SEOs & web designers never get along

Everyone thinks that web design & SEO go hand in hand, two peas in a pod if you will. 

In my experience, most SEOs & web designers don’t get along. 

A few years ago, I worked with a very “prestigious” web design agency. Prestigious is in quotes because of the price tag on their sites – usually about $80-100k.

Yeah, $100,000 for a new website.

To be fair, their ICP was huge personal brands like personal injury lawyers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and the like. 

In fact, I got to work on a few cool projects while I was there for dating coaches & fitness influencers, but I’m sworn to secrecy on most of those. A story for another time perhaps…

Anyways, I was an SEO consultant for the design agency & the projects they worked on. Basically, I’d produce keyword research for the personal brand site and devise a content strategy. 

It was very barebones, but the pay wasn’t too bad at the time. 

I also consulted on the technical side of SEO, my least favorite part. 

Reason one, technical SEO is boring. 

Reason two, designers don’t like being told that the site they spent hours on sucks (at least it sucks in the eyes of search engines). 

I was a 22-year old telling senior-level designers working on some of the biggest personal brands in the world that their work wasn’t going to fly with the SEO strategy. 

They never listened to me – I don’t blame them. 

I was operating within my SEO silo, but as I’ve said multiple times before – technical SEO doesn’t matter a ton in most cases, especially not personal brand sites. 

The design agency was best known for their beautiful websites, so that was the first priority. Then there were about 50 other things, and then came SEO. 

Plus, why the hell would they care what a 22-year old was saying? 

They didn’t like me and I didn’t like them (professionally speaking). 

But my biggest gripe with them is that web designs are never finished on time. 

I kid you not, they would regularly schedule 90-day site builds and routinely run into the 6+ month mark range – completely unacceptable, especially if you’re paying $100k for a site. 

Fast forward to today…

I cannot tell you how many discovery calls I get on with brands who want to invest in SEO but are in the middle of a site redesign. 

WHY!?

There are brands doing $1m/month on free Shopify themes, why on earth do you want to redesign your website for the 3rd time this year? 

I will tell you why. It’s because they think a new theme or a custom design will be the solution to their revenue or conversion issues. 

In most cases, you just need more traffic, a better offer, more reviews, or a better product. 

Remember how that design team consistently missed deadlines? Yep, that happens all the time in web design agencies, those guys weren’t an exception. 

Clearly, I have a strong dislike towards web design agencies. It’s not the people running them. 

It’s that they sell false hopes & dreams to brands for exorbitant prices, don’t deliver on the timeline they say they will, and for the icing on the cake, they don’t do anything to help you get more traffic. 

They pretty much slap an IG filter on your website and walk away with a testimonial in hand. 

They always ask for testimonials right away, because if they asked 6 months later, few clients would be happy about their “investment.” 

Web design & SEO is a common partnership, however. If you’ve ever worked with a design team, they’ve likely said they can help you with SEO too. 

They can’t. They’ll outsource it to some overseas team and there will be zero QA on the work. 

I had three different design agency founders all reach out to me last year looking to partner (all popular on Twitter/X btw) – I said no to all three of them. 

Now, I did hear all of them out. But all of them operated under the same principle – we’re going to add SEO as an upsell, whether it’s you (me) or some VAs in Asia. 

I don’t work like that, and I refuse to work with agencies that just want to expand their offer without hiring the best.   

If you’re thinking about investing in web design, I’d caution you not to. You don’t even have to spend the money on SEO. 

Go spend it on Pinterest ads for all I care, just make sure that you’re getting a tangible return on your investment.

Until next time,

Kai Cromwell