Content
UX SEO: How SEO Website Design at the Development Stage Can Save You Thousands of Dollars
January 21, 2026
14 mins
Imagine launching a beautifully designed website for your new business, only to find that after 6 months, it brings in no organic traffic. You’ve already spent thousands on design and development, and now you have to restructure your site, rewrite your content, and fix technical errors just to start growing the search rankings.
Unfortunately, this is a common and costly mistake. Businesses that don’t integrate SEO at the earliest stage of website development often have to pay for the same work twice. At Promodo, we’ve helped many clients correct these missteps, and in many cases, the cost of improvement in SEO in website design is huge!
The solution is simple: combine SEO and UI/UX strategy at the website development stage. This approach doesn’t just save money, it also builds a strong foundation for the long-term growth of your business.
SEO in website development means designing and building a site that is search engine-friendly from the ground up. It considers both technical and content-related requirements that influence organic ranking in the future.
"Conducting an SEO audit during the website development stage significantly simplifies future promotion, as it ensures that all technical requirements and the logic for creating essential landing pages are taken into account from the start."
Vladislav Trishkin, Team Lead at the SEO Department
Key components of web design SEO:
You need to remember that SEO website development doesn’t mean stuffing keywords into a designed and developed website; it’s about using search data when structuring, designing, and building a new website.
A well-optimized site begins with a collaborative effort between SEO experts, UX/UI designers, and developers.
Many companies start with a visual-first approach. The homepage comes first, followed by page mock-ups, and then the SEO team is brought in once everything is built. This is backwards.
When SEO leads, we can:
With this foundation, UI/UX design becomes a seamless layer over a strategically developed structure.
❗Promodo’s SEO and UX/I teams collaborate to make sure website design and SEO support each other from the first brainstorm to the final mockup of your website.
Core Web Vitals are metrics that measure user experience for page load performance, interactivity, and visual stability.
There are three of them:
A design is considered “successful" and efficient for SEO if it meets Google's "Good" thresholds:
Google does not use your average score. It uses the 75th percentile rule. In practice, this means that at least 75% of page views must meet the “good” threshold. If 25% fall into the “poor” range, overall performance is classified as poor.
At Promodo, we follow a phased approach that combines SEO and UI/UX from the earliest stages of website creation. Our SEO experts have provided a list of SEO processes you need to consider when creating an SEO-friendly website design.
Here’s how we recommend structuring your development workflow to ensure the site is search-engine-optimized, user-friendly, and ready to perform from day one.
Before any wireframe or layout is created, we start with comprehensive keyword research. We form a structured list of keywords that reflect your audience’s search behavior. This research defines:
This stage ensures that every website page has a purpose rooted in real user demand.
With keyword data in hand, we craft an intuitive site hierarchy that aligns with both SEO best practices and UX logic:
This stage is where SEO and UX truly begin to merge, ensuring that users and search engines can both navigate the site effortlessly.
In fact, in our recent collaboration with Ariamo Fashion Group, we had to completely restructure their website after launch—a necessary change driven by in-depth keyword clustering and search intent analysis that should have been addressed during initial development. Read more in our case study.
A clean, keyword-relevant, and logically nested URL structure reinforces the site’s architecture and supports internal linking:
This improves crawlability, user comprehension, and CTR in search snippets.
Using the site hierarchy as a base, we define internal linking strategies that guide users through content and pass SEO authority:
This boosts both user experience and crawl budget efficiency.
Regarding website development SEO, logical navigation, filters, and tags are essential for eCommerce and content-rich sites. However, if not implemented properly, they can lead to duplicate content and crawl issues. Our approach includes:
Our UX designers work closely with SEO specialists to balance usability with search performance.
With mobile-first indexing now standard, performance on small screens is non-negotiable. From the wireframe stage, we:
These considerations directly impact usability and Core Web Vitals scores.
Slow sites not only frustrate users but also lose rankings. We make speed a design priority by:
Before launch, we test performance in staging environments using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse.
Using static prototypes and dev environments, we verify:
This technical QA prevents expensive fixes after the site is built.
Content drives design decisions and not the other way around. Using the web design SEO approach, our team:
Every CTA, heading, and paragraph is shaped by insights from search behavior and UX patterns.
In our case study, read how Promodo’s UX/UI team created the design for the new fintech product Scatter. With its easy-to-use and intuitive web design, we demonstrated that spending cryptocurrencies can seamlessly integrate into daily routines.
By integrating SEO into every design and development step, you reduce rework, prevent expensive corrections, and build a scalable site from day one. At Promodo, this process is at the core of delivering high-performance websites.
We also work with a network of proven development partners who understand how to implement these recommendations with precision, ensuring your vision becomes a powerful, optimized reality.
If you already have a website but plan to redesign it, you need to be even more careful, as now you have one more goal: keep the results you already have.
