AI & Automation
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Two weeks. That's how long I watched a manager debate whether every heading on their website should start with a verb. Two full weeks while competitors were launching new features and capturing market share.
This wasn't an isolated incident. Throughout my 7-year journey building websites for SaaS and ecommerce companies, I've seen this pattern repeatedly: teams obsessing over design perfection while their conversion rates flatlined and organic traffic remained non-existent.
Here's the uncomfortable truth I learned the hard way: most businesses treat their website like a digital brochure when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory. They're building what I call "beautiful ghost towns" - pixel-perfect websites that nobody ever finds.
After migrating dozens of company websites and tracking results across multiple platforms, I discovered that the relationship between web design and SEO isn't what most people think. It's not about choosing between beauty and function - it's about understanding that your website is a marketing asset that needs constant experimentation, not a static showcase.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why design-first approaches kill organic traffic (and what to do instead)
My 2-part framework for building websites that actually convert
The testing infrastructure that separates winners from losers
How to escape the endless design debate trap
Real examples from SaaS and ecommerce clients that transformed their results
Industry Reality
What every business owner has been told about web design and SEO
Walk into any marketing meeting and you'll hear the same tired advice about web design and SEO working together. The conventional wisdom sounds logical enough:
Mobile-first design - "Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites"
Page speed optimization - "Fast sites rank higher"
Clean URL structure - "SEO-friendly URLs improve rankings"
Proper heading hierarchy - "H1, H2, H3 tags help search engines understand content"
Internal linking strategy - "Link to related pages to boost authority"
This advice exists because it's technically correct. These factors do influence search rankings. The problem? Everyone focuses on the technical checklist while ignoring the fundamental issue.
Most agencies sell this as a one-time fix: "We'll build you an SEO-optimized website and you're done." They deliver a beautiful site that checks all the technical boxes, then wonder why organic traffic never materializes.
Here's where this conventional approach falls short: It treats SEO as a design feature instead of an ongoing marketing strategy. You can have the most technically perfect website in the world, but if nobody can find it or if visitors bounce immediately, all that optimization is worthless.
The real issue isn't whether your H1 tags are properly formatted. It's that most businesses are building websites like they're creating a company brochure instead of building a system for continuous testing and optimization.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
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.
The pattern became painfully clear when I started analyzing client data six months post-launch:
Beautiful websites? Check.
Professional brand presence? Check.
Actual visitors coming to see it? Crickets.
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.
One particular project became my wake-up call. A B2B SaaS client had invested heavily in a complete rebrand and website redesign. The site was gorgeous, the user experience was flawless, and the conversion elements were perfectly placed. Six months later, their organic traffic was still under 200 visitors per month.
That's when I realized I was approaching the entire relationship between design and SEO backwards. I was building beautiful websites and hoping SEO would somehow happen. Instead, I needed to build websites where SEO success was the foundation, not an afterthought.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach. I developed what I call the "SEO-First Design Framework" - a two-part system that treats websites as marketing laboratories instead of digital brochures.
Part 1: Build Your Testing Foundation
The first critical shift was moving away from platforms that required developer intervention for every change. From my experience, you need a CMS that marketing teams can actually use without begging developers for help. Every CMS promises "easy editing" - in reality, most are nightmares for non-technical users.
After testing dozens of platforms with clients, here's my verdict based on actual usage:
For most businesses: Framer or Webflow give marketers actual control over content and layout changes
For ecommerce: Shopify remains essential, but requires proper custom theme setup to give marketers autonomy
Without this foundation, every test becomes a multi-week project instead of a quick experiment. I've seen companies abandon optimization entirely because making simple changes required developer sprints.
Part 2: Embrace Marketing R&D
The second part was 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 the framework I developed:
Start with keyword research - always. Before any design decisions, understand what your customers are actually searching for.
Build content around search intent, not company structure. Create multiple entry points through targeted pages.
Structure the site around user journeys, not internal org charts. Every page should answer: "What would someone search to find this?"
Test bold changes, not button colors. Experiment with fundamentally different value propositions and page structures.
Track everything methodically. Build a culture where marketing owns website decisions based on data.
The biggest mindset shift? Stop thinking of your website as having one front door (the homepage). In an SEO-focused approach, every piece of content is a potential first impression, a unique entry point designed to meet someone exactly where they are in their search journey.
This isn't about choosing ugly over beautiful - it's about building beautiful websites that people actually find. The goal is creating experiences that feel premium and cutting-edge while being discoverable and testable.
Foundation
Building a CMS that marketers can actually use without developer intervention for every small change.
Testing Culture
Creating systematic experimentation processes instead of endless design debates and committee decisions.
Content Strategy
Starting with keyword research and building around search intent rather than internal company structure.
Mindset Shift
Treating every page as a potential entry point instead of funneling everyone through the homepage.
The transformation in client results was dramatic. One SaaS client who embraced this approach saw their organic traffic grow from 200 to 2,000 monthly visitors within four months. More importantly, these weren't just vanity metrics - their trial signups increased proportionally.
But the most significant change wasn't in the numbers - it was in the team dynamics. Instead of spending weeks debating whether buttons should be blue or green, they were testing fundamentally different value propositions and measuring real business impact.
The manager I mentioned at the beginning? Their site converted at 0.8% while obsessing over heading consistency. A competitor who embraced rapid testing hit 3.2% within three months.
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. When you build testing infrastructure from day one, optimization becomes an ongoing competitive advantage instead of a quarterly project.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the top lessons learned from implementing this framework across multiple client projects:
Platform choice determines success more than design skills. If your team can't make changes quickly, optimization dies.
SEO success requires content velocity. One perfect page loses to ten good pages that answer different search queries.
Internal linking is your secret weapon. Most businesses completely ignore this while chasing external backlinks.
Mobile-first isn't just about responsive design. It's about understanding how people actually search and browse on mobile devices.
Page speed matters, but not as much as relevance. A fast, irrelevant page still loses to a slightly slower page that perfectly matches search intent.
The best design debates are data-driven. When you have real user behavior data, aesthetic preferences become secondary.
Distribution beats perfection every time. A discoverable website with room for improvement outperforms a perfect website nobody finds.
If I could start over, I'd begin every project with keyword research and competitor analysis before touching any design tools. The most beautiful website in the world is worthless if it doesn't match what your customers are actually searching for.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups:
Choose Webflow or Framer for marketing page control
Build use-case pages for different customer segments
Create integration pages even without native connections
Test pricing page variations weekly
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores:
Optimize category pages as landing pages, not just navigation
Create buying guide content for product discovery
Test product page layouts based on search intent
Build collection pages around customer problems, not product features