there aren't any issues that you're running into.
Strategic Design Boosts SEO
[00:15:45] The hard truth is this, if your site looks nice but doesn't bring in traffic and clients, the missing piece is probably that SEO strategy in the design process.
[00:15:59] I'm gonna give you a quick client example. I did a Refresh VIP Day for my client, Kirsten, who is a naturopathic doctor, and we addressed the design and SEO. She went from ranking for a total of eight keywords, two of which were on page one of Google to ranking for 27- 7 of which were on the first page of Google in just three months. That means she's getting more traffic to her website from both search engines and from ChatGPT and she is converting those people into clients.
[00:16:43] Beautiful design that is also created to be strategic means that you can be more visible and that you get more clients. So if you want a website that looks amazing and actually gets found, your design and SEO need to go hand in hand.
[00:17:03] If your site isn't pulling its weight on Google, whether it looks nice or not, my one week design process fixes both the look and the strategy so that you can finally get found by the right clients. You can reach out to me on Instagram or through email to chat about your website and see how we can transform it into a site you are proud to share and that is actually supporting your business as it grows.
[00:17:31] Thanks for listening to Elevate your Practice. If you enjoyed today's episode, follow the show and leave a review. It helps more practitioners find these tips and start growing their practices with confidence. And don't forget to check out the show notes for links and resources from today's episodes. I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you build a thriving practice.
