SEO REPAIR: WEB DESIGNER CHECKLIST
Does Your Web Designer Know SEO? Run This Checklist on Their Work
Most designers say they know SEO. Fewer can show it on a page. Here is how to check their work yourself, using a real site flip we repaired.
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Your new site looks great and the phone stopped ringing. That is the most common reason business owners call us, and it usually traces back to a web designer who said they knew SEO and did not. Web design and SEO are different skills. One makes the page look right to a visitor. The other makes it make sense to a search engine. The fastest way to find out is a free website analysis. We compare what the old site had to what the new one lost.
The question Beth Guide hears most in class is does my designer know SEO, and how would I know. This page is the checklist. The running example is a real client, Trips2Italy, a custom Italy vacation planner we built, that another designer flipped and broke.
Watch: How to know if your web designer knows SEO
THE FIRST TEST
How do I know if my web designer knows SEO?
Ask them. Then ignore the answer. Beth’s rule is that 9 out of 10 designers will say yes, I know SEO, and say it with confidence. What matters is not what they say. It is what their pages show.
A better question is whether they do keyword research before they design, and which tool they use. A designer who knows SEO starts with the search terms customers type and builds the web design around them. A designer who only knows art starts with the colors.
So ask for references, and not just names. Ask for the websites they built, open them and run the checks on this page. A designer who knows SEO leaves fingerprints on every page: a title tag that names the service, headings that carry keywords, a menu that tells the search engine where to go, related links at the bottom, images with alt text, and pages that load fast on a mobile device. A designer who only knows art leaves none of those.
If the job is a rebuild of a site that already ranks, add 2 questions. How many site flips have you done, and can I call one of those clients?
Here is why it matters. The Trips2Italy site we built held more than 1,000 terms on page 1 of Google. After the flip, page 1 rankings fell by about 80%. Nothing about the new design looked broken. Everything underneath it was. For the full list of questions to ask before you sign, see our guide to hiring a web designer.
CHECK 1 AND 2
What should the title tag and navigation look like?
Start at the top of the browser tab. That text is the title tag, and it is the strongest signal on the page. It is also the blue line a user sees in a search result. On a broken site it is usually the company name, or the word Home. Neither tells the search engine what you sell, and neither gives a customer a reason to click.
On the Trips2Italy flip, the homepage title became Custom Vacations to Italy. The old title was Custom Trip to Italy, Plan the Best Trip to Italy Vacation. It reads a little clunky, and Beth says so. It also carries the terms buyers type. The inner pages got worse. The vacation types page was titled Trip Type. That phrase means nothing to Google and nothing to ChatGPT. The old page was titled around Italy vacation packages, because that is what people search.
Now read the menu. Vague labels are the second tell. The flipped site used Trip Types and Packages. Trip types could be anything from a rideshare to a cruise. Packages is what a delivery driver brings. The old menu said Italy vacation packages, honeymoon packages, family vacations, group travel and guided tours, with dropdowns under each. Beth describes those dropdowns as telling Google what to look at and where to go.
- Hover over the browser tab on your homepage and 3 service pages. Each title should name the service and, where true, the city. A title that is just your business name, when you are not a household brand, is what Beth calls counterproductive.
- Read every menu label out loud. If a stranger could not tell what you sell from the label, the search engine cannot either.
- A flat menu with no dropdowns gives the search engine no path into your deeper pages, on desktop or on mobile.
CHECK 3 AND 4
Are the headings and page content written for Google or for decoration?
Headings are the H1, H2 and H3 tags. Beth teaches them with a newspaper. The H1 is the front page headline, H2s are the smaller headlines down the page, and each one should tell the search engine what the page is about. Never spend them on anything else. The H1 is often the only heading a user reads on a mobile device, so it has to carry the keyword.
The flipped Trips2Italy homepage had an H1 of Custom Italian Vacations. Google reads Italians as people and Italy as the destination, so even the one keyword was the wrong one. Below it came a heading that read Has Never Been Easier. Beth’s test: if she walked into a room and said has never been easier, would you know what she meant? Booking a vacation, making mac and cheese, joining a gym? The inner pages were the same. One page’s only H1 was Crafted for You. Another was Customizable and Unique.
The old homepage headings read Custom Italy Vacation, Choose Your Italy Destination, Popular Italy Vacation Destinations, Sample Italy Vacation Itineraries and Italian Honeymoon Vacations, each with a paragraph under it to support the term. Every heading did a job.
Then read the body copy. The new site said romantic honeymoons to unforgettable family vacations. Beth’s fix: romantic Italy honeymoons, family vacations in Italy. Short, pretty paragraphs with no keywords are what she calls a piano that is out of tune. The designer knew enough to try, not enough to get it right.
