Companion planting
In agriculture, companion planting is the practice of growing certain crops together because they help each other thrive. Basil repels pests from tomatoes. Corn provides a trellis for beans. Marigolds protect the whole garden.
Accessibility and SEO are companion plants. They share the same soil: semantic HTML, clear structure, descriptive content, and when you invest in one, the other benefits automatically.
The shared root system
Consider what both disciplines ask of you:
- Semantic HTML. Screen readers need proper heading hierarchies and landmark elements to navigate. Search engines use those same structures to understand your content's organization and relevance.
- Descriptive alt text. Alt text makes images accessible to visually impaired users. It also gives search engines context about visual content they can't otherwise interpret.
- Clear link text. "Click here" helps no one. Not the screen reader user trying to understand where a link goes, and not the search engine trying to understand the relationship between pages.
- Logical heading structure. A proper H1 → H2 → H3 hierarchy creates a navigable outline for assistive technology and a clear content signal for crawlers.
- Fast, well-structured pages. Performance improvements that help users with slow connections or older devices also improve Core Web Vitals, a direct ranking factor.
Where the misconception grows
The myth that accessibility and SEO compete for attention usually comes from teams with limited budgets who see them as separate workstreams. Fix the accessibility backlog or optimize for search. Hire an a11y specialist or an SEO consultant.
This is like saying you have to choose between watering the left side of the garden or the right. The water table is connected. The roots intertwine. The soil is the same.
A practical example
Say you're fixing a navigation menu. For accessibility, you add aria-current="page" to the active link, ensure the menu is keyboard navigable, and use a proper <nav> landmark with an aria-label.
Every one of those changes also helps search engines. The <nav> element tells crawlers this is navigation content. The descriptive link text gives context to the pages being linked. The clean, semantic structure makes your site easier to crawl and index.
You didn't do extra work for SEO. You got it for free by building accessibly.
One scan, both harvests
This is precisely why eiSEO scans for both accessibility and SEO issues in the same pass. They're not separate problems. They're two views of the same field. When you fix a missing heading hierarchy, you're improving both your WCAG compliance and your search ranking signal. When you add proper link text, you're helping both screen reader users and Googlebot.
Plant them together. Tend them together. Harvest them together.