Is SEO included in web design?

If you have ever asked a web designer this and come away unsure of the answer, you are not being slow. The question is genuinely muddled, because "SEO" is used to describe two completely different things — and only one of them is a separate job.

Some of it is simply what building a website properly looks like. It takes a competent builder a bit of extra care, no specialist tools, and no monthly fee. The rest is ongoing work that carries a real, recurring cost, because somebody has to keep doing it every month.

Plenty of confusion sits in the gap between the two, and it is worth knowing which side of it your money is on.

The part that should be in any competent build

None of what follows is advanced. It is the digital equivalent of putting the sign above the shop door and making sure the lights work. If it is missing, the site was not finished.

• Page titles and meta descriptions, written for every page. The title is the blue line in the search results; the description is the text underneath. They are what people read before they decide whether to click. Every page needs its own, written deliberately, not auto-filled with the business name repeated nine times.
• A proper heading structure. One clear H1 per page saying what the page is, then H2s for sections beneath it. Headings are how a search engine works out the shape of a page, and how a person skims it. They are not a font-size picker.
• Fast loading. Mostly this means images at sensible sizes and not loading a pile of scripts nobody asked for. Speed matters for rankings, but it matters far more because slow pages get closed.
• Works properly on a phone. Most people who find you will find you on a phone. Not "technically loads on a phone" — readable text, tappable buttons, no sideways scrolling, forms that work with a thumb.
• Clean URLs. /sports-massage rather than /page-id-7841?cat=3. Easy to read, easy to say out loud, easy to link to.
• A sitemap, and a robots file that does not block anything important. This is the site telling search engines which pages exist. It takes minutes.
• Your name, address and phone number, consistent and marked up. Identical everywhere they appear, and written into the page in a format search engines read directly (structured data). This is the backbone of showing up in local results.
• Internal links that make sense. Related pages pointing at each other with descriptive wording, so a visitor — and a search engine — can move through the site without going back to the menu every time.
• Pages that are not competing with each other. If you have three pages all aiming at the same phrase, they split your chances rather than multiplying them. This is a decision made when the site is planned, not a fix applied later.

Why charging extra for that is charging extra for doing the job

Every item on that list is a consequence of building the site thoughtfully. Writing a page title is part of writing the page. Choosing the URL is part of creating the page. Deciding what each page is for, so two of them are not chasing the same customer, is part of planning the site at all.

If those things appear on a quote as a separate line item, what is being priced is not extra work — it is the ordinary work, moved into a box with a better-sounding name. A builder who quotes you for a house and then quotes separately for making the roof watertight has not offered you an upgrade.

There is a fair version of this, mind. If your existing site is a few hundred pages of accumulated mess, auditing and fixing it is genuinely a project, and it should be priced as one. Getting it right on a new build is not.

For what it is worth: at AI ORCA every item in that list is part of a standard build. Not as a package, not as an add-on — it is simply how the site gets made.

The part that genuinely is ongoing work

Here is where the honesty has to cut the other way. There is real SEO work that cannot be finished at launch, because it is not a task. It is a habit.

• New content aimed at terms you do not yet rank for. Your site covers what you do now. It does not cover the dozens of specific questions people type before they are ready to buy. Each of those is a page that has to be researched, written and kept accurate. That is writing work, every month, forever if you want it to compound.
• Reading the data and acting on it. Search Console and your analytics will tell you what people actually searched for, which pages they landed on, and where they gave up. Reading that is an hour. Acting on it — rewriting a page that gets shown but never clicked, splitting a page that is trying to do two jobs — is the part that takes skill and time.
• Local listings upkeep. Your Google Business Profile, directory entries, the places your details sit outside your own site. Opening hours change, phone numbers change, listings get edited by strangers. Left alone, they drift out of line, and inconsistency quietly undermines local visibility.
• Earning links. Other sites linking to yours is still one of the strongest signals there is, and it cannot be built into a site. It comes from being useful, being mentioned, being part of a local or trade community. It is slow, it is relationship work, and nobody can hand it to you at launch.
• Watching competitors. Rankings are relative. If the firm down the road starts publishing weekly and you do not, your position changes without you touching anything.

That is not a con. It is somebody's time every month, and time costs money. If you want to grow beyond what your site says about you today, that work has to happen — by an agency, a freelancer, or you.

How to tell which one you are being sold

The test is simple: is the monthly fee buying work that produces something new, or is it charging rent on work that was already finished?

A worthwhile ongoing arrangement produces artefacts. New pages you can read. Specific changes you can point at. A note saying what was tried and what happened. A weaker one produces a PDF of rankings and the word "optimisation", month after month, with nothing on the site that was not there before.

Questions worth asking any provider

• Which of the on-page basics are included in the build price, and can I see that written down?
• If I do not take the monthly plan, will my site still have page titles, headings, a sitemap and structured business details?
• What will you actually produce in month one, and in month six? Name the deliverables.
• Will I get access to my own Search Console and analytics accounts, in my name?
• Who owns the content you write for me if I stop paying?
• What happens to the work if I leave — does anything get taken away or switched off?

The first two are the ones that matter most. If the basics are only included when you also buy the monthly plan, you have your answer about what the monthly plan is really for.

And if a provider cannot say clearly which side of the line a piece of work sits on, that is information too. This is not complicated enough to need vague answers.

If you want to see it rather than read about it: send us your website — or just your Instagram — and we'll rebuild your main page properly and send it over as a link. Free, no call, nothing to book. You get the new page and a short note on what we changed and why, so you can judge the thinking as well as the result. Get my free website here.

If you'd rather talk it through than read it, there's a free 15-minute call too.