Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
After 7 years building websites as a freelancer, I've sat through countless meetings where CTOs insisted on keeping WordPress while marketing teams desperately needed faster deployment. The breakthrough moment came when I helped a B2B SaaS startup cut their website update time from 2 weeks to 2 hours by switching to Webflow.
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: without traffic, even the world's best-converting website converts zero.
In this playbook, you'll learn:
Why most businesses treat their website like a digital brochure when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory
The fundamental shift from design-first to SEO-first thinking that changed everything
My two-part framework for converting websites that actually drive revenue
Real examples of how this approach transformed client results
When to prioritize design vs SEO (and why it's not either/or)
Let's dive into why the industry has this backwards, and what actually works in practice.
Industry Reality
What the market tells you about website priorities
Walk into any digital agency or browse through web design portfolios, and you'll see the same story repeated everywhere: beautiful, pixel-perfect websites showcased like art pieces. The industry has convinced businesses that great web design equals business success.
Here's what every business owner has been told:
Design First, Everything Else Later: Start with brand identity, create stunning visuals, perfect the user experience, then "add SEO" as an afterthought
Homepage is Your Front Door: Invest heavily in homepage design because it's where everyone lands first
Conversion Rate Optimization is King: A beautifully optimized funnel will turn visitors into customers
Technical Excellence Drives Results: Fast loading times, perfect mobile responsiveness, and flawless UX are the keys to success
Build It and They Will Come: If your website is good enough, customers will find you
This conventional wisdom exists because it's what looks impressive in case studies and client presentations. Agencies can showcase beautiful before/after designs, demonstrate technical improvements, and point to higher conversion rates on the traffic that does arrive.
The problem? None of this addresses the fundamental issue: getting people to your website in the first place. It's like training the world's best sales representative and then placing them in an empty mall. The approach optimizes for the wrong metric—conversion rate instead of actual conversions.
Most businesses don't realize they're optimizing 2% of the equation (conversion rate) while ignoring 98% of it (traffic acquisition). That's exactly where I was for the first few years of my career.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
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.
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 manager obsessing over heading consistency? Their site converted at 0.8%. A competitor I worked with who embraced rapid testing? They 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.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach. The fundamental shift wasn't just tactical—it was philosophical. Here's the key difference I discovered:
The Design-First Approach (What I Used to Do):
Start with features and product pages
Assume the homepage is the main entry point
Build navigation around company structure
Optimize for the perfect pitch
The SEO-First Approach (What Actually Drives Results):
Start with keyword research—always
Build content around what people actually search for
Create multiple entry points through targeted pages
Structure the site around search intent, not company org charts
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.
My new two-part framework became:
Part 1: Build Your Testing Foundation
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. After testing dozens of platforms with clients, here's my verdict:
For most businesses: Framer or Webflow give marketers actual control
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.
Part 2: Embrace Marketing R&D
I started 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.
This means:
Testing bold changes, not button colors
Methodically tracking each experiment
Building a culture where marketing owns website decisions
This isn't about choosing ugly over beautiful—it's about building beautiful websites that people actually find. The best approach is creating something visually compelling that also follows SEO principles, then continuously testing what works for your specific audience.
Testing Infrastructure
Platform choice determines experiment velocity. Choose tools that let marketing teams deploy changes in hours, not weeks.
Content-First Structure
Build your site architecture around what people search for, not your internal company structure. Every page should be a potential entry point.
Rapid Experimentation
Treat your website as a marketing laboratory. Test bold changes systematically rather than obsessing over minor design details.
SEO Foundation
Start with keyword research before design. Understanding search intent should drive both content strategy and site architecture decisions.
The transformation in client results was dramatic once I implemented this framework consistently:
Before the shift: Clients had beautiful websites with conversion rates around 0.8-1.2% but struggled with traffic acquisition. Most were spending heavily on paid ads just to get visitors to their optimized funnels.
After implementing the SEO-first approach: The same clients achieved 3.2-4.1% conversion rates because the traffic arriving was already qualified through search intent. More importantly, organic traffic grew 400-600% within 6 months.
The most significant change wasn't in conversion rate—it was in the quality of traffic. When people find you through search, they're already in a buying mindset. They're not being interrupted by ads; they're actively seeking solutions.
One B2B SaaS client saw their cost per acquisition drop from $340 (paid ads) to $45 (organic search) while simultaneously improving lead quality. The leads that came through organic search were 3x more likely to convert to paid plans.
This approach also created compound growth. Each piece of content continued attracting visitors months after publication, building momentum rather than requiring constant ad spend to maintain traffic levels.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the top lessons learned from shifting from design-first to SEO-first website development:
Platform choice determines experiment velocity: If your marketing team can't make changes without developer intervention, you'll test 10x less frequently than competitors
Every page is a potential front door: Homepage optimization matters less than creating multiple high-quality entry points through search
Search intent beats perfect design: A page that matches what someone is searching for will outperform a perfectly designed page that doesn't
Compound growth beats linear growth: SEO content continues working months after creation, while ad spend stops producing results the moment you pause campaigns
Quality of traffic matters more than quantity: 1,000 visitors from search often convert better than 5,000 visitors from social media
Marketing R&D is a discipline: Systematic experimentation with proper tracking produces better results than intuition-based decisions
Content-first architecture scales: Building your site structure around search intent rather than company organization creates natural scalability
What I'd do differently: Start with keyword research even earlier in the process. Many clients resist this because it feels less creative than design-first approaches, but the data always wins in the end.
When this approach works best: For any business that needs sustainable growth rather than quick wins. If you can only invest in one approach, SEO-first creates lasting value.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing this playbook:
Choose development platforms that let your marketing team iterate quickly
Build content around user search intent, not product features
Create multiple entry points for different customer journey stages
Track organic traffic quality, not just quantity
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores implementing this approach:
Optimize product pages for search intent, not just conversion
Build category pages that target buyer keywords
Create content that supports the entire purchase journey
Use search data to inform product and inventory decisions