Your SEO Is Telling On Your Brand Strategy
I had a client last spring — an interior designer with a steady stream of referrals and a portfolio that included two homes I'd seen in magazines — who told me on our discovery call that she was "doing SEO." When I asked what she was optimizing for, she said, "interior designer near me." I asked her where her referral clients had been finding her before they got referred. Pinterest, mostly, with the occasional Instagram save. And one woman who'd been sitting on her website for eleven months before finally inquiring.
So I pulled up her site, ran it through a few of my usual diagnostics, and noticed something interesting…
She was ranking on page four for a phrase that lived all over her site copy but had nothing to do with her positioning: "warm modern interiors." She was ranking on page nine for "interior designer near me." And she wasn't ranking at all for the thing she did — full-service interior design for second homes in resort towns.
Her SEO was telling her the truth about her brand strategy.
That's the thing I want to talk about today, because I think SEO gets shoved into a corner of the marketing conversation that has nothing to do with how it actually functions. Most people I work with think of SEO as a technical project — keywords, metadata, alt text, the kind of work you hand to a specialist and then forget about. And the technical work matters. But the part that matters more, the part almost nobody is talking about, is that your SEO is a forensic readout of what your brand is actually saying. If your strategy is fuzzy, your SEO is going to be fuzzy. If your strategy is clear, your SEO becomes clarifying instead of decorative.
I want to walk you through what I mean by that.
SEO Tells You What Your Brand Is Communicating, Not What You Think It's Communicating
Here's the part most people misunderstand.
The keywords you rank for are the intersection of two things: what your ideal client is typing into Google, and what your site actually says back. If those two things are aligned, your SEO works. If they aren't, you end up ranking for phrases that don't match your business, or not ranking at all for the phrases you should own.
When I sat down with the interior designer I mentioned, what we found was that she'd built her entire site around a phrase ("warm modern interiors") that she didn't really claim as her positioning. She liked the look of it. She'd used it in her bio because a copywriter she worked with a few years ago had suggested it. And the phrase had taken over her whole site without her noticing. Every alt tag, every project description, every blog post title. Google was just doing its job. It was telling her, with great confidence, what her site said.
The problem was that her site and her business had drifted apart, and SEO was the place she could see the drift first.
This is what I mean when I say SEO is a brand strategy tool. It gives you an unsentimental read on the words your business is built around, the words your client is searching for, and whether those two things are pointing at the same thing.
The Keyword Conversation Belongs at the Strategy Stage, Not the Implementation Stage
Most websites I audit have one of two problems. Either the keywords were chosen at the very end of the project, after the copy was written and the design was finalized, and so the SEO is whatever phrases happened to end up in the existing copy. Or the keywords were chosen at the very beginning by an SEO specialist who had no idea what the brand strategy was, and the site was built around phrases that have nothing to do with how the business positions itself.
Both of these are missing the point.
The keyword conversation needs to happen at the strategy stage — when you're deciding what your business is, who it serves, and what kind of person you want finding you. That work is brand strategy. The fact that it feeds directly into SEO is the point.
When I do a Sunday Strategy with a client, one of the things we map is the language her ideal client uses to describe what she does. Not industry language. The phrases that come out of her client's mouth at three in the afternoon trying to explain to her husband what kind of person she's looking to hire. Those phrases are the ones that should be doing the heavy lifting on her site. They're also, conveniently, the phrases that show up in keyword research with real search volume — because they're the phrases real people are typing.
Brand strategy and SEO strategy are the same conversation, run through two different filters. If you're doing one without the other, you're leaving half the value on the table.
"SEO Built Into the Site" Means More Than Most Designers Pretend It Does
I want to call this out because it makes me a little crazy.
It blows my mind how many people come to me for a new website thinking that SEO has been handled on their old one because their previous designer told them they "did SEO." When it comes down to it, I open the backend and there are no meta descriptions. There are either too many H1s or none. There's no hierarchy. There's no alt text on a single image. Sometimes the page titles are missing altogether. It's honestly kind of sad.
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"Doing SEO" has become one of those phrases that gets used so loosely it stops meaning anything. It can mean the designer typed a few keywords into the metadata fields and called it “done”. It can mean they ran an audit at the very end and ticked a few boxes. It can mean nothing at all — they said it because they thought it sounded good in the proposal.