When you redesign the website, URLs, content structure, page speed, and internal links are often affected, even when it doesn’t feel intentional. You must build SEO into the process to avoid losses.
We’ve gathered the steps to redesign the website without SEO losses.
Before you start, protect what already works. This phase prevents data loss and makes everything else possible.
Run a full crawl using a tool like Screaming Frog and export all existing URLs. If you don’t know which pages exist today, you won’t be able to redirect them correctly later.
Use analytics to identify the pages that drive traffic, generate leads, or drive revenue. Migrate these pages with extra care. If possible, keep their URLs and core content unchanged.
Pages with no traffic, no backlinks, and outdated content likely don’t need to be moved to the new site. Delete them before the redesign and return a 404 or 410 status. This helps search engines focus on pages that actually matter.
Use password protection (HTTP authentication) to prevent the staging site from being indexed by accident. This avoids duplicate content and indexing issues before launch.
SEO depends heavily on how users and search systems experience your site, especially on mobile.
Google ranks based on your mobile site. Ensure every paragraph, FAQ, and internal link on the desktop version also exists on the mobile version. Do not hide core content behind "Read more" tabs on mobile.
Important pages should start with a clear answer to the primary user question. Two or three direct sentences are enough. Use clear headings and bullet points so users and AI systems can understand and reuse the content.
The Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures how quickly the site responds when a user taps or clicks. Test your menu buttons and interactive elements on mobile. They must respond within 200ms of a tap.
Avoid drastically changing the terminology of your core headers. If you rank for “Laptop Accessories,” don’t change the H1 to, let’s say, “computing solutions.” AI may lose the semantic connection.
At this stage, the risk of losing rankings is the highest, so you should be careful.
Every old URL should redirect to a specific and relevant page on the new site. Avoid "lazy" redirects. Sending everything to the homepage kills SEO value.
Internal links should point directly to the new pages, not to old URLs that redirect. Don’t let users click a link and end up in a redirect chain.
Use visual comparison tools to review old and new versions of key pages. Layout shifts can affect usability and performance metrics, especially on conversion-focused pages.
Add alt text to images, ensure readable contrast, and support screen readers. Accessibility itself isn’t a ranking factor, but it strongly affects user experience, which search engines do measure.
This is when hidden issues usually appear. Careful checks here can save months of recovery.
Immediately after launch, check the homepage source code and confirm there is no "Noindex" Tag left from staging. This is one of the most common causes of sudden visibility loss.
Upload the new XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Keep the old sitemap active for a few weeks so Google can crawl old URLs, follow redirects, and update the index more quickly.
Complete a real conversion, such as submitting a form, and confirm it appears in real-time analytics. If tracking is broken, fix it before you lose important data.
Monitor rankings for core keywords during the first month. If positions drop, review the content itself. Often, the issue is not technical but semantic: important sections were removed, shortened, or made less specific during the redesign.
Even the best strategy falls flat without proper execution. That’s why Promodo collaborates with a wide network of reliable development partners to bring SEO-optimized website designs to life.
Whether you need a simple lead-generation website or a complex eCommerce platform, we’ll connect you with trusted development teams who specialize in implementing our detailed SEO and UX/UI recommendations. While SEO strategy remains entirely on our side, our partner developers ensure flawless technical execution based on our briefs. Our partnership department works with reliable teams experienced in bringing our SEO-friendly solutions to life.
Even experienced businesses fall into common traps during website creation, most of which stem from neglecting SEO until it’s too late. Here are some of the most frequent issues we encounter:
Without understanding what your audience is searching for, your content and page layout may miss the mark entirely.
Skipping SEO input at this stage can lead to disorganized content, poor internal linking, and deep-clicked pages that go unnoticed by Google.
While animations and high-quality visuals look good, they can slow down load times and make content difficult to crawl.
A desktop-first design may fail to meet Google’s mobile usability standards, hurting rankings and user satisfaction.
URLs like /product?id=456 offer no SEO value and confuse both users and search engines.
Sites often go live without title tags, meta descriptions, or schema markup, leaving crucial ranking signals missing.
Treating SEO as a post-launch fix instead of an integral part of the build often results in costly rework and missed traffic opportunities.
Why is UX design important for SEO? Here’s a quick overview of how user experience affects SEO.
Here, we clearly see the role of UX in SEO. User experience optimization makes content easier to access and process.
In the race to build a digital presence, too many businesses make a considerable mistake by ignoring SEO website design at the development stage. The result? Rebuilding, reworking, and repaying for what could have been done right from day one.
By investing in website design SEO services, you save thousands on future fixes and ensure faster growth. At Promodo, we offer a full-service approach: SEO, UX/UI, and access to trusted developers who can bring your site to life the right way..
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