Written by
Diego Sonoda
Web Designer & Mkt Strategist
Blending design and strategy to help brands communicate with clarity. Writes to share ideas, stay curious, and inspire others to keep building what matters.
INTRO
SEO and design are often treated like separate worlds. One is technical, the other visual. But in practice, they are deeply connected. The best-performing websites are not just stuffed with keywords or obsessed with backlinks. They are well-designed, easy to navigate, and built to make sense to both people and search engines.
I have seen this in nearly every project I have worked on. Sites with beautiful layouts but poor structure struggle to rank. On the other hand, a fast, simple, well-built page with smart design choices often climbs faster than expected, even without aggressive SEO campaigns. Let’s break down how design decisions impact how your website gets discovered and ranked.
1. DESIGN IS HOW PEOPLE EXPERIENCE YOUR SEO
You can write the best meta description in the world. But if someone clicks and lands on a confusing page with no clear structure, they are gone. SEO gets people to your website. Design decides whether they stay.
For example, I once worked with a studio that had great Google rankings but a bounce rate above seventy percent. Why? The homepage looked nice, but users could not tell where to go next. There was no clear hierarchy, no buttons visible straight away, and the copy was hard to scan. After a layout redesign, nothing else changed, bounce dropped to under forty percent, and engagement tripled.
2. PAGE SPEED, ACCESSIBILITY, AND STRUCTURE MATTER
Google cares about how fast and usable your site is. That includes things like:
Optimised image sizes
Heading structure
Logical flow
Alt text for images
Text readability
These are design decisions. If you build a beautiful but bloated site with videos loading too early or large uncompressed images, Google will notice. I use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights almost weekly. Sometimes, I love a new section I have just built, but the mobile score crashes. That is a sign to rethink how it is structured, not just how it looks.
3. MOBILE FIRST DESIGN IS SEO FIRST DESIGN
Most of your users are on mobile. And Google looks at your mobile version before anything else. That means a perfect desktop layout is not enough. You can see it clearly in performance tests. A site that loads in less than two seconds on desktop can take more than six seconds on mobile if it is not well optimised. That is why I build for mobile first and then scale upward. Because that is how users actually experience your work.
4. CLEAN LAYOUT IMPROVES ENGAGEMENT AND TIME ON PAGE
Google tracks how long people stay on your site, how far they scroll, and if they move around. So if your layout is messy, full of pop-ups, or hard to read, you lose ranking strength, even if your content is good. I rebuilt a blog post once, same content, just improved layout. Better headings, more white space, and no distractions. The time on page went from forty-seven seconds to over two minutes. That is design doing its job.
5. SEO IS NOT A PLUGIN, IT IS A DESIGN DECISION
Many people think they can just install an SEO tool and tick the box. But SEO is not a plugin. It is the result of thoughtful decisions made throughout your website.
Which pages are featured in your navigation?
How quickly do they load on different devices?
Does the content match what people were searching for?
Design shapes every part of that. Tools can support the work, but they cannot fix a broken structure or a frustrating experience.
CONCLUSION
If you want your website to perform better on Google, start with how it feels. Design and SEO are not separate. They are partners. The more clearly your site communicates, the more likely it is to be found, explored, and remembered. Good design is not just about visuals. It is about intention. And that intention is what makes a site visible, valuable, and ready to grow.
