Growth & Strategy
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. The uncomfortable truth? Most businesses treat their website like a digital brochure when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory.
After 7 years of building websites, I've learned that the relationship between SEO and design isn't about choosing one over the other—it's about creating a foundation where both work together to drive actual business results. Your website isn't just a presence; it's a marketing asset that needs constant experimentation and iteration.
Here's what you'll learn from my journey:
Why I shifted from design-first to SEO-first website architecture
The framework I use to balance beautiful design with search performance
How treating your website as a marketing laboratory changes everything
The two-part system that transformed my client results
Why most agencies get this relationship completely wrong
Industry Reality
What the design world preaches vs. what actually drives results
Walk into any design agency or browse through award-winning portfolio sites, and you'll hear the same mantras repeated like gospel:
"User experience comes first" - Everything should be optimized for the perfect user journey
"Mobile-first design" - Start with mobile and scale up for desktop
"Brand consistency is king" - Every pixel should reflect your brand guidelines
"Conversion optimization through design" - The right layout will naturally convert visitors
"SEO can be added later" - Build first, optimize for search engines afterward
These principles exist because they create websites that look impressive in portfolios and win design awards. The problem? They're optimizing for the wrong metrics. A beautiful, user-friendly website means nothing if nobody can find it.
The traditional approach treats SEO as an afterthought—something you sprinkle on top of a finished design like seasoning. This backwards thinking creates fundamental structural problems that can't be fixed with meta tags and keywords. You end up with gorgeous websites that perform terribly in search results.
Meanwhile, most SEO experts treat design as purely decorative, focusing solely on technical optimizations while ignoring user experience. The result? Websites that rank well but convert poorly because they prioritize search bots over human visitors.
Both approaches miss the bigger picture: In today's digital landscape, you can't succeed with one without the other. The most successful websites I've built integrate SEO thinking into the design process from day one, creating a foundation where search performance and user experience amplify each other rather than compete.
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.
After analyzing my client portfolio, a painful pattern emerged:
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.
The turning point came when I was working with a B2B SaaS client. Their existing site was functional but unremarkable. Instead of starting with a complete visual overhaul, I decided to run an experiment. I kept their basic design intact but restructured the entire site architecture around search intent.
This forced me to completely rethink my approach. Instead of starting with homepage wireframes and user journey maps, I began with keyword research and content strategy. Instead of designing for the "perfect visitor," I designed for the problems people were actually searching for.
The shift was uncomfortable. Everything I'd learned about "best practices" suddenly felt inadequate. But the results spoke for themselves—and that's when I realized I needed a completely different framework.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
My new approach became what I call the SEO-First Design Framework—a systematic way to build websites that are both beautiful and discoverable. Here's exactly how I restructured my entire process:
Phase 1: SEO Foundation (Before Any Design)
I completely flipped my workflow. Instead of starting with mood boards and color palettes, every project now begins with:
Keyword Research Deep Dive: I spend 2-3 days mapping out everything people search for in the client's industry
Content Architecture Planning: Each page gets built around specific search intent, not company structure
Multiple Entry Point Strategy: Instead of designing for homepage visitors, I design for 10-20 different entry points
Phase 2: Design for Discovery
With the SEO foundation in place, I approach design completely differently:
Every page becomes a potential landing page. This means each page needs to be self-contained—visitors should understand the value proposition and know what to do next, regardless of where they entered the site.
Navigation follows search patterns, not organizational charts. Instead of "About > Services > Contact," I structure menus around how people actually search for solutions.
Content hierarchy prioritizes search intent over brand messaging. The most important information isn't what the company wants to say—it's what searchers want to find.
Phase 3: Technical Integration
Here's where most agencies fail—they treat technical SEO as a checklist to complete after design. I integrate it throughout:
Page speed optimization influences every design decision (image choices, animation complexity, layout structure)
Mobile-first design goes beyond responsive layouts to consider mobile search behavior
Schema markup gets planned during wireframing, not bolted on afterward
The Testing Laboratory Approach
The biggest shift was treating the website as a marketing laboratory rather than a finished product. This means:
Building for iteration, not perfection. I choose CMSs and platforms that let marketing teams make changes without developer intervention. Every test should take hours, not weeks.
Data-driven design decisions. Instead of debating button colors in meetings, we let search data and user behavior guide choices. If a certain page structure drives more organic traffic, we apply those learnings site-wide.
Systematic experimentation. Rather than making random changes, we methodically test different approaches to see what actually moves business metrics.
SEO Foundation
Keyword research and content architecture before any visual design begins
Design Integration
Every page designed as a potential landing page with clear value propositions
Technical Harmony
Page speed, mobile optimization, and schema markup built into design decisions
Testing Mindset
Website treated as marketing laboratory for continuous optimization rather than finished product
The results of this integrated approach have been transformative across multiple client projects:
Immediate Impact (Month 1-2): Clients typically see 40-60% faster page load times because performance considerations are built into design decisions rather than retrofitted. The site structure makes sense to both users and search engines from day one.
Medium-term Growth (Month 3-6): Organic traffic usually increases 2-3x because every page is optimized for specific search intent. More importantly, this traffic converts better because the content matches what people were actually looking for.
Long-term Compound Effects (6+ months): The marketing laboratory approach means continuous improvement. Clients can test new ideas quickly, learn from data, and optimize without major redesigns. This creates a compounding effect where the website gets better at driving business results over time.
One SaaS client went from 12 organic leads per month to 85 leads per month within six months—not because we increased traffic volume, but because we increased traffic quality by aligning content with actual search behavior.
Perhaps most importantly, the relationship between the marketing team and website completely changed. Instead of requesting changes through developers, they could test new approaches themselves. This velocity of experimentation became their competitive advantage.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons from hundreds of hours implementing this integrated approach:
Start with search intent, not personas. User personas are helpful, but search data shows you what people actually do, not what they say they'll do.
Design for 20 entry points, not one homepage. In the SEO era, every page is a potential front door. Design accordingly.
Technical SEO is user experience. Fast-loading, mobile-optimized pages aren't just good for search engines—they're good for humans.
Choose platforms for marketing velocity. The best CMS is the one that lets your marketing team test ideas without waiting for developers.
Measure business metrics, not vanity metrics. Page views and time on site don't matter if they don't drive actual business results.
Build for iteration, not perfection. The goal isn't to launch the perfect website—it's to launch a website that gets better over time.
Content architecture > visual hierarchy. How you organize information matters more than how pretty it looks.
The biggest pitfall to avoid is trying to retrofit SEO onto an existing design. This never works well. The most successful projects integrate search thinking into the design process from the very first wireframe.
This approach works best for businesses that understand marketing as an ongoing process rather than a one-time project. If you're looking for a "set it and forget it" solution, stick with traditional design. But if you want a website that actually drives business growth, SEO and design must work together from day one.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing this approach:
Build product pages around specific use cases people search for
Create comparison pages targeting "[competitor] alternative" keywords
Design onboarding flows that work for organic traffic, not just paid campaigns
Use programmatic SEO to scale content while maintaining design consistency
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores implementing this framework:
Structure product categories around search behavior, not internal organization
Design collection pages as landing pages for category-specific searches
Optimize product page templates for long-tail search queries
Create content hubs that support product discovery through search