The SEO Experiment: Two Months In

Two months ago I added a sitemap to this site. That was the last post in this series — I Added a Sitemap. Google Finally Found My Blog.

At the time, the win was moving from 1 indexed page to 2. Small number, but directionally correct.

Here’s where things stand now.

The indexing picture

42 pages indexed. 10 not indexed — 6 are redirects, 4 were crawled but Google decided not to include them.

The redirects make sense. The 4 crawled-but-not-indexed pages are less clear — likely thin content or pages Google didn’t find valuable enough to keep. Not a crisis, just a signal to pay attention to.

The trajectory on the indexing graph is what I find genuinely encouraging. It climbed slowly at first, then more consistently as I kept writing. Each post adds a page, each page gets picked up faster than the last. The compounding is real, it’s just slow.

The performance numbers — and what they actually mean

This is where it gets interesting.

Over the last 3 months: 77 impressions, 0 clicks, average position 8.3.

That’s a number that could read as discouraging. You’re showing up in search results 77 times and nobody clicked. But I think that framing misses what’s actually happening.

77 impressions means Google is surfacing these pages for real queries. Position 8.3 means I’m showing up — just not on page 1. Page 1 is positions 1–10. I’m sitting just outside that, or hovering at the bottom of it.

The gap between impressions and clicks is the gap between being indexed and actually ranking. Getting indexed is step one. It’s necessary but not sufficient. The next step is earning a higher position, which comes from the content being more useful, more specific, or more trusted than what’s already there.

That’s not a technical fix. That’s a content quality problem. Which is a solvable problem.

The query data is the most useful thing here

The top query driving impressions is: “node.js vs tailwind css” — 12 impressions, 0 clicks.

I wrote a post called Why Tailwind CSS Is My Go-To for Node.js Frontends. It’s not a comparison post — it’s about why I use Tailwind in Node.js projects. But the title pulled in people searching for a comparison between the two.

Which is a bit funny, because Node.js and Tailwind CSS aren’t competing tools. One is a runtime, one is a CSS framework. You’d typically use both. But people are searching for it, which tells me something: there’s genuine confusion out there about what these tools are and where they fit.

That confusion is a blog post waiting to happen. Something like Node.js and Tailwind CSS are not the same kind of tool — here’s what they each do. It would be genuinely useful, it would target a query people are actually typing, and it’s something I can write accurately because I use both.

This is how SEO actually works in practice. You publish something, Google starts surfacing it for queries, the query data tells you what people were looking for when they found you, and that shapes what you write next. It’s a feedback loop. The content strategy emerges from the data rather than being imposed on it upfront.

What two months of consistent writing actually produces

42 indexed pages. A handful of queries. No clicks yet — but the average position tells me I’m close to the territory where clicks happen, not far from it.

The realistic picture for anyone who’s wondering what SEO looks like on a real site, not a case study:

• Months 1–2 are mostly infrastructure. Getting indexed, getting crawled, fixing the things that were broken.
• Month 3 is when you start to see the first query data. It’s small, but it’s signal.
• The clicks come when the position improves, and the position improves when the content improves.

There’s no shortcut in that sequence. But it’s also worth saying — this is what it looks like for a personal site, writing about whatever I’m genuinely working through, without a deliberate keyword strategy upfront.

It doesn’t always look like this. If you’re more intentional about what you write — targeting queries people are actively searching for, in a niche with real demand — the curve is different. The indexing is faster, the impressions come sooner, the clicks follow.

I can actually show that with Jetdomains, which has a different content setup and a more defined audience. That comparison is worth a post of its own — same experiment, different variables, different results. Coming soon.

issamzk.com is registered and hosted on Jetdomains. If you want your domain and hosting sorted simply, start there.