Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
For the first few years of my freelance career, 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 The design made competitors look outdated.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.
These websites had become expensive digital brochures—impressive when someone stumbled upon them, but nobody was stumbling upon them. The harsh reality: without traffic, even the world's best-converting website converts zero.
Here's what you'll learn from my painful but profitable transition:
Why the "design-first" approach creates beautiful failures
The fundamental mindset shift that transformed my client results
A step-by-step framework for building websites that people actually find
Real metrics from clients who made this transition
How to structure your site architecture around search intent, not company org charts
Industry Reality
What the design industry preaches
Walk into any web design agency or browse through Awwwards, and you'll hear the same gospel: "Beautiful design drives conversions." The industry has built its entire philosophy around five core beliefs:
Homepage-centric thinking: Everything starts with the homepage because that's where users "enter" your site
Brand-first approach: Visual identity and messaging hierarchy trump everything else
Conversion optimization focus: Perfect the user journey from homepage to checkout
Premium aesthetics: Award-winning design will naturally attract customers
Mobile-responsive perfection: If it looks good on all devices, it will perform well
This conventional wisdom exists because it feels logical. Beautiful stores attract more customers, right? Premium brands invest heavily in aesthetics. Apple's design philosophy changed entire industries.
The problem? This approach treats websites like physical storefronts when they're actually more like billboards in the middle of nowhere.
Your beautiful homepage is useless if nobody can find it. Your perfectly optimized checkout flow means nothing if there's no traffic to convert. The design industry has been optimizing the wrong variable—appearance over discoverability.
Most agencies avoid SEO because it's "too technical" or "takes too long." They'd rather deliver a stunning website in 6 weeks than a traffic-generating machine in 6 months. The result? Clients with gorgeous websites that generate zero leads.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
My wake-up call came after analyzing my client portfolio across three years of projects. I had built dozens of beautiful websites—each one would make you stop scrolling if you found it. But that was the problem: nobody was finding them.
I remember one particular e-commerce client who sold handmade jewelry. Their site was gorgeous—photographer-quality product shots, seamless checkout experience, compelling brand story. After launch, they were getting maybe 50 visitors per month. Fifty. Their competitors with uglier websites were getting thousands.
That's when I started tracking what I called the "Ghost Town Syndrome" across my projects:
Average monthly organic traffic: 127 visitors
Homepage bounce rate: 78% (people left immediately)
Google search visibility: Practically zero
Client satisfaction after 6 months: Mixed at best
The most painful realization? I was building websites like physical stores when I should have been building them like search engines.
Think about your own behavior online. When's the last time you typed a company's URL directly into your browser? You Google what you need, click on results, and judge credibility in seconds. Yet I was designing for a world where people somehow magically knew my clients existed.
My clients were paying premium prices for premium design, but getting amateur-level traffic. Beautiful sales reps standing in empty malls, waiting for customers who would never walk by.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
The shift from design-first to SEO-first changed everything about how I approach website architecture. Here's the exact framework I developed after rebuilding my approach from scratch:
Step 1: Keyword-First Architecture
Instead of starting with "About Us" and "Services" pages, I now start with keyword research. I identify what my client's ideal customers are actually searching for, then build the site structure around those search terms.
For a B2B SaaS client, instead of generic pages like "Features" and "Pricing," we created pages like "Project Management Software for Remote Teams" and "Slack Alternative for Small Businesses." Each page targets specific search intent.
Step 2: Content-Driven Design
The design now serves the content, not the other way around. Every page is built to answer specific questions that prospects are asking Google. The visual hierarchy guides users through information, not just to a "Contact Us" button.
Step 3: Multiple Entry Points Strategy
I stopped thinking of the homepage as the "front door." In an SEO-first website, every page is a potential entry point. Someone might discover my client through a blog post about "inventory management challenges" and never see the homepage.
Step 4: Search Intent Mapping
For each piece of content, I map it to search intent:
Informational: Blog posts and guides
Commercial: Comparison and alternative pages
Transactional: Product and pricing pages
Navigational: Brand and company pages
The Results Framework:
One e-commerce client went from 300 monthly visitors to over 5,000 in just 3 months using this approach. But the real transformation wasn't just traffic—it was qualified traffic. Instead of random visitors bouncing off a pretty homepage, we were attracting people actively searching for solutions my client provided.
The secret sauce? Building websites that Google loves, not just humans. When you align your site architecture with how people actually search and discover content, both traffic and conversions improve dramatically.
Search Intent
Map every page to specific search queries and user intent
Content Architecture
Structure your site around what people search for, not your org chart
Entry Points
Every page should work as a potential first impression
Traffic Quality
Focus on attracting visitors who are actually looking for your solution
The transformation was dramatic across multiple clients. Here's what happened when I implemented the SEO-first approach:
E-commerce Client (Handmade Jewelry):
Month 1: 50 → 400 monthly visitors
Month 3: 400 → 1,200 monthly visitors
Month 6: 1,200 → 2,800 monthly visitors
Revenue increased 5x in the first quarter
B2B SaaS Client (Project Management):
Pre-redesign: 127 monthly organic visitors
Post-redesign: 3,400 monthly organic visitors
Trial signups increased from 2-3 per month to 45-60 per month
But the most important metric? Client satisfaction. Instead of beautiful websites that disappointed, I was delivering traffic-generating machines that actually drove business results.
The timeline for seeing results was typically 2-4 months for initial traction, with significant growth after 6 months. The key was patience—SEO-first design takes longer to show results than design-first approaches, but the results compound over time.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the seven critical lessons from transforming dozens of websites from ghost towns to traffic magnets:
Beauty without discoverability is worthless. The most gorgeous website means nothing if your ideal customers can't find it.
Start with keywords, not wireframes. Your site architecture should reflect how people search, not how your company is organized.
Every page is a landing page. Stop thinking homepage-first. Think search-intent-first.
Content drives design, not vice versa. Design should serve the user's information needs, not your aesthetic preferences.
SEO takes time, but compounds. Design-first approaches show immediate visual results but plateau quickly. SEO-first approaches start slow but accelerate.
Quality traffic beats quantity traffic. 100 visitors searching for your solution are worth more than 1,000 random visitors.
Measure what matters. Track organic traffic, search rankings, and qualified leads—not just bounce rate and time on site.
The biggest mistake I made early on was treating SEO as an afterthought. Now, SEO considerations influence every design decision from day one.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies implementing this approach:
Build feature pages around specific use cases and search terms
Create comparison pages for competitor alternatives
Develop integration guides as SEO content
Structure pricing pages for commercial search intent
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores applying this framework:
Organize categories around search terms, not product types
Create buying guides for high-commercial-intent keywords
Build location pages for local SEO opportunities
Design product pages for long-tail search visibility