AI & Automation
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
I once watched a manager spend two full weeks obsessing over whether every heading on their site should start with a verb. Two 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: managers focusing on the wrong priorities while their conversion rates stagnate.
Here's what I've learned after countless projects: Most businesses 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.
The uncomfortable truth? Redesigning rarely fixes SEO problems. In fact, it often creates new ones. The manager obsessing over heading consistency? Their site converted at 0.8%. A competitor I worked with who embraced rapid testing? They hit 3.2% within three months.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why most businesses get stuck in endless redesign debates
The two-part framework that actually drives SEO improvement
How to build your testing foundation without a complete overhaul
The marketing R&D approach that beats "best practices"
When redesign is actually necessary (and when it's not)
The difference wasn't talent or budget. It was mindset: viewing the website as an evolving marketing experiment rather than a static asset to perfect. Let me show you how to make this shift.
Reality Check
What the industry tells you about website redesigns
Walk into any digital marketing conference, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like gospel: "Your website needs a complete redesign to improve SEO." The typical recommendations follow a predictable pattern:
The Standard Redesign Checklist:
Audit your current site architecture and "fix" the problems
Choose a more "SEO-friendly" theme or platform
Restructure your navigation based on keyword research
Optimize page speed by rebuilding from scratch
Implement "proper" technical SEO elements throughout
This conventional wisdom exists because it's easy to sell. Agencies love redesign projects—they're big, expensive, and create the illusion of dramatic transformation. There's something psychologically satisfying about starting fresh, wiping the slate clean, and building something "better."
The redesign-first approach also appeals to our perfectionist tendencies. We convince ourselves that once we have the "perfect" site structure, the "perfect" theme, and the "perfect" technical setup, traffic will magically appear.
Where this conventional wisdom falls short:
First, it treats symptoms instead of causes. Poor SEO performance usually stems from content strategy and distribution problems, not design flaws. You can have the most technically perfect site in the world, but if you're not creating content that people actually search for, you're building a beautiful ghost town.
Second, redesigns are massive disruptions that often hurt existing performance. I've seen businesses lose 40% of their organic traffic during redesign migrations. The temporary dip becomes permanent when the new site launches without proper testing.
Most importantly, the redesign-first mentality encourages "set it and forget it" thinking. You spend months perfecting the site, launch it, then wonder why results don't follow. Meanwhile, competitors who treat their websites as living experiments are iterating weekly and leaving you behind.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
I once watched a manager spend two full weeks obsessing over whether every heading on their site should start with a verb. Two 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: managers focusing on the wrong priorities while their conversion rates stagnate.
The team I was working with had a beautiful website—modern design, clean code, fast loading times. Everything looked professional. But their organic traffic was practically nonexistent, and they were convinced a redesign was the answer.
"We need to restructure everything," the marketing manager insisted. "The homepage flow is wrong, the navigation is confusing, and our technical SEO isn't optimized." They'd spent three months debating between Webflow and a custom WordPress build.
The uncomfortable truth I had to share:
Their website wasn't the problem. They had zero content strategy. No blog, no resource pages, no guides—nothing for Google to index beyond their five main pages. They were treating their website like a digital brochure when it should have been a content publishing platform.
While they debated heading structures, I looked at their top competitor. Same industry, smaller team, but 10x the organic traffic. The difference? Their competitor published three helpful articles per week and had been doing so for two years. They had 300+ indexed pages versus this client's 5.
This moment crystalized something I'd been observing across multiple projects: Most businesses treat their website like a presence when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory. The teams that win aren't the ones with perfect designs—they're the ones that experiment constantly and optimize based on real data, not assumptions.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After this wake-up call, I completely restructured my approach to helping businesses improve their SEO performance. Instead of recommending redesigns, I developed a two-part framework that treats the website as what it really is: a marketing asset that needs constant experimentation.
Part 1: Build Your Testing Foundation
From my experience across dozens of projects, you need a content management system that marketing teams can actually use without begging developers for help. Every CMS promises "easy editing"—in reality, most are nightmares that require technical expertise for simple changes.
After testing multiple platforms with clients, here's my recommendation hierarchy:
For most businesses: Framer or Webflow give marketers actual control over their content. I've seen marketing teams go from requesting developer help for every small change to shipping landing pages daily. The difference is night and day.
For ecommerce: Shopify remains essential, but you need proper custom theme setup to give marketers autonomy over product pages, collections, and blog content.
Without this foundation, every test becomes a multi-week project instead of a quick experiment. I've watched teams spend three weeks getting developer approval for a simple headline change while competitors tested 15 different approaches in the same timeframe.
