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 The design made competitors look outdated.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 me when I analyzed my client portfolio after three years of beautiful website launches. Every site looked incredible, converted well when people actually visited them, but nobody was visiting them. I'd built premium digital storefronts in the middle of digital deserts.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why the traditional web designer vs SEO specialist divide is killing business results
The fundamental mindset shift that transformed my approach to website architecture
My complete framework for building websites that actually drive revenue through organic traffic
The specific workflow I now use to merge design excellence with SEO strategy from day one
Real case studies showing the revenue impact of this integrated approach
Industry Reality
What the market preaches about web design vs SEO
If you've ever tried to hire for digital marketing, you've probably seen the traditional divide between web designers and SEO specialists. The market treats these as completely separate roles with distinct skill sets:
Web designers are supposed to:
Create visually appealing layouts and user interfaces
Focus on user experience, conversion optimization, and brand alignment
Work with design tools like Figma, handle front-end development, and optimize for mobile responsiveness
Think about homepage funnels, conversion paths, and visual hierarchy
SEO specialists are supposed to:
Handle keyword research, content optimization, and technical SEO audits
Focus on search engine rankings, organic traffic growth, and backlink strategies
Work with tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Google Analytics
Think about content architecture, internal linking, and search intent
Most agencies and freelancers still operate this way. You hire a designer to make it pretty, then hire an SEO specialist to make it findable. The assumption is that these are complementary but separate skill sets that can be layered on top of each other.
This conventional wisdom exists because it mirrors how traditional marketing worked. In the pre-digital world, you had graphic designers creating brochures and direct mail specialists handling distribution. The separation made sense when design and distribution were completely different channels.
But here's where this approach fails in 2025: your website's design fundamentally determines its SEO potential. SEO isn't something you bolt onto a finished design—it needs to be architected from the ground up.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The turning point came when I analyzed my three-year client portfolio and discovered a painful pattern. Every single website I'd delivered was what I now call a "beautiful ghost town."
Take one of my favorite projects from that era—a B2B SaaS client in the project management space. We spent months crafting their brand identity, designing custom illustrations, building interactive demos, and optimizing every conversion point. The site was gorgeous. It converted visitors at 3.2%, which was excellent for their industry.
But six months after launch, they were getting fewer than 200 organic visitors per month. The beautiful sales rep I'd trained was sitting in an empty mall.
The problem was my entire mental model.
I was designing websites like physical stores. Start with the homepage (the front entrance), map out the customer journey (the store layout), optimize the checkout flow (the cash register). This approach assumes people enter through your front door and follow a predetermined path.
But websites don't work like physical stores. In the digital world, every page is a potential front door. Someone searching for "project management software for remote teams" might land on your features page. Someone looking for "Asana alternatives" might hit your comparison content. Someone researching "agile workflow tools" could start with your blog.
I was building websites with one beautifully designed entrance while my potential customers were trying to enter through 50 different doors that didn't exist.
The wake-up call came when I started tracking where my most successful clients were actually getting their traffic. It wasn't through the homepage funnels I'd carefully crafted. It was through SEO-driven content pages that I'd treated as afterthoughts.
This forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: I needed to fundamentally change how I approached website architecture. Instead of thinking like a store designer, I needed to think like an urban planner—creating multiple entry points, clear navigation between districts, and ensuring every neighborhood served a purpose.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I accepted that design-first thinking was limiting my clients' results, I rebuilt my entire website development process around what I call "SEO-first architecture." This isn't about sacrificing design quality—it's about making strategic design decisions that support discoverability from day one.
The Mindset Shift: From Homepage-Centric to Entry-Point Architecture
Instead of starting with "How will the homepage convert visitors?" I now begin every project with "What are the 20-50 ways people might discover this business online?" This completely changes how you structure a website.
For that project management SaaS client, instead of building around their homepage funnel, I mapped out their entire keyword universe:
Direct product searches ("project management software")
Alternative searches ("Asana alternative," "Monday.com competitor")
Use case searches ("remote team collaboration tools")
Integration searches ("Slack project management integration")
Problem-solution searches ("how to track project deadlines")
Each keyword cluster became its own "neighborhood" on the website, with its own entry point, internal navigation, and conversion path.
