Freelance Designer or Consultant? What Google Thinks About Your Job Title
I changed my job title. Then I panicked about Google.
For years my website said freelance UX/UI designer. These days it says product design consultant. It's more accurate. It reflects how I actually work with clients now: retainers, product strategy, long relationships. But there's a catch. Nobody types "product design consultant" into Google. They type "freelance UX designer Perth."
So did I just make myself invisible? I dug into the data. Here's what I found, and how I'd think about it if you're facing the same choice.
The core tension
"Freelance UX/UI designer" is the vocabulary of the search market. "Product design consultant" is the vocabulary of my positioning.
These do different jobs. The title on your homepage sells to the person once they arrive. Search visibility depends on Google connecting you to the words people actually type. Get this wrong in either direction and you lose. Optimise purely for search and you attract the wrong clients. Optimise purely for positioning and nobody finds you.
The good news: you don't have to pick one identity sitewide. You handle it in layers.
Google matches meaning, not strings
The first thing that softened my panic. Google stopped doing exact keyword matching years ago. It treats "freelance UX designer," "UX consultant," and "product designer" as closely related entities in the same semantic neighbourhood.
My site still ranks for "ux design perth" and "ui design perth" even though the homepage leads with consultant. The words UX and UI are still all over the site: the service descriptions, the structured data, the meta description. Changing the headline didn't erase the discipline.
Look at who actually searches "freelance"
This was the real unlock. I checked which queries put me on page one. None of them contain the word freelance. They're all discipline plus city. "ux design perth." "ui design perth." Local intent is doing the heavy lifting, not the employment model.
Then think about who types "freelance UX designer" in the first place. A big chunk of that traffic is recruiters filling contract roles, students researching careers, and price-shoppers comparing hourly rates. The clients I actually want, founders who need a design partner rather than a pixel vendor, arrive through referrals, LinkedIn, and posts like this one.
Chasing "freelance" traffic means optimising for the searchers least likely to become good clients. The searcher-quality argument cuts in favour of holding the consultant line.
Let your blog speak the searcher's language
Here's the layered approach in practice. The homepage keeps the consultant positioning. The blog and FAQ carry the freelance vocabulary.
I've already written about hiring a freelance designer vs an agency. My FAQ literally answers whether I'm a freelancer or a consultant. Those pages can rank for freelance-intent searches and then reframe the visitor on arrival. The person searches one thing, lands, and learns why the distinction matters. Same trick works for any repositioning: keep the old vocabulary alive on the pages built to catch it, not the page built to convert.
It's the same principle as brand strategy before logo design. Decide what each page is for before you decide what it says.
Decide with data, not intuition
The temptation is to build a dedicated "Freelance UX/UI Designer in Perth" landing page right now, just in case. I'm not doing it.
Search Console will settle the question. In a month or two I'll filter my queries for anything containing "freelance" and look at impressions. If it's a rounding error, the question is closed and I stop worrying. If there's real volume with poor click-through, that's the trigger to build the page. One landing page speaking the old vocabulary doesn't dilute the homepage. But building it speculatively is guessing, and good design decisions come from evidence, not vibes.
The short version
Don't chase your old job title on your homepage. The repositioning is worth more than that traffic. Keep the old vocabulary alive in your blog and FAQ, where it can catch searches without confusing your pitch. Then let the data tell you whether anything more is needed.
My honest bet: it won't be. The clients worth having were never going to type "freelance" anyway.
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