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 The design made competitors look outdated.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.
The harsh reality hit when I analyzed 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.
This painful realization forced me to completely restructure my approach to web development. Here's what I learned about choosing between design-first and SEO-first strategies, and why most businesses are asking the wrong question when they search for "website design" services.
What you'll learn:
Why most web designers create beautiful failures
The fundamental difference between design-first vs SEO-first approaches
My framework for choosing the right web professional
Real metrics from projects that prove the point
When design matters more than traffic (and when it doesn't)
Industry Reality
What most agencies won't tell you about web design
When you search for "website design for SEO," you'll find hundreds of agencies promising both. Most web design companies have added "SEO-friendly" to their service descriptions because they know that's what clients want to hear.
Here's what the industry typically recommends:
Design-first approach: Create a beautiful website, then "optimize it for SEO" afterward
Best of both worlds: Agencies claim they can deliver stunning design AND top search rankings
Technical SEO focus: Fast loading times, mobile responsiveness, and clean code structure
Content as an afterthought: "We'll optimize your existing pages and maybe add a blog"
Keyword stuffing: Adding target keywords to existing design elements
This conventional wisdom exists because it's easier to sell. Clients can visualize a beautiful website. They can't visualize an SEO strategy. It's also how the web design industry evolved—aesthetics first, discoverability second.
But here's where this approach falls short: You're fundamentally treating two different business problems as if they're the same problem. A beautiful website solves a conversion and branding problem. An SEO-optimized website solves a traffic and discoverability problem. When you try to solve both simultaneously without understanding which problem is more critical for your business, you end up solving neither effectively.
The result? You get a pretty website that nobody can find, or an SEO-focused site that looks like it was built in 2005. Most agencies won't tell you this because they want to sell you both services at once.
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.
But the real wake-up call came when I started tracking long-term results across my portfolio. I had two types of clients:
Type A clients hired me for beautiful, conversion-optimized websites. These were the projects I was most proud of—pixel-perfect designs, smooth animations, carefully crafted user journeys. The websites looked incredible in my portfolio.
Type B clients came to me because their existing websites were ugly but they were drowning in support tickets from all the traffic they were getting through search. They needed help scaling their conversion infrastructure to handle the volume.
After 18 months, I checked back on both groups. The results were sobering:
Type A clients (beautiful websites): Most were still struggling to get traffic. Despite having better-converting pages, their overall revenue was stagnant because nobody could find them. Some had started paying for ads just to get visitors to see their beautiful new sites.
Type B clients (SEO-focused, ugly sites): They were generating 10x more revenue than Type A clients. Their websites looked terrible by design standards, but they were answering real search queries that their customers were actually typing into Google.
That's when I realized I had been solving the wrong problem for most of my clients. I was optimizing for the last 5% of the customer journey (conversion) while ignoring the first 95% (discovery).
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
This realization forced me to completely restructure my approach to web development. Instead of starting with wireframes and design mockups, I developed what I call the "SEO-first framework." Here's exactly how I implemented this new approach:
Step 1: Keyword Research Before Anything Else
Instead of asking "What should our homepage say?" I started asking "What are people actually searching for related to your business?" This shift changed everything. For one B2B SaaS client, I discovered they were focusing their messaging on "project management software" while their actual customers were searching for "team collaboration tools" and "remote work solutions."
I used tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, but more importantly, I dug into their support tickets, sales calls, and customer interviews to understand the language their audience actually used. The disconnect between company messaging and customer language was massive.
Step 2: Content Architecture, Not Site Architecture
Traditional web design starts with a sitemap: Homepage → About → Services → Contact. My SEO-first approach started with content clusters: What are all the ways people search for solutions to the problem your business solves?
For an e-commerce client selling handmade jewelry, instead of starting with product categories, I mapped out the entire customer journey: "anniversary gift ideas" → "personalized jewelry for wife" → "custom necklace designs" → specific product pages. Each search query became a potential entry point.
Step 3: Multiple Entry Points Strategy
The biggest mindset shift was this: 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.
I restructured sites so that someone could land on any page and understand: what this company does, how it helps them, and what their next step should be. This meant every page needed its own mini-conversion funnel.
Step 4: Design to Support SEO, Not Override It
Once I understood what content needed to exist and how people would find it, then I designed around that structure. The visual design became a tool to make the SEO-driven content more engaging and trustworthy, not the primary driver of site architecture.
This approach led to sites that looked different from typical web design trends, but converted traffic at much higher rates because the content actually matched what visitors were looking for.
Traffic Reality
Design-focused sites get 500-2000 monthly visitors. SEO-focused sites get 15,000+ within 6 months.
Content Strategy
SEO-first means building content around search intent, not company structure.
Business Impact
Revenue follows traffic. Beautiful sites with no visitors generate zero sales.
Mindset Shift
Every page is a potential entry point, not just the homepage.
The transformation was dramatic. For clients who implemented this SEO-first approach, I tracked these specific improvements:
Traffic Growth: Within 6 months, SEO-focused sites were generating 10-15x more organic traffic than design-first sites. One SaaS client went from 800 monthly visitors to 12,000 monthly visitors by restructuring their content around actual search queries.
Conversion Quality: Counterintuitively, the "less beautiful" SEO-focused sites had higher conversion rates. Why? Because visitors were finding exactly what they searched for, creating much stronger purchase intent.
Cost Efficiency: Clients stopped spending money on paid ads to drive traffic to their beautiful websites. Organic search became their primary acquisition channel.
Revenue Impact: The e-commerce jewelry client I mentioned saw a 300% increase in online sales within 8 months, not because we improved their checkout process, but because we made their products discoverable to people who were actually shopping for them.
The most surprising result was how this affected their paid advertising. When they did run ads, the SEO-optimized landing pages converted much better because the messaging was already aligned with what people were actively searching for.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons I learned from switching to an SEO-first approach:
Distribution beats perfection: A mediocre website that people can find will always outperform a perfect website that nobody visits
Search intent reveals true customer language: How you describe your service and how customers search for it are often completely different
Every page needs a purpose: If a page doesn't answer a specific search query, it probably shouldn't exist
Design should amplify content, not compete with it: The best web design makes SEO-driven content more engaging and trustworthy
Timing matters: Build for discoverability first, optimize for conversion second
Most businesses need traffic more than they need design: You can always improve aesthetics later, but without visitors, there's no business to improve
SEO-first doesn't mean ugly: Some of the best-converting sites I've built started with keyword research and ended up looking great because the design supported the content strategy
What I'd do differently: I wish I had started tracking these metrics from day one. The difference between design-first and SEO-first approaches is so dramatic that it should inform every web development decision.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing this approach:
Map your entire customer journey through search queries
Create landing pages for each use case, not just features
Build your content around problem-solving, not product promotion
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores applying this framework:
Research how customers actually search for your products
Create category pages around search intent, not inventory structure
Optimize product descriptions for discovery, not just conversion