How Website Accessibility Affects Your SEO

About This Episode

Website accessibility is a crawl problem before it is a compliance problem. A crawler is a user missing a sense, and every chart you never described in text is invisible to both.

In this episode of SEO On-Air, host Koa Kauwe sits down with Lindsey Flanagan (We Are Genuine) and John Coleman (Dentsu) to discuss what your SEO data is actually telling you, and what it quietly leaves out.

The panel explores accessibility as a visibility issue rather than a checkbox. Lindsey frames the crawler as an agent lacking a sense, which makes an undescribed infographic invisible to a screen reader and a bot alike. John adds the risk side, noting his semi state clients in Ireland and the UK now treat it as continuous testing rather than a one time audit, because the exposure moved from a box check to a litigation and PR problem.

They also discuss why 50 million impressions can be worth nothing, why a local client chasing a national brand on volume wastes budget, whether the map pack is losing ground to AI, the automated audit whose red flags were all unfixable, the AI built deck that missed a site migration entirely, the real cost of tracking prompts across multiple markets, and the most overrated and underrated metrics in any report.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

– Why a crawler behaves like a user missing a sense

– Why infographics and charts are invisible without text

– Why accessibility became a litigation and PR risk

– Why 50 million impressions can be worth nothing

– Why chasing a national brand on volume wastes budget

– Whether the local map pack is losing ground to AI

– What automated audit red flags actually mean

– The real cost of tracking prompts across markets

– Why total inbound links is the most overrated metric

– Why share of voice beats tracking individual keywords

Whether you’re an agency owner, SEO professional, analyst, or a site owner with compliance exposure, this episode provides actionable insights into treating accessibility as crawl visibility, reading reports critically, and knowing which metrics hold up under scrutiny.

Because the metric your agency leads with won’t be the one that proves the work.

It will be the one that was easiest to make look good.

⏱️ Chapters

00:00 Introduction to SEO On-Air & Meet the Guests

05:39 What Is the Point of 50 Million Impressions?

06:22 Why Chasing a National Brand on Volume Backfires

08:39 Is the Local Map Pack Losing Ground to AI?

17:36 Why Automated Audit Red Flags Are Often Unfixable

21:26 The AI Built Deck That Missed a Site Migration

26:17 The True Cost of Tracking Prompts Across Markets

30:28 Cost, Time & Quality: The Agency Triangle

37:54 How Website Accessibility Affects Your SEO

40:54 The Most Overrated & Underrated SEO Metrics