Can Simple Web Design + Strong SEO Beat the Competition? The TopChoice Experiment

Updated 20th Feb, Update at the bottom

Post Summary

Most people assume you need a fancy, expensive website to rank for competitive search terms. With TopChoice, I’m running a live experiment to test the opposite: can a very basic, almost bare-bones website rank highly for competitive, commercial keywords purely on the strength of solid SEO, fast performance and useful content?

This case study documents how I’m building a lightweight local editorial directory, how I’m optimising it, and what this reveals about the balance between web design and SEO when you’re trying to compete in crowded niches.

Why I Started the TopChoice Experiment

As a web designer and SEO who works with a lot of trades and service businesses, I hear the same worry all the time:

“Our competitors have huge budgets and flashy websites… how am I supposed to compete with that?”

TopChoice is my way of putting that fear under a microscope.

Instead of building another beautifully branded, design-heavy site, I decided to do the complete opposite:

• Very basic, almost “no-frills” design
• Clear, text-driven pages built for search and users, not aesthetics
• Aggressive focus on SEO fundamentals, architecture, content, internal links, schema, page speed

The core question I want to answer is simple:

If the SEO is strong and the content is genuinely useful, how much “design” do you actually need to rank for competitive keywords?

What Top Choice Actually Is

TopChoice is a local editorial-style directory website, built to help people find trusted trades and service providers in major cities and regions by providing them with a top 5 list as well as a featured listing.

Think of pages like:

• Plumbers in Auckland
• Electricians in Christchurch
• Builders in Dunedin

Each page is intentionally simple:

• A short intro explaining what the page is about
• A curated top 5 list of businesses with basic details
• Clear calls to action encouraging users to contact those businesses
• Strong on-page optimisation around the target keyword (for example, “[trade] in [city]”)

Visually, it’s closer to a clean spreadsheet than a slick marketing site. No hero videos, no parallax sections, no design flourishes just for the sake of it.

The Hypothesis: Design Is Overrated (Up to a Point)

I’m not anti-design. I make a living designing and building websites.

But I do believe that, for ranking and lead generation, most small business sites would get a better return from:

• Clear structure
• Strong SEO
• Good copy
• Fast loading

…than from piling on animations, gradients and visual gimmicks.

TopChoice is my way of testing how far you can push that idea and maybe a deciding factor in redesigning my own website.

The working hypothesis:

1. Google and other search engines care more about relevance, clarity and technical health than fancy layouts.
2. Users searching for “[trade] in [city]” mainly want speed and usefulness, not visual fireworks.
3. If SEO and content are done properly, a basic site can still compete with, and sometimes outrank, bigger, better-designed competitors.

How the Site Is Built: SEO First, Design Second

1. Super-simple, fast layout

The design goals were:

• Minimal styling and assets
• No heavy sliders, video backgrounds or animation libraries
• Clean typography and spacing, readable on any device
• Very few distractions or competing elements

The result is a site that loads fast and doesn’t confuse users. It looks “plain” by agency portfolio standards, but it’s very clean to crawl and very easy to use.

2. Tight information architecture

Each location and service gets its own focused page, for example:

• “Plumbers in Christchurch”
• “Electricians in Dunedin”
• “Builders in Auckland”

These pages:

• Target one main intent at a time
• Use consistent URL patterns and internal linking
• Are easy for search engines to understand and group

Instead of bloated mega-menus or endless dropdowns, Top Choice uses a straightforward structure that’s simple to expand as new locations and trades are added.

3. Content written for users and search

Every page includes:

• A short overview of the service in that city
• Why someone might want to compare providers, not just pick the first ad
• A list of top 5 businesses and a featured business with basic info and links
• Supporting content that naturally reinforces the main keyword and local intent

No bullshit, no copy written just for keyword density. The emphasis is on:

• Clear language
• Local context
• Helping visitors understand their options quickly

4. On-page SEO fundamentals

For each page, I’m being very deliberate with:

• Title tags that match real search queries
• Meta descriptions that encourage clicks without clickbait
• H1 and H2 structure that reflects search intent
• Internal links between related locations and trades
• Clean schema markup to help search engines understand the directory-style content

In other words: nothing exotic, just the stuff that works, done properly and consistently.

What I’m Measuring

Because this is an experiment, the goal is not just “rank somewhere”, it’s to observe how a basic site performs over time.