- Assume anything big and bold is a heading. Read each one alone. Does it name a service, a place or a money term?
- One H1 and a run of H2s and H3s is normal. One H1 and nothing else means the structure is missing.
- If the keyword you most want is not in the title, the H1 and the first paragraph, the page is not built to rank for it.
Check it yourself
Run the 8 checks in about an hour
CHECK 5 AND 6
Did the designer write meta descriptions and keep the URLs?
The meta description is the text under your title in a Google search result. You cannot see it on the page, which is why designers skip it. A good one pulls a user from the search results to your site. A blank one lets the search engine pick a random sentence. On the flipped Trips2Italy site, most pages had none. The homepage had one, and it said more destinations and travel experiences than any other travel site. Not one mention of a trip to Italy.
To check yours, search Google for your company name and read the snippet under each result. If it is blank, cut off mid-sentence or pulled from your footer, nobody wrote it. Our SEO audit tool will list every page missing a title or description in a few minutes.
URLs are the bigger risk, and the one Beth is most firm about. The old Trips2Italy URLs were a little chunky because the site had come through several systems. They also ranked. The new designer changed them and did not redirect the old ones. Google only honors about 80% of redirects, so an exact match of the old URL beats a redirect, and a redirect beats a 404 by a mile. On this site the ranking pages for vacations, packages and trip types simply went away.
One more mistake from the same flip: the year in a tour page URL. A year in the title helps freshness. A year in the URL has to change every January.
- Paste in 5 URLs from the old site, from an old sitemap or Search Console. Each should land on its matching new page.
- Ask the designer for the redirect map. If they do not know what that is, you have your answer.
- Years, dates or page IDs in your URLs mean nobody planned the structure.
CHECK 7 AND 8
Are the internal links, silos and backlinks still connected?
This is the check almost every designer fails, because the links they remove look like clutter. On the old Trips2Italy site, each region and travel guide page ended with a block of related pages in plain anchor text. The honeymoon page linked to honeymoons in Venice, Rome and Tuscany. The region pages linked to each other. Beth calls it siloing, and she built it so Google could deep spider the site and see which page was the main page on each subject.
The new designer assumed those blocks were superfluous and stripped them. The pages still exist, but they do not rank, because the search engine has no path to reach them and no signal that they belong together. Users lose the same path, and so does every visitor on a phone.
Backlinks are the last check, and the one that hurts most. When URLs change with no redirects, every link from another website breaks. On the Trips2Italy flip, a link from the Smithsonian pointed at a page that now returned a 404. A link like that happens naturally once. If the Smithsonian removes it, it never comes back.
- Scroll to the bottom of your 3 most important service pages. If the related links block was there on the old site and gone now, ask why.
- Click 10 links inside your site at random. Any that land on a 404 count against the designer.
- Ask for a list of pages that had backlinks before launch, and test each URL.
If you have already seen the drop, our page on website traffic dropped after redesign covers the rollback decision and the fix order in detail.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
What is SEO web design, and how do you structure a website for search?
SEO web design means the search engine and the user are both in mind from the first sketch. The designer does keyword research before picking colors, builds the menu and page structure around the terms customers type, and writes the title, headings and URL for every page before it looks pretty. Web design without SEO starts with the look and bolts the words on later. That is where most flips go wrong.
The two pull on each other. SEO shapes web design: the structure needs one page per service, headings that carry keywords and related links at the bottom. Web design shapes SEO: speed, mobile layout, image size and user experience all feed the search engine’s ranking. A heavy hero image that takes too long to load on a phone costs rankings and visitors at the same time, and the bounce rate in Google Analytics will show it. Responsive design, where one set of HTML adapts to desktop and mobile, is the baseline, not a feature.
Structure for search in 4 steps. Start with the terms, group them into subjects, give each subject a main page with its supporting pages under it, and link them to each other in plain text. That is the silo Beth builds on every site. Then handle the technical SEO: compressed images with alt text, clean HTML headings, fast speed on a mobile device and a sitemap submitted to Search Console. A web developer or SEO expert can check the performance side in an afternoon. The structure takes longer, which is why a designer who skips it rarely adds it later.
THE RESULT
What does a site flip gone wrong look like in the numbers?
Beth pulled the Trips2Italy history and the line drove straight off a cliff the month the new site launched. That step down at launch is the signature of a bad flip.
