People treat accessibility and SEO like two separate line items. One for "compliance" and one for "marketing." Two different consultants, two different budgets, two different conversations.
We don't. Because they're the same work.
When Tyler writes the code for a client site, the decisions that make it accessible are the same decisions that make it rank. Not by coincidence. By design. The same clean engineering that lets a screen reader understand your page is what lets Google understand it too.
Here's how that plays out in practice.
Semantic HTML: The Foundation of Both
This is the big one. And it's the one most web developers get wrong.
Semantic HTML means using the right elements for the right purpose. A navigation bar uses a <nav> element. A main content area uses <main>. A list of items uses <ul> and <li>. A heading uses <h1> through <h6> in order.
A screen reader relies on these elements to help someone navigate a page they can't see. "Navigation region." "Main content." "Heading level 2: Our Services." That structure is what makes a page usable for someone who relies on assistive technology.
Google relies on the same structure. When Googlebot crawls your page, it's reading the HTML, not looking at the pixels. It uses headings to understand your topic hierarchy. It uses nav elements to understand your site structure. It uses semantic markup to figure out what your page is actually about.
Most WordPress themes and page builders generate a soup of <div> elements with CSS classes that make things look correct visually. A screen reader sees nothing meaningful. And Google sees the same nothing.
When Tyler builds a site, every element is the correct semantic element. Not because it's a checkbox on an accessibility audit, but because it's how HTML is supposed to work. And the SEO benefit comes for free.
Alt Text: Images That Work Twice
Every image on an Egmer site gets a real alt description. Not "image1.jpg." Not "photo of building." A description that tells a screen reader user what the image actually shows and why it matters in context.
"Tyler reviewing code on a laptop at the Egmer office" gives a blind user real information. It also gives Google real information. Google Image Search uses alt text to understand and index images. Pages with descriptive alt text consistently outperform pages with missing or generic alt text in image search results.
And here's the part most SEO guides skip: decorative images get an empty alt attribute (alt=""). This tells a screen reader to skip the image entirely instead of announcing "image" with no context. Getting this right means screen reader users hear your actual content instead of a stream of meaningless "image, image, image" announcements between paragraphs.
Heading Structure: Your Content Outline
On every page we build, there's exactly one H1. It's the page title. Below it, H2s mark major sections. H3s mark subsections within those. The hierarchy never skips levels and it never goes out of order.
A screen reader user can pull up a list of all headings on the page and use it like a table of contents to jump directly to the section they want. That's how they navigate. It's fast, efficient, and only works when headings are structured correctly.
Google uses headings the same way. Your H1 tells Google what the page is about. Your H2s signal the major topics covered. Your H3s provide the detail layer. This is fundamental on page SEO, and most sites get it wrong by either having no heading structure at all or by using heading tags for visual styling instead of content hierarchy.
We've checked sites where the business name in the footer was wrapped in an H2 and the actual page title was a styled <div>. Google reads that and concludes the most important content on your Services page is your company name in the footer. Not helpful.
Page Speed: Fast for Everyone
WCAG requires that sites be operable, and that includes reasonable loading times. A site that takes 8 seconds to load doesn't just frustrate someone with a slow connection. It can be genuinely unusable for someone relying on assistive technology that has to process the DOM as it loads.
Google has confirmed that page speed is a ranking factor. Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) directly influence your search rankings.
Every site we build in Next.js is optimized for speed from the architecture level. Server side rendering. Automatic image optimization. Code splitting. No bloated page builder JavaScript. No unnecessary third party scripts loading on every page.
The same engineering that makes the site fast for a screen reader user makes it fast for Google's ranking algorithm.
Clean Code: What Lives Under the Hood
Here's something most business owners never see: the source code of their own website.
A WordPress site with Elementor might look perfectly fine in a browser. But view the source code and you'll find hundreds of nested <div> elements, inline styles, unused CSS files, JavaScript libraries that load on every page whether they're needed or not, and a DOM structure so bloated that both screen readers and search engine crawlers struggle to parse it.
When Tyler builds a site, the HTML is clean. Every element has a purpose. There's no wrapper div inside a container div inside a section div inside another wrapper div. The code is lean, readable, and structured in a way that both assistive technology and search engines can interpret efficiently.
This isn't perfectionism. It's engineering. And it's the reason our sites consistently score 90 or above on Lighthouse for both accessibility and performance.
Mobile Responsiveness: One Site, Every Device
Making your site work on every screen size is both an accessibility requirement and an SEO requirement. Google uses mobile first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your site is what determines your rankings.
When we build responsive layouts, we're not just resizing elements. We're ensuring that touch targets are large enough for people with motor impairments, that text remains readable without zooming, that interactive elements don't overlap, and that the tab order still makes logical sense on a smaller screen.
Google rewards all of this. A site that works beautifully on mobile, with fast load times, readable text, and properly sized touch targets, ranks better than one that's technically "responsive" but barely usable on a phone.
Descriptive Link Text: Context That Counts
"Click here" is one of the most common accessibility violations we find. A screen reader user navigating by links hears a list: "click here, click here, click here, click here." Zero context. Zero usefulness.
"View our web design services" tells a screen reader user exactly where that link goes. It also tells Google exactly what the linked page is about. Internal link anchor text is a real SEO signal, and descriptive link text consistently outperforms generic anchor text.
We write every link with both audiences in mind. The person who can only hear the link text, and the search engine that's using it to understand your site's internal structure.
Video Captions and Transcripts
Captions make video content accessible to deaf and hard of hearing users. Transcripts provide the same content in text form for anyone who prefers reading or can't play audio.
Both give Google indexable text content. A 10 minute video with no captions or transcript is invisible to search engines. That same video with a full transcript gives Google hundreds of words of relevant, keyword rich content to index.
The Business Case
When you combine all of this, the math gets compelling:
One in four adults has a disability. If your site doesn't work for them, you're losing that revenue.
The same engineering that makes your site accessible also makes it rank higher, load faster, and convert better.
You're not paying for accessibility AND SEO. You're paying for good engineering, and both come with it.
This is why we don't separate the two. When a client hires us to build a website, they get accessibility and SEO from the same codebase, the same developer, the same set of decisions. Because they were never separate things to begin with.
We build custom websites where accessibility and SEO are the same engineering, not separate line items. No templates, no overlays, no shortcuts. See what that looks like.