Key things I’m watching:

• Indexing behaviour
  • How quickly new pages get crawled and indexed compared to more complex sites.
• Impressions and average positions
  • Are the target pages starting to show up for competitive “[trade] [city]” searches?
  • Are they moving up steadily or bouncing around?
• Click-through rate
  • Does a clean, straightforward snippet get more clicks than noisy, over-optimised competitors?
• User behaviour on the page
  • Do people scroll, click through to businesses, or bounce straight back to search?

I’m not claiming victory or “number one for everything”, the point is to track, adjust, and see how much can be achieved with basics done well.

Early Observations (Without the Hype)

Even at an early stage, the experiment has already highlighted a few truths:

1. Google has no problem ranking a plain site if the intent match is strong.
   You don’t need a visually spectacular design to get on the map, you need a page that aligns tightly with what the searcher is looking for.
2. Fast, lean pages feel good to use.
   Especially on mobile, a simple layout that loads instantly beats a slow, “impressive” one. That alone can help lower bounce rates and send better engagement signals back to search engines.
3. Structure and consistency matter more than decoration.
   Clear URL patterns, consistent headings and predictable layouts make life easier for both users and bots.

There’s still a long way to go, and competitive niches don’t fall overnight, but the direction of travel reinforces the idea that SEO and content quality carry more weight than pure aesthetics.

The site went live on Wednesday 17th December, so my plan is to update this case study on a monthly basis to show how long it takes to rank.

What This Means for Small Businesses and Tradies

The TopChoice experiment isn’t about saying design doesn’t matter at all. Branding, trust, and visual polish absolutely have a role, especially once you’re getting good traffic.

But it does suggest:

• You don’t have to delay SEO and content work while you chase the “perfect” design.
• A clean, basic site with a solid SEO foundation can absolutely compete for tough keywords.
• For many local businesses, getting the structure, copy and optimisation right will move the needle far more than another round of visual tweaks.

If you’re sitting on an over-designed, under-optimised site that looks impressive but doesn’t rank or convert, this experiment is a nudge in the opposite direction:

Start with clarity, relevance and SEO fundamentals. Then make it pretty.

Update, February 2026

It’s been 2 months since the TopChoice experiment went live, and the data is starting to tell a very clear story. SEO is rarely a “light switch” moment; it takes time to build trust with search engines, but once that momentum kicks in, the results compound rapidly.

Here is exactly where the site stands as of February 20, 2026.

The Rankings Breakdown

The most exciting movement is in our keyword rankings. Over the tracked period, the site’s average position across all keywords has jumped significantly from 43.4 to 26.95. We currently have 31 keywords moving up the ranks, and an impressive 20 keywords sitting securely in the Top 3 positions.

Here are the current top-performing search terms driving the site’s growth:

• top plumbers dunedin: Position 1 (Up 14 spots)
• top plumbers christchurch: Position 2 (Unchanged)
• recommended plumbers dunedin: Position 2 (Up 10 spots)
• top builders dunedin: Position 3 (Unchanged)
• recommended plumbers christchurch: Position 4 (Up 23 spots)
• top electricians dunedin: Position 4 (Up 96 spots)
• top electricians christchurch: Position 6 (Up 2 spots)
• dunedin fencing: Position 7 (Up 14 spots)

Real-World Search Performance

High rankings are great, but traffic is the ultimate goal. The search performance data shows that we are successfully capturing high-intent local traffic:

• The search term “recommended plumbers christchurch” pulled in 166 impressions and 3 clicks, resulting in a 1.81% Click-Through Rate (CTR).
• “best electricians dunedin” generated 67 impressions and 3 clicks, sitting at a strong 4.48% CTR.
• “arborist dunedin” is showing highly targeted search intent, generating 33 impressions and 3 clicks for an impressive 9.09% CTR.
• Most notably, we are starting to see branded searches for “topchoice”, capturing a 40% CTR when it appears.

Technical SEO Health

A site won’t dominate the search results if the technical foundation is broken. I’ve spent time dialing in the backend, and the audits reflect that effort:

• The site currently holds a near-perfect On-Page SEO score of 99.
• Desktop performance is excellent, with a blazing load time of just 0.92 seconds and an interactivity time of 55.00 ms.
• However, keeping this experiment completely transparent, there is still work to do: our mobile load time is currently sitting at 3.48 seconds, which has been flagged as needing improvement.

The Verdict So Far

The directory is catching the eye of Google’s algorithms, proving the core hypothesis: combining niche authority with hyper-local targeting is a winning formula.

The next phase will focus heavily on optimising that mobile load speed to capture users searching on their phones, while continuing to scale these directories across other major New Zealand regions & trades.