The keyword mix changed too, and most owners miss this. Before the flip, the site ranked for money terms: trips to Italy, top 10 places to visit in Italy, best parts of Italy to visit. Those are people planning to buy a vacation. After the flip, what was left were terms like best Italian movies of all time and the flag of Siena. Rankings a report can brag about. Not one of them sells a trip.
So when you judge a designer’s reference site or your own, look past the count. Ask whether a buyer would type the terms. That is also why some owners end up with a new website not ranking at all. The structure was never built for the terms that pay.
To see your own timeline, run your domain through our traffic drop analyzer. It shows when the decline started and which pages lost the most. Then open Google Analytics and Search Console side by side. Analytics shows visitors falling. Search Console shows which search terms and pages fell with them.
WHAT TO DO NOW
What should I do if my designer already broke my SEO?
If the site launched in the last few weeks and traffic fell straight down, Beth’s first move is to put the old site back. A site that was flipped properly never goes into a straight nose dive. It is not a thing. The old site is the fastest way to stop the bleeding while you figure out what broke.
Ask your old host or designer today whether a copy still exists. On Trips2Italy we still had the old version, so we could stand it back up. If the old site is gone, the fix is slower but doable.
Do not send every 404 to the homepage. The link value on a strong site is spread through the whole site. Dump it all on the homepage and every service page goes weak. Beth calls that the difference between a chef and a jar of sauce. Each old page needs to point to its matching new page.
Fix in this order: restore or redirect the URLs that had rankings and backlinks, put the titles and headings back, rebuild the related links at the bottom of each page, and fix the menu labels. Then submit a fresh sitemap and watch Search Console for the update. If the drop is older than a few weeks, or the old site is gone, bring in SEO repair for a redesign that lost its rankings. The mistakes are usually the same ones.
One honest caveat. If your old site had no rankings either, the problem is not the flip. Nobody has ever done SEO on the site.
WHY VERTICAL WEB
Who should I trust to fix or rebuild it?
Beth says our best customers have always been the ones who came from somewhere else with a flip gone wrong. Here is the honest case for calling us.
- We teach it. Beth Guide has taught SEO since 2003 for the SBA, the University of Houston SBDC, Lone Star College and HCC. The 8 checks on this page come from the class she teaches, and you can sit in on the next one through the Internet Marketing Clinic.
- One in-house team since 1998. Design, development, SEO and hosting are the same people. The web developer and the SEO expert sit in the same office. Nobody strips the silo because they did not know it was there.
- The original 1998 client is still with us.
- We tell you what not to buy. If putting the old site back and mapping the redirects will fix it, we will say so, and we will not sell you a new site.
Planning the next build? Start with our website redesign page. Already launched and something feels off? Request the free analysis. We will show you which of the 8 checks failed and what it is costing you.
Questions
Web designer does not know SEO: common questions
If you want the site to bring in business from search, yes. A site can be beautiful and invisible at the same time. Title tags, headings, menu labels, URLs and internal links are set during the build, and a designer who does not understand them will undo whatever rankings you had.
Hover over the browser tab on their reference sites. If the title tag is just the company name or the word Home, they do not understand SEO. Then read the menu labels and the biggest heading on the homepage. Those 3 checks take 2 minutes.
Content writing and link building can be separate. Structure cannot. Titles, headings, URLs, redirects and internal links are part of building the page, whether or not you bought an SEO package.
If traffic fell straight down within a few weeks of launch and a copy of the old site exists, usually yes. A properly flipped site does not nose dive. The old one restores your URLs and links while the new one gets fixed.
We advise against it. Your link value was spread across many pages. Pushing it all to the homepage leaves your service pages weak. Map each old page to its closest new page instead.
Before anyone touches the site, list every page with rankings, traffic or backlinks. Keep the URLs that rank. Ask for the redirect map, the title tags and the heading plan before launch, and ask how many site flips they have done and whom you can call.
Often, yes. Scroll to the footer, where many designers leave a credit link. If there is none, view the page source in your browser and look through the HTML for a theme name, a page builder or a comment with the agency name. Then run the checks on this page on 3 of that designer’s other client sites before you hire them.
Yes, in both directions. Speed, mobile layout, image size and user experience are signals the search engine measures, and a slow or confusing site sends users back to the search results. At the same time, SEO decides the structure the design has to hold: one page per service, keyword headings and related links. Plan design and SEO together or the answer to one breaks the other.
Keep reading
Other ways a site gets broken, and how we repair each one
Not sure which one is your problem?
Request the free website analysis and we will tell you what is actually wrong, in plain English, before anyone touches your site.
Galleria 713-703-3030 | Kingwood 281-852-8253 | info@verticalweb.com