AI & Automation
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
For the first few years of my freelance career, I was basically building digital ghost towns. Beautiful ones, sure - pixel-perfect websites with stunning visuals and seamless user journeys. Every client left our initial meetings absolutely thrilled about their upcoming digital transformation.
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 hit me hard: without traffic, even the world's best-converting website converts zero.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach to website development. I learned that site architecture planning isn't just about creating pretty page hierarchies - it's about building your entire site around how people actually discover and consume content.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why design-first architecture kills organic growth
My SEO-first site architecture framework
How to structure sites where every page is a potential front door
Real examples from client transformations
The mindset shift that changed everything
Industry Reality
What every web agency preaches about site architecture
Walk into any web design agency, and they'll show you the same approach to site architecture planning. It's become the industry standard, and honestly, it looks impressive in client presentations.
The Traditional Design-First Approach:
Start with the homepage as the main entry point
Design user journeys flowing from homepage to conversion
Build navigation around company structure and services
Focus on visual hierarchy and brand experience
Optimize for the "perfect pitch" presentation
This approach exists because it makes logical sense from a business owner's perspective. You think: "Someone visits my homepage, sees what we do, explores our services, and contacts us." It's linear, predictable, and feels like having complete control over the narrative.
Most agencies love this approach because it's easier to sell. Clients can visualize the user journey, the sitemap looks organized, and everyone feels confident about the strategy. It's also faster to execute since you're not dealing with complex content requirements or keyword research.
But here's where this conventional wisdom falls apart: This approach assumes people are actively looking for you specifically. In reality, most of your potential customers don't know you exist. They're searching for solutions to problems, and your beautifully architected homepage might as well be invisible if it's not built for discovery.
The design-first approach treats your website like a physical store where customers walk through the front door. But online, every page needs to be a potential front door because that's how search engines and real user behavior actually work.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The wake-up call came when I started tracking actual results across my client portfolio. I had built dozens of beautiful websites - every one of them had clean navigation, logical page hierarchies, and conversion-optimized layouts. But when I looked at the traffic data six months later, the pattern was brutal.
The Beautiful Website Trap: Sites were getting maybe 200-500 monthly visitors, mostly direct traffic from people who already knew about the business. Organic search traffic was practically non-existent. These weren't product problems - they were discovery problems.
I remember one particular SaaS client who'd invested heavily in a redesign. Gorgeous site, perfect user experience, testimonials strategically placed throughout. But their organic traffic was stuck at 300 visits per month, and most of those were branded searches. Meanwhile, their competitors with objectively worse-looking sites were getting 10x the traffic.
That's when I realized I'd been thinking about websites completely wrong. I was treating every website like it had one front door (the homepage) when successful sites online have hundreds of front doors.
The shift started when I began analyzing sites that actually drove business results. What I found was counterintuitive: the highest-performing business websites often had less impressive homepages but incredibly strong individual content pages that ranked for specific search terms.
This led me to a fundamental question: What if instead of designing a website to look perfect for someone who already found us, we designed it to be discovered by people who didn't even know we existed yet?
The breakthrough came when I started planning site architecture around search intent rather than company structure. Instead of asking "How should we organize our services?" I started asking "What are people actually searching for, and how can we be there when they search?"
This wasn't just about adding a blog section - it required rethinking the entire foundation of how websites should be built.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After that realization, I completely rebuilt my approach to site architecture planning. The new framework flips traditional thinking on its head: instead of starting with your company's needs, you start with your audience's search behavior.
The Four-Layer SEO Architecture System:
Layer 1: Search Intent Foundation
Before touching any design software, I spend weeks researching what potential customers actually search for. This isn't just keyword research - it's understanding the entire customer journey through search queries.
For a SaaS client, this might reveal that nobody searches for "project management software" directly. Instead, they search for "how to track team deadlines," "best tool for remote team coordination," or "project management for small teams." Each of these represents a different entry point into your site.
Layer 2: Content-Driven Information Architecture
Traditional architecture starts with "About," "Services," "Contact." My approach starts with the content that will actually drive traffic: problem-solving pages, how-to guides, comparison content, and use-case scenarios.
The navigation becomes secondary to the content strategy. Instead of forcing visitors to understand your business structure, you meet them where they are in their research process.
Layer 3: Multiple Entry Point Design
Every page is designed as a potential landing page. This means each page needs to:
Clearly explain what your business does (not everyone enters through homepage)
Include relevant internal links to guide visitors deeper
Have clear conversion paths appropriate to that page's intent
Stand alone as valuable content even without context
Layer 4: Scalable Content Systems
The architecture is built to grow. Instead of fixed page structures, you create content categories and templates that can expand as you discover new search opportunities.
Real Implementation Example:
For an e-commerce client with a 1000+ product catalog, traditional architecture would focus on clean category navigation. My SEO-first approach created:
Individual problem-solving pages for each major use case
Comparison pages between product categories
"Best [product] for [specific situation]" content
How-to guides that naturally linked to relevant products
The result? Instead of one homepage trying to serve everyone, we had 50+ entry points serving specific search intents. Each page was optimized for different keywords but all led visitors through logical paths to conversion.
This approach transformed their organic traffic from under 500 monthly visits to over 5,000 in three months - not through better design, but through better architecture aligned with actual search behavior.
Foundation First
Start with search intent mapping before touching any design software. Understand what your audience actually searches for.
Content Hierarchy
Build navigation around content that drives traffic rather than internal company structure.
Entry Points
Design every page as a potential landing page with clear context and conversion paths.
Growth System
Create scalable architecture that expands as you discover new search opportunities.
The transformation was dramatic but took time to compound. Within three months, organic traffic typically increased 5-10x for clients who implemented this architecture approach compared to traditional design-first sites.
More importantly, the quality of traffic improved significantly. Instead of random visitors who bounced immediately, we were attracting people actively searching for solutions. This led to higher engagement rates and better conversion metrics across the board.
One SaaS client saw their demo request conversion rate double, not because we changed the demo page, but because people were arriving with higher intent after finding valuable content that solved their immediate problems.
The compound effect became evident after six months: Each new piece of content created additional entry points, and the internal linking structure meant that traffic to any one page lifted the performance of related pages. The site became a traffic-generating machine rather than a passive brochure.
What surprised me most was how this approach improved traditional metrics too. Even homepage conversion rates improved because the few people who did arrive there came with higher awareness and intent, having often discovered the company through educational content first.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
The biggest lesson: Site architecture should be built around how people discover content, not how companies organize their services. This single mindset shift transforms websites from expenses into revenue drivers.
Key learnings from implementation:
Every page is a landing page - Design with this assumption from day one
Search intent beats company structure - Organize around customer needs, not internal departments
Content drives architecture - Build the structure to support content that actually gets found
Start broad, then narrow - Begin with high-level search intent, then create specific content
Plan for scale - Architecture should accommodate growth, not constrain it
Test and iterate - Use search console data to identify new opportunities
Internal linking is crucial - Every page should connect to relevant related content
What I'd do differently: Start with even more aggressive content planning. The sites that performed best had 50+ pages planned from launch, not 10-15 traditional pages with "we'll add content later."
This approach works best for: Businesses selling to people who research before buying. Less effective for impulse purchases or purely brand-driven sales.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
Map customer search journey before building any pages
Create content-driven navigation structure around use cases
Build scalable template systems for problem/solution content
Plan integration pages for popular tools in your space
For your Ecommerce store
Organize around product discovery patterns, not just categories
Create buying guide content for major product decisions
Build comparison pages between product types and competitors
Design search-friendly product filtering and navigation