Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
I used to watch managers obsess over whether every heading on their site should start with a verb. Two full weeks. While competitors were launching new features and capturing market share, this team was stuck in grammatical paralysis.
This wasn't an isolated incident. Throughout my freelance career building landing pages for SaaS and ecommerce businesses, I've seen this pattern repeatedly: teams focusing on the wrong design priorities while their conversion rates stagnate and their Google rankings suffer.
Here's what most businesses get wrong about the design-SEO relationship: they treat their website like a digital brochure when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory. Your website isn't just a presence—it's a marketing asset that needs constant experimentation and iteration.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why beautiful design can actually hurt your SEO (and when it helps)
The exact design mistakes that tank Google rankings
My framework for balancing aesthetics with search performance
Real examples of redesigns that improved rankings 3x
How to test design changes without destroying your traffic
Most teams get stuck in endless debates about copy tweaks while ignoring the fundamental infrastructure that enables rapid testing. Let me show you what actually works.
Industry Reality
What the SEO industry tells you about design
The SEO industry has been spreading the same advice for years: "Design doesn't directly affect rankings, but user experience signals do." They'll tell you about Core Web Vitals, mobile responsiveness, and page speed—all technical factors that matter.
Here's the conventional wisdom everyone preaches:
Mobile-first design improves rankings through better user signals
Fast loading speeds reduce bounce rates and increase dwell time
Clean navigation helps Google crawl and understand your site structure
Accessible design creates better user experiences that Google rewards
Visual hierarchy guides users to important content and reduces pogo-sticking
This advice isn't wrong—it's just incomplete. The problem is that most businesses interpret this as "make it pretty and mobile-friendly," then wonder why their organic traffic isn't growing.
What the industry doesn't tell you is that the biggest design problem for SEO isn't technical—it's strategic. Most websites are designed as digital brochures when they should be designed as content distribution machines.
The conventional approach focuses on perfecting a homepage and a few key pages, assuming visitors will enter through your front door and navigate through your carefully crafted user journey. This worked when websites were mainly discovery tools. But in today's search landscape, every page is a potential entry point.
Here's where conventional wisdom falls short: it treats design and SEO as separate disciplines when they should be integrated from day one. Most teams perfect their design first, then try to retrofit SEO—which rarely works.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
After 7 years building websites as a freelancer, I realized I was the architect of what I now call "digital ghost towns." I poured my energy into crafting pixel-perfect websites—brand-aligned, modern, conversion-optimized. Every client left our initial meetings thrilled about their upcoming digital transformation.
I treated each website like a premium sales representative for the company. The messaging was sharp. The user journey was seamless. The design made competitors look outdated. But here's what I discovered after tracking results across dozens of projects: I was essentially training world-class sales reps to do door-to-door sales in an empty neighborhood.
The pattern was brutal. Beautiful websites? Check. Professional brand presence? Check. Actual visitors coming to see it? Crickets.
One particular project drove this home. A B2B SaaS client came to me wanting a complete rebrand and website redesign. Their existing site looked outdated, and they were convinced this was why leads weren't converting. We spent three months building something gorgeous—custom animations, perfect typography, seamless mobile experience.
The new site launched to crickets. Traffic remained flat. Leads didn't improve. The client was frustrated, and honestly, so was I. That's when I realized the fundamental flaw in my approach: I was optimizing for the wrong metrics.
These websites had become expensive digital brochures—impressive when someone stumbled upon them, but nobody was stumbling upon them. Without traffic, even the world's best-converting website converts zero visitors. I was solving the wrong problem entirely.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach and understand the real relationship between design and SEO performance.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
The breakthrough came when I shifted from a design-first to an SEO-first approach. This wasn't about making ugly websites—it was about building beautiful websites that people could actually find.
The Design-First vs SEO-First Mindset
Design-first thinking assumes visitors enter through your homepage and navigate through your intended user journey. You start with features and product pages, optimize for the perfect pitch, and build navigation around company structure.
