For businesses looking to grow online, one question comes up time and time again: “Should we focus on SEO or user experience first?” It’s a fair question—especially when budgets are tight and resources are limited. The challenge lies in the fact that SEO and UX are often treated as competing priorities. In reality, they are two sides of the same coin. At The Website Design Agency, we believe a high-performing site is the result of both disciplines working in harmony.
But what happens when you truly do have to choose? If you're launching a new site, overhauling an old one, or working with a phased budget, where should your efforts go first—and why? Let’s break down the differences, dependencies, and decision points to help you decide.
Technical SEO refers to the process of optimising your website’s infrastructure so that search engines can crawl, index, and understand your content effectively. It forms the foundation upon which all other SEO efforts are built. Without a technically sound site, even the best content in the world may never reach your audience.
Key components of technical SEO include ensuring a clean URL structure, proper use of canonical tags, optimised metadata, structured data (Schema.org), robots.txt configuration, XML sitemaps, and fast server response times. It also covers site security (HTTPS), mobile-friendliness, and meeting Core Web Vitals benchmarks.
Let’s take crawling as an example. If your site has broken links, redirect loops, or disorganised architecture, Google may waste its crawl budget on irrelevant pages, missing your most important ones. Similarly, without schema markup, your content may not be eligible for rich results—like review stars or featured snippets—which could severely limit your visibility in search.
In short, technical SEO ensures your site is discoverable, understandable, and indexable. It’s not the most glamorous work—but without it, you're building on sand.
UX focuses on the experience real people have when they interact with your site. This includes everything from how quickly a page loads to how intuitive your navigation is, how persuasive your calls to action are, and how easy your forms are to complete. The goal of UX is to reduce friction, build trust, and guide users toward meaningful actions—whether that’s submitting an enquiry, signing up to a newsletter, or completing a purchase.
Good UX starts with understanding your audience. Who are they? What problems are they trying to solve? What are their pain points, motivations, and expectations? From this foundation, we design logical page flows, consistent design systems, and high-performing content layouts that keep users engaged and moving forward.
It also involves continuous improvement. Tools like Hotjar, Google Analytics, and user feedback help us understand where users are dropping off, which CTAs convert best, and which design elements cause confusion. At TWDA, we treat UX as an iterative process—not a “once and done” exercise.
Strong UX not only improves engagement and conversion—it influences SEO directly. Google’s algorithm increasingly rewards user-centric behaviour, such as high engagement, low bounce rates, and longer dwell times. UX isn’t just good for people; it’s good for rankings.
If your site is struggling to rank at all, if it’s plagued by indexing issues, or if page load times are beyond acceptable limits, technical SEO should be your first port of call. These issues form the bedrock of your digital visibility, and until they’re addressed, any effort spent on content or conversion will be undermined.
Common red flags that indicate a need to prioritise technical SEO include:
Imagine you’ve launched a beautifully designed website, but every page loads in six seconds and the navigation is invisible to Googlebot. Users may love what they see—but they’ll never find it. Fix the foundation first.
On the flip side, if you already have some search visibility but your engagement or conversion metrics are poor, UX deserves immediate attention. No amount of organic traffic will convert if users find your site clunky, confusing, or uninspiring.
UX becomes the priority when:
Let’s say you rank #1 for a key service keyword, but your landing page is overloaded with dense copy, broken CTAs, and no clear next step. You’ll lose business despite your SEO success. Improving UX in this context can have an immediate revenue impact—even without changing your rankings.
While short-term prioritisation may be necessary, your long-term strategy should always integrate both technical SEO and UX. Think of SEO as the mechanism that brings users to the door, and UX as the experience that makes them stay, trust, and act. One without the other creates imbalance.
In fact, the lines between the two are increasingly blurred. Google’s Page Experience update and Core Web Vitals initiatives are explicit moves to integrate UX into ranking criteria. Fast load times, responsive layouts, and stable content rendering are now essential ranking factors.
At TWDA, we approach every website as a system. Our development teams collaborate with UX designers and SEO strategists from the first wireframe to final deployment. It’s not about winning a traffic race—it’s about creating a seamless, credible, and enjoyable user journey from search result to conversion.
If you absolutely must choose, assess your current pain points first. Is visibility your biggest challenge? Start with technical SEO. Is engagement and conversion the bottleneck? Start with UX. But don’t stop there—invest in both over time to unlock your website’s full potential.
Need help figuring out where to start? 📧 Get in touch with us or book a free website audit. We’ll show you exactly where your biggest wins lie—and how to capitalise on them.
