Seven red flags when hiring a web designer for your local business

We audit a lot of websites that cost real money and produce nothing. The failures are predictable — most were visible in the proposal, before a dollar changed hands. Here’s what to look for, whether or not you ever talk to us.

1. No one asks what your customers search for

If the discovery process is all about your preferences — colors, vibes, sites you admire — and nobody asks what your customers type into Google, ranking was never part of the plan. Design taste matters; query research decides whether anyone arrives to see it.

2. “SEO included” with no specifics

“SEO-friendly” in a proposal should decompose into named deliverables: which pages target which queries, what structured data ships, what the Core Web Vitals targets are, who writes the copy and from what research. If it doesn’t decompose, it’s a checkbox, not a service.

3. Nobody mentions your existing URLs

If you have an existing site, some of its pages have earned rankings — even mediocre sites usually rank for their own name and a few services. A redesign that deletes or renames pages without a redirect plan silently burns that equity. Ask directly: “What happens to my current pages and their rankings?” A blank look is your answer.

4. The portfolio is beautiful and slow

Open their recent work on your phone, on cellular if you can. Count the seconds before you can read the first headline. Beautiful-but-heavy is the signature failure of design-led shops — and speed is both a ranking factor and the first impression every visitor gets.

5. Stock everything

If their portfolio sites are interchangeable — same stock heroes, same three-column features, same testimonial carousel — yours will be too. Search engines increasingly reward distinctive, substantive pages; templates with your logo swapped in are structurally forgettable to humans and machines alike.

6. You can’t update it yourself

Ask: “After launch, how do I add a service page or an article?” If the answer involves hourly billing forever, the site is a rental, not an asset. Content you add over the years is how a site compounds; that path should be handed to you, documented, at launch.

7. Guarantees of rankings

Nobody controls Google. “First page guaranteed” is either naivety or a plan to rank you for queries nobody makes. What a competent builder can promise: measurable technical standards, honest content targeting real queries, and reporting that shows exactly what happened.

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What a good proposal sounds like

It talks about your customers’ searches before your color preferences. It names the pages it will build and why. It commits to measurable speed. It plans your redirects. It ends with you owning something you can edit.

That’s the standard we hold ourselves to — and you should hold anyone to it, including us. If you want to see it in practice, request a visibility audit and read what comes back.