Challenge

The site was already attracting attention from designers. But without a blog, structured content, or SEO foundation, that momentum risked plateauing. The challenge was to build on that success and unlock long-term search performance through smart, sustainable optimization.

The beauty of Designsystems.surf? It started with credibility. Ilya Greben - already respected in design circles - launched the project and designers naturally gravitated toward it before any SEO strategy existed.

To learn how the project turned that early momentum into steady search growth, we sat down with Hanna Matsiyeuskaya, the SEO manager. She says she joined the team “completely by accident” — but today, she plays a key role in turning Designsystems.surf into a leading platform in its niche.

• So, Hanna, when did SEO become a focus for the project?

Together with the project manager, we decided that the website needed to be “tidied up” to give it growth, namely natural growth, which is now based on very soft SEO, since Google has been updating frequently lately.

• What made you realize there was SEO potential in the design systems niche?

The first thing that caught my eye was the lack of good tags that could give great potential, that could be even more useful. We immediately wanted to improve them. And here’s how the search engine reacted to our content updates (we made our first changes at the end of January):

(screenshot from Ahrefs)

• Did you analyze any competitors or benchmark sites before getting started?

Yes, of course — this is one of the fundamentals of SEO: analyze your competitors and try to outperform them in every aspect. That means using different tags, creating unique content, creating a strategy for effective link building, promoting your brand at the same level (or higher), and identifying niche opportunities and traffic sources that others may have overlooked.

• What was the first sign that organic traffic could be a major growth channel?

Of course, there was a clear demand. At first, I did not really understand whether all pages would be promoted, I thought it would only be design system pages. But when I started collecting keywords and saw the traffic potential for each keyword, I realized that we could target almost every page on the site and get it into organic search results.

• How did you approach keyword research for such a specific niche?

At first I had to study the site for a long time, and it's true that very little was clear in the beginning. But gradually, I started to dig deeper, explore the market, and found quite a lot of keywords for the most popular design systems - and then for the entire site.

The strategy is still evolving: so far, we’ve proposed only a few content changes and have primarily focused on improving the site’s performance in search results.

Approach

In this section, Hanna explains what was prioritized, what tools helped surface technical gaps, and how the team is laying the groundwork for long-term SEO health.

• What technical aspects did you focus on first (e.g., site speed, structure, indexing)?

When we took on the technical audit of the site and ran it through a checklist of SEO-critical issues, we found very few serious problems. In fact, we realized that there were few serious problems, and we directly reported this: that the site is quite good. 

The most serious problems that were (and sometimes appear now) are broken links to external resources. Since the site often refers to various design systems, you need to carefully and constantly monitor their updates. For example, one design system recently announced it was being discontinued, and updates like that need to be addressed quickly to maintain site quality and SEO performance.

(screenshot from Screaming Frog - Broken links)

• Did you implement structured data or schema? If so, what kind and why?

So far, we have added one type of structured data - Website markup - for correct indication of the company name in snippets. 

(screenshot from validator.schema.org)

Several other micro-markup types are in the pipeline:

1. Organization, to boost brand recognition and trust; 

2. Article, to improve the visibility and structure of blog content in search results;

3. and BreadcrumbList, which helps improve both navigation and how the site’s structure is presented in SERPs.

• Which types of content have worked best for SEO — ranking pages, blog posts, comparisons?

Content performance doesn't have a clear winner. Each improvement contributes to the overall SEO impact. Not surprisingly, the design system pages attract the most visitors. What's interesting though is that new blog articles sometimes appear in Google Discover, suggesting potential for expanded content visibility down the road.

Hanna sticks to tools she's mastered completely. For tracking keyword positions, backlink growth, and site performance metrics, she relies on Ahrefs. When it comes to technical audits and regular checks, Screaming Frog helps her identify issues like broken links or indexing problems. She also uses Netpeak for deeper technical analysis, examining not just Designsystems.surf but competitor sites too. For polishing content, Grammarly is her final quality check.

While AI has become standard in many content operations, the Dzeya team has grown increasingly wary. Recent Google updates appear to reward fully human-written content. We avoid keyword stuffing and focus on a natural writing style. Instead, we incorporate LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) words that support the topics organically. This is a win-win tactic: it creates content that not only feels authentic but also performs well in search results.

We've now restricted AI-generated text and implemented platforms like GPTZero and Copyleaks to detect and minimize AI influence in their published materials.

Results

After just a few months of focused SEO work, Designsystems.surf saw dramatic gains across nearly every key metric. The gains in organic traffic, keyword coverage, and indexation show that even modest changes, when strategic, can drive impact.

• What metrics do you focus on most — rankings, clicks, engagement?

As a result of page optimization, we look at the growth of site impressions. We also use the number of user clicks as a key indicator of how those impressions are converting.

(screenshot from Google Search Console)

• Can you share any before/after numbers or a big win that surprised you?

The site is developing rapidly, with new design systems constantly being added. This is a sign of its growing value in the design community. 

This steady expansion is reflected in the data: over the past three months, impressions grew from 6,457 to 9,766. The screenshot from Google Search Console below highlights this consistent upward trend in page visibility.

This is also evident in the rapidly growing number of keywords across the site — spanning branded, informational, and commercial intents.

(screenshot from Ahrefs)

• How long did it take to start seeing significant organic growth?

Just a couple of weeks after we started making changes to the site, we started seeing results. I think brand recognition also played a huge role here as well: the company was likely already familiar to many users in the design community, which gave us a solid foundation to build on.  But what matters most is that our improvements are made with users in mind, not just search engines. We prioritize expertise and quality above all.

Over the last 2 months, after making changes to the design system pages, site visits from search engines increased by 27.3% compared to the previous two-month period, when only minimal changes had been made.

(screenshot from Google Analytics)

Over the past 3 months, the number of impressions in Google search results has grown from 6,457 in early February to 9,766 in early May.

(screenshot from Google Search Console)

Also, over the last three months, many keyword positions have improved as well, and, as the screenshot shows, they're fiercely contested terms in a crowded space. That's what makes their consistent ranking improvements so significant. Despite facing tough competition, their positions for these valuable terms have been rising steadily month over month.

(screenshot from Ahrefs)

• What do most people underestimate about SEO in niche projects like this?

It’s not just about the niche. I’d say it’s more about the general underestimation of SEO. Of course, both niche and competition play a role, but many website owners expect unrealistically fast results,while the competition is off the charts. 

It is important to understand that sometimes it really takes a long time, sometimes a little faster, but still, you need to be prepared for the fact that the results may appear even after six months. Still, it’s absolutely worth the wait. Everything is connected: user behavior, search engine perception, site history, backlinks - all this together gives results.

Next Moves and Hard-Earned Advice

• What’s your current SEO focus for the site — scaling content, link building, something else?

We haven't started implementing a link building strategy yet, but it’s on the roadmap for the near future. Another key focus will be the development of a blog — something the site currently lacks but truly needs. Our goal is to build it out and make it genuinely valuable for the audience.

• What’s one piece of advice you’d give someone optimizing a niche project for SEO?

Don't rush or overdo it with content generation. Google has recently been rolling out frequent updates that prioritize quality content above all. That’s why content should now be a top priority. Find a strong copywriter — or even a few — who truly understand the niche, or take the time to help them get immersed in it. That investment pays off.

By Polina Reut, Hanna Matsiyeuskaya from Dzeya team