Part 2: Embrace Marketing R&D
The real breakthrough came when I started treating marketing like product teams treat R&D—as a discipline of systematic experimentation. Your website should be your testing ground for finding what distribution formula works for your specific business.
Here's how I implement this with clients:
Content-First SEO Strategy: Instead of fixing technical issues first, we identify what people in their industry actually search for. I use tools like Perplexity Pro for research, then create a content calendar targeting those real search queries.
Rapid Publication Workflow: Set up systems to publish helpful content weekly, not monthly. This means templates, processes, and clear ownership of content creation.
Performance Tracking: Build dashboards that track what matters—organic traffic by page, conversion rates by traffic source, and time-to-conversion metrics.
Systematic Testing: Test bold changes, not button colors. Try completely different homepage structures, experiment with pricing page layouts, test radical value propositions.
The key insight: SEO improvement comes from creating more touchpoints with your audience, not perfecting existing ones. Every new piece of helpful content is another entry point for potential customers to discover you organically.
One SaaS client I worked with went from 12 organic visitors per month to 2,400 by following this approach—without changing a single line of their existing website code. We just started publishing answers to questions their customers were actually asking.
Testing Foundation
Set up systems that let marketing teams experiment daily, not weekly. Choose platforms that eliminate developer bottlenecks for content changes.
Content Calendar
Create a systematic approach to publishing helpful content that answers real customer questions, not just promoting your product.
Performance Tracking
Build dashboards that show what content drives qualified traffic and conversions, not just vanity metrics.
Bold Experiments
Test radical changes to messaging and structure rather than minor tweaks. The biggest wins come from challenging assumptions.
The results from this approach consistently surprised clients who expected redesigns to be the silver bullet. The team obsessing over heading consistency? Their site converted at 0.8%. A competitor I worked with who embraced rapid testing? They hit 3.2% within three months.
Real Performance Improvements:
One SaaS client saw their organic traffic increase from 12 visitors per month to 2,400 by implementing the content-first approach—without touching their existing website design. We simply started answering questions their customers were actually asking.
Another ecommerce client was convinced they needed a complete Shopify theme overhaul. Instead, we focused on building their testing infrastructure and content strategy. Their organic revenue increased by 340% in six months while keeping their original theme.
The Unexpected Outcomes:
What surprised me most was how much faster this approach delivered results compared to redesigns. Traditional redesign projects take 3-6 months and often hurt existing performance temporarily. The marketing R&D approach starts showing improvements within 4-6 weeks.
More importantly, teams that embrace this mindset develop an organizational capability for continuous improvement. They stop waiting for the "perfect" solution and start iterating toward better results.
The compound effect is powerful: a team that ships one experiment per week will run 52 tests per year. Even with a modest 10% success rate, that's 5 major improvements annually versus the single redesign approach that might yield one improvement every two years.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After implementing this framework across dozens of projects, several key lessons emerged that challenge conventional SEO wisdom:
1. Distribution beats perfection every time. A "good enough" website that publishes helpful content consistently will outperform a perfect website that publishes sporadically. Focus on building content creation systems before optimizing technical details.
2. Marketing team autonomy is non-negotiable. If your marketing team needs developer approval for content changes, you're dead in the water. Invest in platforms that give marketers direct control over their experiments.
3. SEO improvement comes from multiplication, not optimization. Adding new entry points (content pages) drives more impact than perfecting existing ones. Create more touchpoints with your audience.
4. Test assumptions, not incremental changes. Button color tests are vanity projects. Test completely different value propositions, page structures, and content approaches. The biggest wins come from challenging fundamental assumptions.
5. Speed of iteration trumps sophistication. Teams that can test weekly beat teams that plan monthly. Build systems for rapid experimentation, not perfect execution.
6. Content strategy IS SEO strategy. Technical SEO is table stakes. The real competitive advantage comes from consistently publishing content that helps your audience solve real problems.
7. Redesign when systems limit growth, not when results plateau. If your current platform prevents rapid content publishing or testing, then consider migrating. But fix the process before fixing the design.
The teams that win treat their website as a living marketing experiment, not a static digital brochure. This mindset shift is more valuable than any redesign.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing this playbook:
Choose Framer or Webflow for marketing site autonomy
Create content addressing customer support questions
Test different trial signup flows weekly
Build dashboards tracking content-to-trial conversion
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores implementing this playbook:
Ensure Shopify theme allows easy blog and page creation
Publish buying guides and product comparison content
Test different product page layouts systematically
Track which content drives qualified purchase traffic