How ‘good’ design poorly impacts SEO
Struggling to find the balance? Talk to us today
You look at your website and think it needs a refresh, the place you look are companies who have websites that look highly designed and make an impact on you with the first impression. This first impression ‘wow’ is what everyone wants, it’s the law of attraction evoking positivity in your mind straightaway by it looking good to you. But it doesn’t always translate to top of the search results pages and therefore isn’t noticed by most without knowing it exists already. In reality, a lot of the choices that make a website look good are the same choices working against it in search and visibility online.
This is not an argument for going back to 2005-style, keyword-stuffed, Times New Roman websites. It's just worth knowing that "beautiful" and "findable" aren't automatically the same thing.
There's less room for substance
Minimalist design has become the default across many industries because it's clean, it's calm, and it suggests professionalism. People make the logical assumption that, especially if your business is B2B, this is the best and optimal way to go - “let’s not scare people by being too flashy”. But minimalism usually means less copy. Less copy means less room to answer the questions your customers are searching for. And therefore, less opportunity to sell your products and services.
This isn't really about keyword density anymore. Google moved past rewarding pages for cramming a phrase in twenty times a long time ago. It's about topical depth in the industry your business should be an expert in. A page that gives a real, thorough answer to "how much does X cost" or "what's the difference between X and Y" has something to rank. The Google “Crawlers” will find this and assume that your content is good for the end user.
Beauty has a payload
Large hero images, background video, custom animation, all of it looks impressive, and all of it adds visual weight and gravitas. But every one of those assets has to load before a visitor sees a usable page, and Google now measures exactly how long that takes as part of its Core Web Vitals.
Slow pages rank lower because slow pages get abandoned. A visually stunning homepage that takes six seconds to load isn't winning on design; it's losing on both fronts - from Google’s and the end users decision making - before anyone's even had a chance to be impressed by it.
Rigid design makes content an afterthought
Highly designed, bespoke layouts are often intentionally rigid with every section built to a precise grid, and every element placed to keep the page looking exactly as intended. Which is great until someone wants to add a new paragraph and doing so risks breaking the layout it took weeks to perfect.
The result is a site that stops getting updated, not because nobody has anything new to say, but because saying it is a hassle. Meanwhile, competitors who can publish new content easily keep giving Google fresh, relevant material to rank.
The exception
There's always the counter-example: the huge, instantly recognisable brand with a stunning, copy-light website and famously "bad" technical SEO, that still ranks fine anyway. That works for a small handful of names with enough existing brand authority and direct search volume that they don't need to compete on content. They win because of their name, not for the problem they solve.
If you're reading a blog post about SEO trade-offs, that's very unlikely to be you yet. For everyone else, the content and the technical fundamentals are doing real work you can't skip. And real work that enables you to have to do less to sell your business, its products or its services.
Pretty vs usable - the website main event
Some of the most effective elements on a website are, frankly, not that pretty. A search bar. A sticky navigation bar with large, obvious labels. A call-to-action button in a bright, contrasting colour. These things work because they interrupt the visual flow and that's what makes them noticeable. But noticeable is often exactly what a tightly art-directed brand site is trying to avoid. Buttons get toned down to match the palette. Navigation gets minimised to keep things clean. The result is a page that converts nobody, because the one thing you needed a visitor to see was designed to blend in.
Amazon is not a good-looking website. It's cluttered, inconsistent, and would fail most modern brand guidelines on day one. But it converts extraordinarily well, because every decision on that page has been tested against actual buying behaviour. That’s why it’s so easy to have an Amazon parcel on the way before you’ve even realised what you’ve bought. With decades of authority and an audience that converts, Amazon no longer has to try to rank.
Wikipedia is another example of ugly winning on SEO specifically. The site has barely any design to speak of but enormous topical depth, with every answer you could want for every notable figure. It ranks for almost everything, not despite looking basic, but partly because looking basic was never the point yet it’s become their winning feature.
Where that leaves you
It doesn’t need to be one or the other. High ranking websites can look good and drive your brand forward with exciting design. However, when those design decisions are being made, their impact on SEO or conversions needs to be held to equal importance.
A good website holds both quality content with an attractive design. It just takes a bit more intent to get there than picking whichever template looks best in the preview.
If you're not sure which side of that trade-off your own site has landed on, that's exactly what we look at in a free website audit. And ultimately, it’s what we excel in when we get our hands on your site as a new client!
Struggling to find the balance? Talk to us today
