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Frontend to SEO: My Practical Experiment

October 6, 2025 (3mo ago)

SEONext.jsFrontendYandexGoogleLearning

🚀 Learning SEO as a Frontend Developer

I have a big task coming up at work: building a project solo where SEO is critical. It will be built on Next.js, so I decided I needed to stop reading about SEO and start doing it.

My strategy was simple: build a side project on weekends and use it as a testing ground.

Once deployed, I immediately set up Google Search Console. I almost skipped Yandex Webmaster entirely—after all, my content is in English. Why would a Russian search engine care? But on a whim, I submitted the sitemap there too.

Two weeks later, the data shocked me:

  • 👉 Google: 58 visitors
  • 👉 Yandex: 200 visitors

The difference wasn't just traffic. Yandex indexed my pages significantly faster and provided far more detailed error reports, which actually helped me fix issues I wouldn't have noticed otherwise.

I never expected to say this, but Yandex has been the MVP of my SEO learning journey. 🙌