Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
After 7 years of building websites as a freelancer, I've sat through countless meetings where founders obsessed over pixel-perfect designs while their conversion rates bled out. 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 an SEO-first approach.
Here's what I discovered: I was essentially training world-class sales reps to do door-to-door sales in an empty neighborhood. These websites were gorgeous - brand-aligned, modern, conversion-optimized. But without traffic, even the world's best-converting website converts zero.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach from design-first to SEO-first thinking. Most businesses treat their website like a digital brochure when it should be treated as a marketing laboratory.
Here's what you'll learn from my journey:
Why beautiful websites fail without SEO foundations
My framework for choosing SEO-friendly themes that actually drive traffic
How to avoid the design-first trap that kills organic growth
Real examples from client migrations that transformed their results
The decision framework I use when evaluating Webflow vs Framer for SEO performance
Industry Reality
What the design world tells you about themes
Walk into any web design conference or browse through award-winning portfolios, and you'll hear the same advice repeatedly. The industry pushes a design-first mentality that prioritizes visual appeal over everything else.
Here's what most agencies and designers recommend:
Visual Impact First: Choose themes that make visitors say "wow" with bold animations and custom layouts
Brand Alignment: Your theme should perfectly reflect your brand personality and values
Conversion Optimization: Focus on perfect user journeys and friction-free checkout processes
Mobile Responsiveness: Ensure your design looks flawless across all devices
Loading Speed: Optimize images and minimize plugins for better performance
This conventional wisdom exists because it's what clients can see and touch. A beautiful website is tangible - you can show it in meetings, get approval from stakeholders, and win design awards. SEO is invisible until it starts working.
The problem? This approach treats your website like having one front door (the homepage) when you should be building a structure where every page is a potential entry point. Most businesses following this path end up with digital ghost towns - beautiful stores in empty malls.
Where this falls short in practice is simple: without organic traffic, you're completely dependent on paid advertising or word-of-mouth. Your gorgeous website becomes an expensive brochure that only existing customers see.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
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 pattern became painfully clear when I started analyzing 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. The harsh reality hit me: without traffic, even the world's best-converting website converts zero.
The wake-up call came when a B2B SaaS client called me six months after launch. Their conversion rate was excellent, but they were getting maybe 50 visitors per month. "We have a beautiful website that nobody sees," they said. "What's the point?"
That's when I realized I'd been thinking about websites completely wrong. I was building for the 5% of visitors who might stumble upon the homepage, not the 95% who would eventually find specific pages through search engines. Every page needed to be a potential front door, not just a stop on a predetermined journey.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
The fundamental shift I made was moving from design-first to SEO-first thinking. This isn't about choosing ugly over beautiful - it's about building beautiful websites that people actually find.
My New SEO-First Framework:
1. Start with Search Intent, Not Brand Guidelines
Instead of asking "What does our brand look like?" I started asking "What are people searching for?" I'd spend the first week of any project doing keyword research before touching design tools. This completely changed how I structured websites.
Traditional approach: Homepage → About → Services → Contact
SEO approach: Problem-focused landing pages → Solution pages → Resource hubs → Contact
2. Choose Platforms Based on Content Velocity
I stopped choosing platforms based on design flexibility and started choosing based on how quickly marketing teams could publish content. This led me to prioritize Webflow and Framer over traditional CMS platforms.
The key insight: Your website should be your testing ground for finding what distribution formula works for your business. If it takes two weeks to publish a blog post, you can't iterate fast enough.
3. Build Every Page as a Landing Page
I restructured my approach to treat every page as a potential first impression. Each page needed:
Clear value proposition within 3 seconds
Internal linking to relevant resources
Multiple conversion opportunities
Schema markup for search engines
4. Theme Selection Criteria
My theme evaluation process became:
Code Quality: Clean HTML structure, semantic markup, fast loading
Content Flexibility: Easy to add new page types and content sections
SEO Features: Built-in schema, meta tag control, URL structure flexibility
Performance: Core Web Vitals scores, image optimization, caching
Content Team Usability: Can marketing teams update content without developer help?
5. Implementation Strategy
For each client migration, I followed this process:
Audit existing content for search performance
Identify high-opportunity keywords the site wasn't targeting
Choose theme based on content strategy needs, not just visual appeal
Build content architecture around search intent
Train teams on content creation workflows
Technical Foundation
Clean code structure and semantic HTML that search engines can easily crawl and understand
Content Velocity
Themes that allow marketing teams to publish and update content without developer bottlenecks
Performance Optimization
Core Web Vitals optimization and fast loading speeds that directly impact search rankings
Growth Architecture
Page structures designed for adding new content types and scaling organic traffic over time
The transformation in results was dramatic once I implemented this SEO-first approach across my client base. Instead of beautiful websites that nobody visited, clients started seeing real organic growth.
Typical improvements after migration:
Organic traffic increased 3-5x within 6 months
Content publishing frequency went from monthly to weekly
Pages indexed by Google increased from 10-20 to 100+ pages
Marketing teams became autonomous in content management
One B2B SaaS client saw their website transform from a cost center to their primary lead generation engine. Instead of spending $5k monthly on ads, they started generating qualified leads organically. Their website became their most productive sales rep - working 24/7 and never asking for a raise.
The most significant change wasn't in the numbers though - it was in mindset. Teams stopped treating their website as a static brochure and started viewing it as a dynamic marketing laboratory where they could test what messaging resonated with their audience.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
The biggest lesson I learned: 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.
Key lessons from this journey:
Distribution beats perfection: A good website that people find outperforms a perfect website that nobody sees
Content velocity is everything: Your ability to iterate and publish quickly matters more than having the perfect design
Marketing R&D mindset: Treat your website as an experiment lab, not a finished product
Team autonomy matters: If marketers can't update content themselves, you're moving too slowly
Every page is a landing page: Design for search discovery, not just homepage visitors
SEO isn't an afterthought: Search optimization needs to influence theme selection from day one
Performance impacts everything: Slow sites don't rank well, regardless of design quality
What I'd do differently: I'd start every project with a content audit and keyword research phase before even discussing design preferences. This saves months of rebuild work later.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups:
Choose themes that support multiple landing pages for different use cases
Prioritize integration page templates for programmatic SEO
Ensure your theme supports customer story and case study layouts
Build content workflows for regular feature announcements and product updates
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores:
Select themes optimized for product page SEO and schema markup
Ensure collection pages are designed for both conversion and search discovery
Choose platforms that support content marketing alongside product catalogs
Prioritize page speed and Core Web Vitals optimization for product pages