SEO (search engine optimization) and effective website design go hand in hand. Good website design is about creating a website that appeals to your target audience and gets them to take some kind of action. However, if the site does not follow current SEO best practices, its ranking will suffer, resulting in a lower number of visitors actually engaging with the site.
Conversely, if the focus is on SEO and how to please the search engine spiders, then the site may rank highly and get a lot of search engine traffic, but if the design is unsatisfactory, that's not the case. In order to succeed in today's digital environment, emphasis must be placed on website design and search engine optimization.