WEBSITE DESIGN AND SEO, BUILT AS ONE ENGAGEMENT

Most agencies sell website design and SEO as two separate engagements. The designer ships a beautiful site that gets no organic traffic. The SEO team retrofits the site with technical fixes the designer would never have signed off on. The site becomes a compromise neither team would have shipped on their own.

At Seahawk Media we run both functions on the same engagement, with the same senior team. Design decisions account for SEO from the brief; SEO decisions account for design from the keyword research. The output is a site that ranks because it was designed to, not because it was patched into ranking after launch. We have shipped over 12,000 sites this way since 2018.

Bundled website design and SEO engagements at Seahawk include the full stack from strategy through launch and beyond:

Strategy and discovery

Audience research, keyword strategy, competitive analysis, and a written content plan that pre-dates any design work. The design follows the strategy, not the other way around.

Design system

Brand-led design system covering typography, colour, components, and interaction patterns. Built mobile-first. Performance constraints baked into the design (font budget, image budget, JavaScript budget) rather than discovered at launch.

Build

Custom-coded front-end on WordPress, Next.js, Astro, or headless. Schema markup at the component level. URL structure designed for the keyword strategy. Internal linking automation built into the templates.

Technical SEO

Core Web Vitals targets we actually hit. Indexability gates per page type. Hreflang where applicable. Build-time SEO linter in CI so regressions never ship to production.

Content production

Page copy that targets the keyword strategy without sounding like SEO copy. Originals on every page. AI-assisted drafting where it earns its place; human editorial discipline always.

Post-launch

Care plan covering ongoing SEO work, content production, performance monitoring, and quarterly strategy reviews. The relationship is structured for years, not for a single launch.

Bundled website design and SEO is the right engagement when:

You are launching a new site or rebuilding an existing one and organic search is part of the brief.

The current site has visible design problems and known SEO issues, and you do not want to run two separate engagements to fix both.

You have an internal team but lack senior bandwidth on either design or SEO.

Your business is post-product-market-fit and ready to invest in 12-month organic compounding rather than chasing paid acquisition month-to-month.

It is not the right engagement when: you need a brochure site under 5K USD, you have not yet validated positioning, or you only need one of the two services. In those cases we will tell you that on the first call.

Bundled website design and SEO engagements at Seahawk start at 25,000 USD for a custom WordPress site with a 6-month SEO retainer included, and run up to 150,000 USD for fully custom-coded Next.js or Astro builds with 12-month SEO retainers and ongoing content production.

Typical mid-market engagement: 45,000 to 80,000 USD all-in for a 12-week build plus 12 months of post-launch SEO and content. The premium over a build-only engagement is roughly 30 to 50% and pays back in organic traffic within the first 9 to 12 months on most engagements we have measured.

Below 25,000 USD bundled, the SEO component is real but the design component is templated. Above 150,000 USD bundled, you are generally paying for enterprise overhead. Match the engagement to the business stage.

Week 1 to 3: discovery and strategy

Business interview, audience research, keyword strategy, competitive landscape, written content plan. Output: a 30-page strategy document that becomes the brief for design.

Week 3 to 8: design

Wireframes, then full visual design in Figma. Performance constraints in the brief. Schema markup planned at the component level.

Week 6 to 14: build

Engineering converts design into working code. Schema, internal linking, content production, technical SEO foundations all happen during build, not after.

Week 14 to 16: QA and launch

Cross-browser, accessibility, performance, content review. Build-time SEO linter passing. DNS cutover. Migration where applicable.

Month 4 to 12+: ongoing SEO retainer

Monthly content production, technical monitoring, link earning, AI surface tracking, quarterly strategy reviews adjusting based on real Search Console and GA4 data.

On every bundled website design and SEO engagement, our default performance targets are:

Core Web Vitals passing at the 75th percentile of field data within 90 days of launch.

Lighthouse 90+ across performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO.

Time to first organic conversion within 6 months of launch on commercial-intent keywords.

Measurable organic traffic growth within 9 months for established sites; within 12 to 18 months for new domains.

We measure these. We report on these. If we miss any of them, the conversation in the next monthly report addresses it directly.

Can I just hire you for the SEO retainer if I already have a site?

Yes. The /technical-seo/ engagement is the right path if your current site is sound and you only need SEO. The bundled engagement is for cases where the site itself needs work.

Do you guarantee rankings?

No. Nobody can. We commit to delivering specific work, hitting specific performance targets, and reporting honestly on what is and is not working. Rankings emerge from that work; they are not guaranteed by it.

What if I already have a designer?

We can work alongside an existing designer if their work meets our performance and SEO baseline. If it does not, we will say so on the first call rather than ship a site that is set up to fail.

How do you handle WordPress versus Next.js versus Astro?

We pick the stack based on your team and three-year horizon, not on what is fashionable. The /guides/nextjs/ pillar covers the decision tree in detail. Most marketing sites still ship best on WordPress in 2026; product surfaces ship best on Next.js. Edge cases get evaluated on first call.

Where are you based?

Seahawk Media operates across Delhi, London, and Eastern Europe. The senior team handles all client-facing work; offshore execution capacity ships the high-volume content and technical work. The model is the reason we can deliver bundled engagements at the price points we quote.

Every bundled engagement at Seahawk follows the principles documented in the UK Government Digital Service Standard: accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA, progressive enhancement, semantic HTML, performance built in rather than bolted on, and graceful degradation across older browsers. The standard is the most rigorously documented set of digital-service principles in the public domain and we treat it as our default brief.

For UK public sector, regulated industries, or any client where accessibility and performance are part of the procurement requirements, GDS alignment is a real differentiator. For everyone else, it is the quality bar that produces sites that age well, rank well, and do not need a remediation engagement two years later.

First conversations are free and the recommendation is honest. We will sometimes tell you that bundled is not the right call for your situation, that you should hire a designer first and an SEO retainer later, or that paid acquisition is the better play right now. Those calls are worth having.

Email gautam@seahawkmedia.com or book a 30-minute discovery call directly. We typically reply within 24 hours during the working week.