When I say every site I build has SEO baked in, here's what I mean: The keyword strategy informs the copy, the page structure, the internal linking, the H1s and H2s, the alt text, the URL slugs, and the metadata from the very first day of the project. Built in, in the sense that the site was designed and written around the strategy from day one.
When I rebuilt the interior designer's site, we made a strategic decision early on that her positioning was full-service interior design for second homes in coastal towns. That's the phrase we wanted her to own — specific enough that the wrong client would self-select out, specific enough to have real ranking potential, and specific enough to be honest about her work. Once we made that decision in strategy, it informed everything downstream. Her homepage H1 changed. Her services page got renamed. Her project galleries got rewritten with location-specific captions. Her blog topics shifted toward "what to know before designing a second home" rather than generic interior design tips. Her about page mentioned the towns she most often works in.
Six months later, she was ranking on page one for three phrases related to her positioning. None of those phrases existed on her old site. They couldn't have. The strategy that named them hadn't been done yet.
The SEO Audit Most Designers Skip
Here's something that happens a lot, and I want to call it out because I think it's the thing that makes most rebrands feel like they didn't fully come together.
A designer rebrands a client's site. The design is beautiful. The copy is sharp. The strategy is solid. The site launches. And then six months later, the client comes back and says, "I'm not getting more inquiries. What happened?"
What happened, most of the time, is that nobody did an SEO audit before the redesign. The old site had been ranking for a handful of phrases that were doing some work in the background — not amazing phrases, maybe not the right ones, but phrases that were bringing in some kind of traffic. When the new site launched, those URLs changed, those page titles changed, those H1s changed, and whatever ranking momentum had been built up over the years got wiped out overnight.
A real SEO audit before a redesign tells you three things: which pages on the old site are currently doing work, which keywords have ranking potential worth preserving, and which 301 redirects need to be in place at launch so that the existing search authority transfers cleanly to the new structure.
This is unsexy, technical, and the difference between a redesign that builds on momentum and one that has to start over from scratch.
I do this audit on every project that involves rebuilding an existing site. It takes about half a day. It saves my clients months of recovery time.
If the person who designed your last site didn't talk to you about preserving ranking authority during the transition, that's not a moral failing on their part — it's a sign that the project was scoped as a design project. The SEO part was an afterthought, the way it usually is.
Your Blog Is the Long Game, and It's Also a Strategy Document
The last thing I want to say is about blogging, because I get asked about this all the time and I think people make it more complicated than it needs to be.
A blog, done well, is a slow-build asset that compounds. Every post is a chance to rank for a different long-tail phrase, to answer a question your ideal client is typing into Google at 11pm, and to demonstrate the kind of thinking that makes someone trust you. The compounding part matters. One post does almost nothing. Twenty posts over two years can become the most reliable lead source in your business.
But the strategic part matters even more. Every blog topic should map back to a phrase your ideal client is searching for, an objection she's working through, or a moment in her buying process where she needs to be educated before she's ready to inquire. The blog isn't a place to write whatever's on your mind. It's a place to systematically address every search-driven moment in your client's journey so that when she's ready, you're the one who shows up.
Think of your blog as a strategy document that lives in public. Every post is a chance to sharpen how your business is positioned, demonstrate your expertise, and pick up search traffic from the right people. The fact that it does all three at once is what makes it efficient. The fact that most businesses publish three posts in a year and then complain that blogging doesn't work is what makes it underused.
What This Looks Like When You Pull It All Together
If you've read this far, you already know what I'm going to say. SEO isn't a checkbox you tick at the end of a project. It's not a specialist service that lives separately from your brand. It's the technical expression of your brand strategy — and when the strategy is right, the SEO follows.
For my clients, that work starts in Sunday Strategy. It's where we define the positioning, get specific about who you're trying to reach, and talk through what those people are searching for when they have the problem you solve. The keyword research and technical SEO work comes in the next phase of the project, but it can only do its job if the strategy underneath it is pointed at the right thing first.
If you're sitting with the feeling that your site is technically fine but isn't pulling its weight, the right people aren't finding you, or the people who are finding you aren't the right ones — your search results are telling you something about your strategy. Sunday Strategy is where we work it out.
