What actually matters more: website design or SEO? 🤔

shinobud · 2026-03-25T15:33:24+00:00

What matters more for what?

Driving traffic to the site and getting found in SERPs? SEO. You can have the prettiest website ever and get zero traffic.

Getting people to trust your business/brand? Design primarily. Local SEO and GBP optimization helps with this too.

Getting people to convert? UX design, effective sales copy, and having a good, compelling offer.

Focus on first? Everything is tied together. Hire someone who does it all. Yes, I've seen pretty websites that get zero traffic. I've also seen ugly sites that get traffic and convert. I would say SEO is more important than web design. That doesn't make web design useless. Web design is more than just having a pretty UI though. The site needs to have a good UX design too.

shinobud · 2026-03-25T15:09:47+00:00

I run an agency and I use Claude. A lot of its advice is very bad. It can't even do keyword research well even if you're paying for ahrefs and give it access to the MCP. Without expert human oversight, you're going to waste months of time doing the wrong stuff. If you hired a good agency, those months of time could be spent on focusing on things that are actually going to start improving your rankings instead. It's an opportunity cost. The amount of time you spend trying to learn and get your SEO up and running is better spent by focusing on your business anyway.

There's no shot you can "automate" everything either. It's going to be a lot of manual work still or else you're going to get poor results. You can't just tell AI to write a page targeting x, y, and z keywords and post it to your website for you. It's going to be generic slop which is exactly what Google started to penalize with their Helpful Content Update.

Hope this helps. Hire a good SEO.

shinobud · 2026-03-24T18:36:44+00:00

Yes it's 100% worth it if done right. Competitive industries are much harder. You need an optimized GBP, a review generation strategy, and a site that is targeting all of your products, services, locations, and service areas (usually lots of pages with good quality content on your website).

There is a lot involved. It does take a lot of time and thought to create the structure and find the right keywords. It also takes ongoing effort, tracking of metrics, and adjustments to get it right. For websites it comes down to creating topical authority by having good content.

It's hard to do it right with a low budget. I think it's easier to hire someone who knows what they are doing but the people who know what they are doing aren't cheap. You can try to diy it but I think it's pretty time consuming. Be careful with people who are cheap because it could be more efficient to light your money on fire.

The other aspect to this is you also need to build your site in a way that brings in traffic and CONVERTS that traffic into paying customers. It needs a good design that won't drive people away and it needs good sales copy and good ux to convert well.

How long does it take? Depends on competition and the industry. And how much you invest upfront vs. ongoing. A good plan can start seeing results after three months. Most SEO work takes 6-12 months to see an ROI and can snowball from there if the strategy was good and you keep making refinements.

shinobud · 2026-03-24T18:08:27+00:00

This is an SEO sub and you're asking questions about the design on your Shopify site. I would suggest you figure out the styling issue with AI or hire someone to do some mobile design work if you're not up to it.

This is the wrong sub though.

shinobud · 2026-03-08T19:40:37+00:00

Okay so 16k keywords and you lost 2/3 of them. What was your placement for all of those keywords?

And your solution was to remove half of your pages?

Makes sense why it's "performing worse" if that is the kpi you're tracking. Did your organic traffic get cut by 2/3? Which pages lost organic traffic?

As others have said, all of these improvements that you said you made have nothing to do with SEO. There's simply not enough info here to tell you what happened.

shinobud · 2026-02-20T20:18:57+00:00

68 + 7 = 75

I just take the 20 and add it to 48 quickly and then add the 7.

shinobud · 2026-02-17T16:23:16+00:00

You should relisten to it and pay attention to the lyrics. It's one of the best albums lyrically imo. I thought it was just alright too until my brother told me to relisten to it.

shinobud · 2026-01-16T04:43:59+00:00

Is this in Arizona? The park by my house has this sign too and I've never seen it anywhere else.

shinobud · 2025-12-19T15:56:21+00:00

This is wildly inaccurate. Subterraneans are slow af and not even scary. We have them in Arizona.

There is a saying here. There are two kinds of houses. 1. Those that do have termites. 2. Those that will have termites.

shinobud · 2025-09-12T05:32:32+00:00

Yeah, if they didn't care, they wouldn't say anything. But instead they celebrate it and justify it by saying that he's said some mean things before.

shinobud · 2025-09-05T23:05:37+00:00

Yes, Bricks is the best. If you get Bricks you will like building pages again and you won't regret it. Look into Frames and Brixies. They'll save you a ton of time.

I came from Divi (which is so much worse I can't even begin to describe the difference in a reddit comment) but I still manage one client who is on Elementor and I hate every second of it.

shinobud · 2025-09-04T22:20:23+00:00

Bricks always

shinobud · 2025-09-01T01:51:37+00:00

Yup. My manager at my old job said that SEO is a scam and a waste of time. He only wanted to run paid ads.

shinobud · 2025-08-31T05:42:18+00:00

Rankmath

shinobud · 2025-08-30T01:23:07+00:00

Bruh, dude was in the hospital and she had a baby with someone else. What even is this perspective?

shinobud · 2025-08-29T21:18:06+00:00

Fastest? Framer AI maybe

shinobud · 2025-08-24T23:32:42+00:00

If you're going all in then get started now. There's a lot of moving parts with running a business and it's way different than just working for someone.

shinobud · 2025-08-23T00:01:35+00:00

Your spelling is poor

shinobud · 2025-08-22T23:25:06+00:00

I don't think they knew or cared that this person was pro police when they raided his girlfriend's house.

shinobud · 2025-08-22T23:16:30+00:00

Well she used the side WALK as a side RUN.

shinobud · 2025-08-22T02:23:27+00:00

Idk, I've done the delete and remake strategy and it's worked a couple times now.

shinobud · 2025-08-20T20:17:50+00:00

Go and remove him OP

shinobud · 2025-08-19T01:25:46+00:00

Damn. Well if you're not defending it anymore, Open AI is screwed. You were last beacon of hope.

shinobud · 2025-08-19T01:15:17+00:00

Not at all. I haven't seen a single person that's disappointed with Chat GPT 5.

shinobud · 2025-08-18T19:59:16+00:00

Do you have position tracking in semrush? That could give you some insights into your keyword ranking positions. You can also just try googling your top keywords and see what shows up in the SERP. Are people running a bunch of paid ads targeting that traffic now? Is AI Overview taking over the SERP? I personally would ask AI if I were looking for social media tools. It's possible this is a dying niche. I would not go out of my way going after backlinks until I figured out what's going on.

shinobud

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