I’m Using My Own Site as a Live SEO Experiment

Something shifted recently.

I’ve been writing more. Not just technically — more genuinely. Posts about what I’m building, decisions I’m working through, things I’ve learned building Jetdomains. And I noticed that the act of writing has started to change how I think about issamzk.com itself.

For a long time, the site was just a portfolio. A brochure. Somewhere to point people so they could get the gist of who I am and what I do. I had basic analytics running - enough to see that someone visited, not enough to understand why or from where.

I think a lot of people treat their personal site this way. Especially developers and founders. You get the domain, you build something clean, you deploy it, and then you largely forget about it unless you’re actively job hunting or something breaks.

Maybe that resonates.

The gap I hadn’t noticed

I never set up Google Search Console.

If you have a site and you care about whether people find it, GSC is the first thing you do. It tells you what queries your pages are showing up for, how many times they appeared in search results, and how many people actually clicked through.

I didn’t have it. For a while. On a site I was hoping would land me work or clients.

My excuse — if I’m honest with myself — is that I was treating the site as a presentation layer. Something to look at, not something to grow. I wasn’t thinking about it as a channel or a compounding asset. I was thinking of it as a business card that happened to have a /blog route.

The shift happened when I started writing more regularly and started to understand, slowly, that the blog wasn’t decorative. It was the actual thing. Each post is a permanent page that can be discovered by someone I’ve never met, who was searching for exactly the problem I was writing about.

That’s when the brochure framing fell apart.

Setting it up, finally

Google Search Console takes about ten minutes to set up. You verify ownership of your domain — in my case straightforward because issamzk.com is registered on Jetdomains, so I could add the DNS TXT record directly without leaving the dashboard — and then you submit your sitemap.

After that, you wait. Google needs to crawl your pages before anything shows up.

A few days in, I checked the Indexing report. Some of my pages had already been discovered. One of them had received an impression — meaning it appeared in someone’s search results, somewhere, for some query.

One impression. That’s a small number. But it’s not zero, and I hadn’t done anything to get it. The page just existed, Google found it, and it was relevant enough to show to a real person searching for something real.

That’s the thing about building on your own domain. The compounding starts quietly.

The question behind the experiment

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to, and the reason I’m calling this an experiment rather than a strategy.

I don’t fully know what I’m doing yet, because it’s personal. I don’t have a brief - I have hypotheses. I write about things I’m genuinely working through — Astro, infrastructure decisions, what a CMS really is, why I built JetDomains — and I’m testing whether that kind of honest, specific writing finds an audience organically.

The alternative is to reverse-engineer search demand, write for keywords, optimise titles. That approach works. It’s also not something I’m willing to do, at least not now. The writing needs to stay honest or it stops being worth doing.

So the experiment is: write what’s real, publish consistently, treat the domain as a living repository rather than a static document, and see what the data says over time.

GSC is how I’ll measure whether it’s working.

What a domain actually is

I spend a lot of time thinking about this because of Jetdomains.

When someone registers a domain, the immediate question is usually now what? They have a name pointed at a server, maybe a basic site up, and the gap between “I have a domain” and “I have something worth finding” feels enormous.

But I think that framing misses something important.

A domain isn’t just an address. It’s a stake in the ground. It’s the one place on the internet that you fully own and control — not rented from a platform, not subject to an algorithm deciding who sees your content, not at risk of disappearing if a company changes its terms.

Everything you publish to your own domain accumulates there. The post you wrote two years ago is still indexed. The audience you built on a social platform can find where you actually live. If the platform changes, declines, or disappears, your content doesn’t go with it.

Your domain is your owned content repository. Not in a technical sense — in a strategic sense. It’s where you should put the things worth keeping.

Social media is the distribution layer. Your site is the source of truth.

Most people have it backwards, or they’ve defaulted to treating social as the real thing and their domain as the trophy case. The trophy case doesn’t compound. The repository does.

What I’m watching

Over the next few months I’m tracking a few things on issamzk.com:

Impressions and clicks from GSC — just like any social media platform, Google tracks how many times you show up in someones feed.

Whether the writing leads anywhere concrete — a Jetdomains registration from a blog reader, a conversation from someone who found the site through a post, a project enquiry. These are harder to track but not impossible.

The frequency effect — whether writing more often makes the writing better, or just produces more of the same. I think it does make it better.

One impression is where this starts. Let’s see where it goes.

If you’ve had your domain for a while and you haven’t set up GSC yet — do it today. It takes ten minutes and you’ll immediately understand things about your site you couldn’t see before.

And if you don’t have a domain yet: jetdomains.co.za. Start there. The rest follows.