The Technical Framework: Information Architecture for Discovery
This approach requires a completely different information architecture. Instead of the traditional model:
Homepage → About → Features → Pricing → Contact
I now build what I call "hub and spoke" architecture:
Content Hubs: Each major keyword cluster gets its own section with multiple entry points
Product Spokes: Every hub connects logically to relevant product pages
Cross-Hub Linking: Strategic internal links create multiple discovery paths
Conversion Bridges: Each content piece includes natural progression points toward trial signup
For the project management client, this meant creating dedicated landing pages for each major use case, competitor comparison content, integration guides, and workflow templates. Each page was designed to both rank for its target keywords and guide visitors toward the product trial.
The Design System: SEO-Driven Visual Hierarchy
The visual design still matters—it just needs to serve SEO goals. I developed a design system that prioritizes:
Scannable Content: Visual hierarchy that makes long-form content digestible
Featured Snippets: Formatted content blocks designed to win Google features
Internal Link Flow: Visual cues that encourage exploration across content hubs
Conversion Integration: Subtle CTAs that feel natural within educational content
This wasn't about making websites ugly for SEO. It was about making design decisions that served both user experience and search engine discoverability.
Real Business Impact
After implementing this approach, my project management SaaS client went from 200 to 3,000+ monthly organic visitors within 6 months. More importantly, their trial signups from organic traffic increased 8x.
Content-First Planning
Every website project now starts with keyword research and content mapping before any design work begins. I map out 30-50 target keywords and plan the content architecture before touching design tools.
Hub Architecture
Instead of linear user flows, I build interconnected content hubs where each major topic cluster has multiple entry points and internal linking strategies.
Design for Discovery
Visual design decisions prioritize readability, scannability, and natural progression between related topics rather than just homepage conversion.
The results spoke for themselves. That project management SaaS client became a case study that transformed how I approached every subsequent project.
Traffic Growth: Within six months, their organic traffic grew from under 200 monthly visitors to over 3,000. But the quality of traffic was equally important—these weren't just any visitors, they were people actively searching for project management solutions.
Conversion Impact: Their trial signup rate from organic traffic was 4.1%, significantly higher than their paid traffic (2.8%). This made sense because organic visitors had already educated themselves about their needs before arriving.
Revenue Attribution: Within 12 months, organic traffic was responsible for 40% of their new customer acquisitions. This dramatically reduced their customer acquisition cost and made their growth more sustainable.
Long-term Compound Effects: Unlike paid advertising, the SEO-driven content continued attracting visitors and generating leads months after publication. Their best-performing comparison pages were still driving consistent trial signups two years later.
But perhaps most importantly, this approach created a competitive moat. While competitors were spending heavily on paid ads, my client had built a sustainable organic acquisition engine that got stronger over time.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me lessons that fundamentally changed how I approach web development:
1. Architecture Beats Aesthetics
The most beautiful website in the world is worthless if nobody can find it. Information architecture and content strategy should drive design decisions, not the other way around.
2. Every Page is Page One
Stop thinking about homepages as the primary entry point. In SEO-driven websites, every page needs to work as a potential first impression and convert visitors who land there cold.
3. Content and Design Are Inseparable
You can't bolt SEO onto a finished design. Content strategy, keyword targeting, and information architecture need to be integrated into the design process from day one.
4. User Intent Trumps User Journey
Traditional conversion funnels assume linear progression. SEO-first design accommodates the messy, non-linear way people actually discover and evaluate solutions online.
5. Speed of Implementation Matters
The faster you can publish content and iterate, the faster you can capture search rankings. Choose platforms and design systems that enable rapid content deployment.
6. Measure What Matters
Homepage conversion rates are vanity metrics if your homepage only gets 5% of your traffic. Focus on overall organic growth and revenue attribution from search.
7. Design for Sharing and Linking
Every piece of content should be valuable enough that other websites want to link to it. This requires thinking beyond company promotion to genuine value creation.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
Start every website project with comprehensive keyword research and content mapping
Build dedicated landing pages for each major use case and competitor comparison
Create integration guides and workflow templates as linkable assets
Implement hub-and-spoke architecture with strategic internal linking
For your Ecommerce store
Map product category pages to high-volume commercial keywords
Create comparison content for major competitor brands in your space
Build category guides and buying advice content as traffic drivers
Design product pages with long-tail keyword optimization in mind