AI & Automation
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 The design made competitors look outdated.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.
The harsh reality hit when I analyzed my client portfolio. 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.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach to web design. Here's what you'll learn from my expensive lessons:
Why design-first websites are actually marketing disasters
The fundamental shift from homepage-thinking to SEO-first architecture
How simple HTML structure beats complex frameworks for organic growth
My tested framework for building websites that actually get found
The metrics that prove SEO-first design drives real business results
Ready to stop building beautiful ghost towns? Let's dive into how website strategy really works when you put traffic before aesthetics.
Industry Reality
What every web designer has already heard
Walk into any web design agency or browse through design portfolios, and you'll see the same approach everywhere. The industry has convinced itself that great web design follows a predictable formula:
The Standard Design-First Process:
Start with a stunning homepage that "tells your story"
Create intuitive navigation around your company structure
Build pages that flow logically from the user's perspective
Focus on conversion optimization and user experience
Launch and hope people find you
This approach exists because it feels logical. Most business owners think about their website the way they think about a physical store—you need an attractive front entrance, clear signage, and organized product displays. Design agencies perpetuate this because it's easier to sell beautiful mockups than explain technical SEO concepts.
The problem? This entire framework assumes people will magically discover your website. It's like opening the world's most beautiful restaurant in a location with no foot traffic, no road signs, and no way for customers to find you.
Traditional web design treats your homepage as the front door, assuming visitors will enter there and navigate through your carefully crafted user journey. But in reality, most organic traffic lands on random pages throughout your site based on what they searched for. Your "About" page might be someone's first impression. Your pricing page could be their entry point.
The industry keeps pushing this design-first approach because it produces immediate visual results that clients can approve in meetings. But it fundamentally misunderstands how people actually discover and consume content online in 2025.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The breakdown happened when I finally tracked where my "successful" clients were actually getting their business. I'd built them gorgeous websites that converted well when people visited, but the traffic sources told a different story entirely.
One SaaS client I'd designed a beautiful site for was getting most of their leads through the founder's LinkedIn content. Another e-commerce store was driving sales primarily through word-of-mouth referrals. The websites I'd built were converting the traffic that was already coming, but they weren't generating any organic discovery.
The painful realization: I was solving the wrong problem. These businesses needed traffic first, optimization second. But I was delivering optimization without addressing the fundamental issue—nobody could find these sites in Google.
I started comparing the sites I'd built against competitors who were ranking on page one for relevant keywords. The difference was stark. Their sites weren't necessarily prettier, but they were structured completely differently. Instead of starting with a homepage and thinking outward, they'd built their entire architecture around keyword research and search intent.
The typical design-first site I was building had maybe 5-8 pages: Homepage, About, Services, Portfolio, Contact. Meanwhile, successful competitors had 50+ pages targeting specific problems their customers were searching for. They weren't just hoping people would find them—they'd built content highways that led directly to their front door.
This is when I realized the fundamental flaw in my approach: I was treating websites like digital brochures when they needed to be content engines. Every page needed to serve dual purposes—converting visitors AND attracting them in the first place through search engines.
The shift required completely rethinking how I approached project discovery, site architecture, and even basic HTML structure. Instead of asking "What pages do you need?" I started asking "What problems do your customers search for solutions to?"
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
The transformation required building a completely different type of website architecture. Instead of the traditional homepage-centric approach, I developed what I call "SEO-first design"—where every page is built to be both a potential entry point and a conversion tool.
Step 1: Keyword-Driven Site Architecture
I stopped starting with wireframes and began every project with comprehensive keyword research. Using tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, I'd identify 50-100 long-tail keywords that potential customers were actually searching for. These became the foundation of the entire site structure.
For a B2B SaaS client, instead of generic pages like "Features" and "Solutions," we built specific pages targeting searches like "automated invoice processing software," "accounts payable workflow tools," and "vendor management dashboard." Each page addressed one specific search intent while naturally flowing toward their main product offering.
Step 2: Simple HTML Structure That Search Engines Love
I abandoned complex JavaScript frameworks and returned to clean, semantic HTML. Here's the structure that consistently performed:
H1 tags that match target keywords exactly
Clear hierarchy using H2, H3, H4 for content organization
Strategic internal linking between related topics
Fast-loading pages with minimal external dependencies
Mobile-first responsive design without sacrificing speed
Step 3: Content-First Design Philosophy
Instead of designing beautiful pages and then figuring out what content to put in them, I flipped the process. The content strategy drove the design decisions. If a page needed to rank for "small business accounting software comparison," the design supported that goal with comparison tables, feature callouts, and clear next steps.
Step 4: Multiple Entry Point Strategy
I built every page assuming it might be someone's first interaction with the brand. This meant:
Brief company context in the header of every page
Clear value proposition visible above the fold
Strategic calls-to-action that worked regardless of entry point
Related content recommendations to keep visitors engaged
For one e-commerce client, this approach meant building 200+ individual product and category pages, each optimized for specific product searches while maintaining the overall brand experience.
Technical Foundation
Clean semantic HTML5 structure with proper heading hierarchy and fast-loading CSS that search engines can crawl efficiently.
Content Strategy
Every page built around specific keyword clusters and search intent rather than traditional company-focused navigation.
Architecture Shift
Site structure designed with multiple entry points instead of homepage-centric user journeys that assume linear navigation.
Conversion Integration
SEO pages that naturally guide visitors toward business goals without sacrificing search performance for sales optimization.
The results spoke for themselves. A B2B SaaS client went from 200 monthly organic visitors to 2,500+ within six months. More importantly, these weren't just vanity metrics—the organic traffic converted at 18% compared to 3% from their previous paid advertising efforts.
An e-commerce client saw their organic search traffic increase by 400% in the first year after implementing this approach. But the real win was the quality of traffic—visitors coming from search were already interested in their specific products rather than needing to be convinced.
The compound effect became clear over time: While competitors were paying increasing amounts for the same keywords through ads, these SEO-first sites were capturing that traffic organically. The cost per acquisition dropped dramatically as organic traffic scaled.
What surprised me most was how this approach actually improved conversion rates. When people found exactly what they were searching for, they were much more likely to take action. The alignment between search intent and page content created higher-quality leads who were ready to engage.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
The biggest lesson: Stop thinking of your website as having one front door (the homepage). In an SEO-first approach, every page is a potential front door, and each one needs to work independently while contributing to the overall business goals.
Key insights from this transformation:
Content strategy beats visual design when it comes to driving actual business results through organic search
Simple HTML consistently outperforms complex JavaScript frameworks for both speed and search engine crawling
Keyword research should happen before wireframes, not after the site is built
Multiple entry points require different design thinking—every page needs context and clear next steps
SEO and conversion optimization aren't opposing forces—they work better together when planned from the start
Long-term organic growth beats short-term design awards when measuring actual business impact
The best "beautiful" websites are ones that people can actually find and use to solve their problems
This approach isn't about sacrificing design quality—it's about ensuring that great design serves a strategic purpose rather than just looking impressive in a portfolio.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS companies, focus on building pages around specific use cases and integration scenarios rather than generic feature lists. Your customers are searching for solutions to specific problems, not browsing feature comparisons.
For your Ecommerce store
E-commerce stores should prioritize product and category pages that target buyer-intent keywords. Build collection pages around how customers actually search, not how your inventory is organized.