Accessibility work and SEO work are mostly the same work

Accessibility gets treated as a compliance chore and SEO gets treated as a marketing line item, so they usually end up as two separate conversations, sometimes with two separate invoices. In practice, a large share of the work overlaps completely, because both disciplines are ultimately asking a machine, whether that’s a screen reader or a search crawler, to understand a page it cannot see.

The overlapping fundamentals

A properly structured heading hierarchy helps a screen reader user navigate a page in seconds instead of scrolling through everything. That same hierarchy tells a search engine what the page is actually about, in order of importance. Descriptive alt text lets a blind visitor understand an image; it also gives a search engine context it can’t extract from pixels alone. Meaningful link text (“read the full case study” rather than “click here”) helps a screen reader user scanning a list of links, and it helps search engines understand what’s on the other end of that link.

Where businesses usually fall short on both at once

• Images with no alt text, or alt text that’s just the filename.
• Buttons and links with no discernible label beyond a generic icon.
• Colour used as the only way to distinguish an important element, invisible to both colour-blind visitors and to any tool parsing the page structurally.
• Forms with no associated labels, which fail a screen reader and complicate how a browser or crawler interprets the field.

Why fixing it properly pays twice

None of this requires treating accessibility and SEO as competing priorities. Structure a page properly once - real headings, real labels, real alt text, sufficient contrast - and both problems get smaller together. It’s rare in this line of work to find an improvement that pays out twice for the same effort, but this is one of them.