Growth & Strategy
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 The design made competitors look outdated.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.
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. This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach and discover the fundamental mistakes that kill SEO before it even starts.
Here's what you'll learn from my 7-year journey and dozens of client projects:
The mindset shift that transformed my approach from design-first to SEO-first strategy
5 critical web design mistakes that murdered my clients' organic traffic
My framework for building websites that people actually find
Real examples from ecommerce and SaaS projects that went from zero to thousands of monthly visitors
The testing infrastructure that prevents these mistakes from happening again
Hard Truth
What every agency promises vs. reality
Walk into any web design agency and you'll hear the same promises: "We build conversion-optimized websites that generate leads 24/7." The industry has convinced itself that a beautiful, user-friendly website automatically equals business success.
Here's the conventional wisdom every designer follows:
Design-first approach: Start with wireframes, focus on user experience, make it look stunning
Homepage-centric thinking: Assume everyone enters through the front door
Feature-heavy navigation: Showcase every service and product prominently
Conversion optimization focus: Perfect the funnel for visitors who are already there
Technical perfection: Fast loading, mobile responsive, accessibility compliant
This approach isn't wrong—it's incomplete. These practices create websites that convert well if people can find them. But they ignore the fundamental challenge: getting discovered in the first place.
The problem with design-first thinking is that it optimizes for the wrong metrics. Agencies celebrate beautiful portfolios and conversion improvements while ignoring the elephant in the room: most of their clients' websites are invisible to their target audience.
I fell into this trap for years because the results looked good in presentations. "We improved your conversion rate by 40%!" sounds impressive until you realize we're optimizing 40% of almost nothing.
The industry perpetuates this because it's easier to sell a redesign than to admit that the beautiful website you just built needs to be restructured around search intent instead of company org charts.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
My wake-up call came from a B2C Shopify client who was drowning in their own success. Despite having over 1,000 products and decent traffic, their conversion rate was bleeding—not because the products were bad, but because finding the right one felt like searching for a needle in a digital haystack.
The data told a brutal story: visitors were using the homepage as nothing more than a doorway. They'd land, immediately click to "All Products," then get lost in an endless scroll. I had created a beautiful website that was fundamentally unusable for its intended purpose.
But the real shock came when I started tracking my portfolio across different time periods. Project after project showed the same pattern:
Month 1-3: Clients were thrilled with their new website
Month 4-6: Questions about "when the leads would start coming"
Month 7-12: Frustration about lack of organic traffic
Year 2: Requests for "SEO help" as a separate project
I was essentially building beautiful stores and placing them in empty malls. The websites worked perfectly—for the three people per month who accidentally found them.
This pattern forced me to examine what I was actually delivering versus what clients actually needed. I realized I was optimizing for the wrong success metrics entirely. A 10% conversion improvement on 50 monthly visitors is meaningless compared to a 2% conversion rate on 5,000 monthly visitors.
The most painful realization? My "premium" design-first approach was actually harming my clients' businesses. I was structuring websites around company hierarchies instead of customer search behavior, creating navigation that made sense to insiders but was invisible to Google and users alike.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After recognizing this fundamental flaw in my approach, I developed what I now call the SEO-First Website Framework. Instead of starting with wireframes and user journeys, I started with keyword research and search intent mapping.
The Mindset Shift: Every page is a potential front door, not just the homepage. This single change revolutionized how I approached information architecture.
Here's the step-by-step process I developed:
Phase 1: Intent Mapping Before Design
Before touching any design tools, I spend 2-3 days understanding how the target audience actually searches for solutions. I map out 50-100 specific search queries and group them by intent and difficulty. This becomes the foundation for the entire site structure.
Phase 2: Content-First Architecture
Instead of creating pages based on company structure ("About," "Services," "Products"), I create pages based on search demand. For a SaaS client, this meant building separate pages for "CRM for small businesses," "CRM for real estate," and "CRM vs spreadsheets" instead of one generic "CRM Software" page.
Phase 3: Strategic Internal Linking
I developed a system for connecting related content that guides both users and search engines through logical pathways. This isn't random cross-linking—it's deliberate architecture that establishes topical authority.
Phase 4: Technical Foundation That Supports Content
Rather than building a beautiful site and "adding SEO later," I ensure the technical infrastructure supports content strategy from day one. This includes schema markup, proper heading structures, and crawlable navigation.
The breakthrough came when I applied this to the struggling Shopify client. Instead of traditional homepage optimization, I restructured their entire site around how people actually search for products in their category. The result? Their homepage became relevant again because it was designed around search intent rather than company ego.
Foundation First
Start with keyword research and search intent mapping before any design decisions. Your site architecture should reflect how customers search, not how your company is organized.
Content Strategy
Build pages around search demand rather than company structure. Create specific landing pages for different user intents instead of generic service pages.
Technical Setup
Implement SEO-friendly technical infrastructure from day one. Schema markup and proper heading structures should be planned alongside visual design.
Measurement
Track organic visibility metrics alongside conversion rates. A beautiful site that nobody finds is a failed site, regardless of its conversion rate.
The transformation in my client results was immediate and measurable. The Shopify client with 1,000+ products saw their organic traffic increase from under 500 monthly visits to over 5,000 within three months of implementing the new approach.
But the real validation came from tracking my entire portfolio using this new framework:
Before SEO-First Approach:
- Average time to first organic lead: 8-12 months
- Percentage of sites with meaningful organic traffic by month 6: 15%
- Client satisfaction scores at 6-month mark: 6/10
After SEO-First Framework:
- Average time to first organic lead: 2-4 months
- Percentage of sites with meaningful organic traffic by month 6: 85%
- Client satisfaction scores at 6-month mark: 9/10
The approach also solved the revenue problem for my own business. Instead of constantly chasing new design projects, clients started requesting ongoing optimization work because they could see measurable growth in their organic traffic.
Most importantly, this framework created a sustainable competitive advantage. While competitors were still promising "beautiful websites," I was delivering websites that actually drove business results from day one.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
After implementing this approach across 50+ projects, here are the critical lessons that transformed my entire business:
Industry "best practices" are often worst practices: Following design industry standards often conflicts with SEO requirements. Choose SEO over aesthetics when they conflict.
Client education is crucial: Most clients don't understand the difference between a beautiful website and a profitable one. Educate them early or deal with disappointment later.
Start with search, not company structure: The biggest mistake is organizing websites around how the company thinks about itself rather than how customers search for solutions.
Every page needs a job: If a page doesn't serve a specific search intent or conversion goal, it shouldn't exist. Beautiful pages that serve no purpose hurt more than they help.
Technical SEO isn't optional: You can't "add SEO later" to a site built without SEO considerations. The foundation determines everything that comes after.
Measure what matters: Conversion rates on 50 monthly visitors is vanity. Focus on growing organic visibility first, then optimize conversion.
Content strategy beats pretty design: A strategically structured site with average design will outperform a beautifully designed site with poor content strategy every time.
The biggest shift was realizing that my job wasn't to build websites—it was to build marketing assets that happen to be websites. This change in perspective transformed everything from client relationships to project outcomes.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups applying this framework:
Build separate landing pages for each use case rather than generic "features" pages
Create comparison pages for alternatives and competitors your prospects are evaluating
Structure your trial signup flow to support organic discovery, not just direct traffic
Plan content strategy before development to avoid expensive rebuilds
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores implementing this approach:
Design category pages around how customers search, not how you organize inventory
Create buying guide content that naturally leads to your products
Structure product pages to capture long-tail search traffic, not just direct navigation
Build brand authority through educational content before pushing products