services · Website Design and SEO
Most beautiful sites rank for nothing. Yours can do both, but not by accident.
If your designer doesn't think about hreflang, your dev doesn't think about Core Web Vitals, and your CMO can't tell you why both matter, you ship a site that looks great and gets no traffic. We design with the SEO budget in the brief, not bolted on afterwards.
Why design and SEO belong together
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.
I run both functions on the same engagement: I scope it, I lead it, and specialists join when the brief needs them. 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. The approach comes from 5,000+ sites shipped at Seahawk Media, which I co-founded and ran as COO until 2026.
What we build
Bundled website design and SEO engagements include the full stack from strategy through launch and beyond:
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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
Who this is for
Bundled website design and SEO is the right engagement when:
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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.
Pricing transparency
Fully custom-coded Next.js or Astro builds with 12-month SEO retainers and ongoing content production attached are priced on scope, not on a neat menu line.
Typical mid-market engagement: from $15k 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.
Our process
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.
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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.
Performance targets we actually hit
On every bundled website design and SEO engagement, our default performance targets are:
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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.
Frequently asked questions
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.
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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.
Where are you based?
London. Every engagement is with me directly: I scope it, I lead it, and specialists join when the brief needs them, so you keep one point of contact the whole way through: me.
Built to GDS service standard
Every bundled engagement I lead 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 I treat it as the 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.
Ready to talk
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.
Send a message through the contact page or book a 30-minute discovery call directly. I typically reply within 24 hours during the working week.