SEO-first thinking recognizes that every page is a potential front door. You start with keyword research, build content around what people actually search for, create multiple entry points through targeted pages, and structure the site around search intent rather than company org charts.
My 3-Phase Integration Framework
Phase 1: Foundation Architecture
Instead of starting with wireframes, I now start with keyword research and content mapping. For one e-commerce client, this meant restructuring their entire site hierarchy around search intent rather than product categories. We identified 200+ long-tail keywords their competitors weren't targeting and built dedicated landing pages for each search intent.
Phase 2: Content-Driven Design
Rather than designing beautiful pages and hoping for traffic, I design around proven search demand. Each page serves a specific search query with dedicated, valuable content. The design supports the content strategy, not the other way around.
Phase 3: Performance Integration
Every design decision gets evaluated through both conversion and SEO lenses. Can Google crawl it efficiently? Do users find what they're searching for? Does the page architecture support internal linking? Is the loading speed optimized?
The key insight: SEO-friendly design isn't about compromising aesthetics—it's about aligning beautiful design with how people actually discover and consume content online.
For my SaaS clients, this meant building resource centers, integration pages, and use-case libraries that looked gorgeous but also captured search traffic. For e-commerce clients, it meant creating category pages that functioned as standalone landing pages rather than just navigation tools.
Strategy Shift
Moving from design-first to SEO-first thinking completely transformed my client results and project approach.
Content Architecture
Building site structure around search intent rather than company structure improved discoverability dramatically.
Performance Integration
Every design decision now gets evaluated through both user experience and search optimization lenses.
Testing Infrastructure
Creating systems that allow rapid experimentation became more important than perfecting individual pages.
The results of this integrated approach were dramatic. One e-commerce client saw their organic traffic increase from under 500 monthly visitors to over 5,000 within three months. A B2B SaaS client improved their lead generation by 3x while maintaining the same conversion rates.
But the most telling metric was time-to-impact. Design-first projects would take 3-6 months to show any traffic improvement (if they showed improvement at all). The SEO-first approach started generating measurable traffic increases within 4-6 weeks.
Perhaps more importantly, these weren't just traffic vanity metrics. The organic visitors were higher-quality leads because they were actively searching for solutions to problems the business could solve. The search-driven content naturally attracted the right audience.
One SaaS client summed it up perfectly: "We finally have a website that works as hard as our sales team." Instead of a digital brochure that prospects might visit after they were already interested, they had a content machine that actively attracted and qualified leads.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After dozens of projects using this approach, here are the key lessons learned:
Design and SEO aren't opposing forces—they're complementary when approached correctly. The best-performing sites are both beautiful and discoverable. The trick is starting with search strategy and building gorgeous experiences around proven demand.
Most "design problems" are actually strategy problems. When clients complained about low conversions, the real issue was usually low-quality traffic, not poor design. Fix the traffic quality first, then optimize conversion.
Every page should justify its existence. If a page doesn't serve a specific search intent or business goal, it's probably just adding bloat. Successful sites have lean, purposeful page structures.
User experience and search optimization want the same things: fast-loading pages, clear navigation, valuable content, and mobile-friendly design. When these seem to conflict, it's usually a sign that you're optimizing for the wrong metrics.
Testing infrastructure matters more than perfect pages. The ability to rapidly test and iterate beats having "perfect" pages that can't be easily modified. Build systems, not just websites.
Content strategy is design strategy. The most successful redesigns weren't about changing colors or layouts—they were about restructuring content to match how people actually search and consume information.
Beautiful sites can rank well, but ranking sites aren't automatically beautiful. Start with search optimization as your foundation, then layer on great design. Trying to retrofit SEO onto a design-first site rarely works.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups:
Build resource centers targeting "how to" and "best practices" keywords
Create integration pages for every tool in your space
Design use-case pages around specific search intents
Prioritize page speed and mobile experience from day one
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores:
Structure category pages as standalone landing experiences
Create buying guides and comparison content
Optimize product pages for long-tail search queries
Build educational content around product usage