SEO vs. UX: When Good Rankings Mean Bad Design
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There’s a conversation happening in every marketing meeting that designers should know about. It usually starts with a line like “our competitor has a 3,000-word guide on this topic and they’re ranking #1” and ends with a request to add more content to a page that users are already struggling to navigate.
This is the tension at the heart of modern web design: the practices that improve search rankings can actively degrade user experience. And with Google’s recent algorithm updates claiming to prioritize UX, the conflict is becoming harder to ignore.
The Content Bloat Problem
SEO strategy for the past decade has operated on a simple premise: longer content ranks better. The Ahrefs and Semrush studies that established this correlation weren’t wrong. Pages with comprehensive coverage of topics do tend to outrank thin content.
But correlation isn’t causation, and what worked for rankings created a generation of websites padded with unnecessary information. A recipe page that could be three paragraphs becomes 2,000 words of “the history of pasta” before you reach the ingredients. A product page that needs a specifications table and a buy button becomes an SEO-optimized essay about the “evolution of smartphone technology.”
Users adapt to this by developing what UX researchers call “content blindness”—the learned behavior of scrolling past introductory text to find what you actually came for. The SEO team celebrates ranking improvements while the analytics show increasing bounce rates and declining time-on-page for users who actually read the content.
When Architecture Serves Robots
One of the persistent conflicts between UX and SEO involves information architecture. SEO best practices often push for what practitioners call “robust site architectures”—more pages targeting more keywords, deeper category structures, and extensive internal linking.
A 2024 study by Ahrefs actually challenged this assumption, finding that single comprehensive pages can rank for many related keywords more effectively than multiple granular pages. But old habits persist. Many SEO strategies still encourage creating separate pages for “best running shoes for flat feet” and “best running shoes for overpronation” rather than a single well-structured guide that serves both queries.
From a UX perspective, this fragmentation creates navigation problems. Users hunting for information end up clicking through multiple similar pages, losing context, and struggling to compare options that live in different locations. The site architecture serves the search engine’s need to categorize. It doesn’t serve the user’s need to decide.
The Speed Tax
Page speed is one area where Google explicitly claims to align SEO and UX. Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor in 2021, and the message was clear: faster sites rank better and provide better experiences.
In practice, the tension remains. Rich media, interactive elements, and dynamic content improve engagement but hurt load times. A product page with an embedded video walkthrough might convert better, but that video file damages your Largest Contentful Paint score.
The optimization becomes a constant negotiation. Marketing wants the video. SEO wants the speed score. Design wants both, knowing that removing the video hurts conversions and keeping it hurts rankings. There’s no clean answer—just tradeoffs that require judgment about which metrics actually matter for your specific users.
The Keyword Stuffing We Don’t Call Keyword Stuffing
Nobody does literal keyword stuffing anymore—the practice of cramming “best pizza Chicago” into every paragraph died with Google’s Panda update. But subtler versions persist.
Consider heading structures. SEO guidance recommends including target keywords in H1 and H2 tags. Good advice in isolation. But when executed mechanically, it produces headings like “Best Chicago Pizza: What Makes Chicago Pizza the Best Pizza in Chicago?” These technically optimized headings read as awkward and repetitive to humans. They signal to users that the page was written for algorithms, not for them.
The same dynamic plays out with internal anchor text. SEO wants descriptive, keyword-rich links. (“Read our complete guide to Chicago deep dish pizza recommendations.”) Users prefer concise, scannable links. (“See our recommendations.”) The optimization that helps search engines understand your content structure can create reading experiences that feel cluttered and over-explained.
The Accessibility Collision
One of the more concerning conflicts involves accessibility. A designer recently posted on Reddit about a client whose SEO strategy required “extensive pages for SEO” while their users (many with cognitive disabilities like ADHD) needed reduced content and clearer focus. The designer was caught between ranking requirements and genuine accessibility needs.
This isn’t an edge case. Comprehensive content works against users with attention difficulties, visual processing issues, or cognitive load limitations. The SEO push for “complete coverage” can actively exclude users who need simplified information hierarchies.
Google’s guidance suggests that accessible design should improve rankings, since accessibility features like alt text, heading structure, and keyboard navigation help search engines parse content. But the macro trend toward content length and topical comprehensiveness runs directly counter to accessibility best practices around information reduction and cognitive simplicity.
What’s Actually Changing
Google’s Helpful Content updates in 2024 and 2025 theoretically address some of these tensions. The stated goal was to surface content “created for people, not search engines” and demote “content created primarily for search ranking.”
Early analysis suggests the update did penalize some obviously AI-generated content farms. But the structural incentives remain. Content comprehensiveness still correlates with rankings. Keyword placement in headings still matters. The fundamental tension between writing for humans and optimizing for algorithms hasn’t disappeared—it’s just gotten more sophisticated.
Finding Actual Balance
The practical solution isn’t choosing UX over SEO or vice versa. It’s getting specific about what you’re optimizing for and who you’re serving.
Start by distinguishing between pages that need to rank and pages that need to convert. Your homepage probably doesn’t need to rank for “best running shoes”—your product pages do. Your product pages probably don’t need 2,000 words of content—they need specifications, reviews, and clear purchase paths.
Use progressive disclosure to satisfy both needs. Put essential information above the fold for users who know what they want. Provide expandable sections with comprehensive detail for users (and search engines) who want depth. This isn’t a hack—it’s good UX that happens to also satisfy SEO requirements for content completeness.
Measure what actually matters. Rankings are a vanity metric if they bring traffic that doesn’t convert. Time on page is misleading if users are searching for information they can’t find. Focus on task completion rates, conversion paths, and user satisfaction surveys. These tell you whether your pages are working for humans, which is supposedly what search engines want to reward anyway.
The uncomfortable truth is that SEO and UX both serve business goals. When they conflict, the question isn’t “which discipline wins?” It’s “what outcome are we actually trying to create?” Sometimes the answer is traffic. Sometimes it’s conversion. Sometimes it’s accessibility compliance. Clarity about goals makes the tradeoffs navigable.
