How We Built Farewell.ph: The Technical Story Behind a Marketplace That Ranked Fast
· Case Studies
A behind-the-scenes look at the architecture, stack decisions, and SEO engineering that took Farewell.ph from zero to 205,000+ Google impressions in under four months. Written for founders and developers.
The technical story behind Farewell.ph, a funeral services marketplace in the Philippines. Stack: Laravel (backend, 400+ database-generated provider and location pages), Vue + Inertia.js (frontend interactivity with server-rendered responses crawlers can read), MySQL (full-text search), Algolia (instant location search), Tailwind CSS (dignified design system). The key decision was choosing a stack that serves both users and crawlers — Inertia gave server-rendered SEO without sacrificing SPA-like UX. The biggest ranking driver was content architecture: pillar guides (2,000-3,000 words each) plus 400+ unique spoke pages, with programmatic internal linking from database relationships. Technical SEO baked in from commit one: server-rendered meta, structured data (LocalBusiness, FAQPage, Service), clean URLs, generated sitemap, sub-3-second loads, mobile-first. Five generalizable principles: choose a stack serving users and crawlers, design content architecture before building, make every page genuinely unique, bake in technical SEO from the start, and let product values show in UX.
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