Most business owners who come to us with this question have already made up their minds. They have a website, it looks fine, and they believe the only missing piece is SEO. "The site is done, we just need to rank."
Sometimes that's true. More often, it isn't. The site itself is part of the reason it doesn't rank, and no amount of SEO work on top will fully make up for it.
So the honest answer to "developer or SEO specialist first?" is: it depends on what you already have. Below we'll walk through how to tell, and show a real example of what happens when the order goes wrong.
Why the order matters
Think of SEO as something that sits on top of your website, not next to it. Search engines read your site's code, structure and content. If those foundations are weak, every euro spent on SEO works harder than it should, and some of it is simply wasted.
A lot of what affects rankings is decided when the site is built:
- URL structure. Clean, consistent addresses that are easy for both people and Google to understand.
- Heading structure. One clear H1 per page, and a logical H2/H3 hierarchy underneath it.
- Page speed. How fast the site loads, especially on phones.
- Site architecture. How pages and categories are organised and linked to each other.
- Meta titles and descriptions. Whether the site even allows these to be set properly for each page.
- Images. File sizes, file names and alt text.
None of these are "SEO extras". They are how the site is built. If the developer didn't think about them, the SEO specialist ends up asking for changes to a site they don't control, and the fixes get slow, expensive or never happen.
A real example: paying for SEO on a site that wasn't ready
One of the companies we audited recently (a Bulgarian services business, which we'll keep anonymous) was in exactly this situation. They had a decent website with useful content, and they had already been paying for SEO for some time. The results weren't there.
When we looked at the site, the problems fell into two groups.
The SEO work itself had been done badly. A large part of their backlinks looked like they came from cheap bulk link packages, the kind sold in their hundreds on freelance marketplaces. The links came from low-quality sites with no connection to the company's industry. Links like these don't build authority. At best they do nothing; at worst they become a risk, because Google explicitly treats manipulative link building as spam.
The site had structural issues that SEO alone couldn't solve. Among other things:
- URLs mixing Latin and Cyrillic characters, which makes addresses messy and harder to share and interpret.
- A blog split into several overlapping categories without a clear logic, both for readers and for Google.
- Heading structures that weren't properly organised across pages.
- Meta titles and descriptions that were missing or not written for the pages they belonged to.
- Images that weren't optimised for size or described with alt text.
To be fair, not everything was wrong. Their internal linking, for example, was genuinely well done, and that's a strong base to build on.
But the takeaway was clear. The company had spent money on "SEO" for months, while the things actually holding the site back were never addressed. Fixing it now means two jobs instead of one: cleaning up what was done badly, and then doing the work properly. Changing URLs, for instance, has to be done carefully with 301 redirects so the site doesn't lose the value its existing pages have built up.
So who should you hire first?
If you don't have a website yet, or you're planning a new one
Don't separate the two. Build the site with SEO in mind from the first day. It costs far less to get the structure right at the start than to rebuild it later. Whoever builds your site should be able to answer, in plain words, how the site will handle URLs, headings, speed, meta data and structure. If they can't, that's a warning sign.
If you already have a website
Start with an SEO audit, not with SEO work. A proper audit tells you which of two situations you're in:
- The site is solid, and the problem is content, keywords or authority. Then ongoing SEO work makes sense right away.
- The site itself is holding you back. Then some changes to the site need to happen first, or at least alongside the SEO work, otherwise you're paying to push a site that can't go much further.
Either way, the audit should end with a prioritised list: what to fix first, and why. If someone offers you monthly SEO without looking at your site first, ask what exactly they plan to work on.
Why we do both in one team
At Crunky Studios we build websites and do SEO in the same team, and it's not just a sales argument. It changes how the work actually goes.
When development and SEO are split between two different people or companies, a simple fix turns into a chain: the SEO specialist writes up a request, sends it to the developer, the developer interprets it, maybe disagrees, schedules it for later, and something gets lost along the way. When something breaks, each side can point at the other.
With one team, that chain disappears. The person who spots the SEO problem can talk directly to the person who can fix it, often the same day. There are no miscommunications between two vendors, and nobody to blame but us. The work moves faster, and the site and the SEO strategy stay aligned instead of drifting apart.
A note on promises
Whoever you hire, be careful with anyone who guarantees a first position on Google or results in a fixed number of weeks. Nobody can honestly promise that. How quickly SEO works depends on your competition, your site's history, your content and your backlinks. What a good team can promise is to work systematically on the things that actually affect your visibility, and to show you what's changing along the way.
The short version
- No website yet? Hire someone who does development and SEO together, and build it right the first time.
- Have a website? Get an audit first. Find out whether the problem is the SEO or the site.
- Already paying for SEO without results? Check what's actually being done, especially where your backlinks come from.
If you're not sure which situation you're in, get in touch and we'll take a look at your site.