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October 6, 2025Sergei Solod1 min read

From Frontend Work to Hands-On SEO

I built a Next.js side project to learn SEO, and Yandex ended up outperforming Google by a wide margin.

SEONext.jsFrontendYandexGoogleLearning

🚀 Learning SEO as a Frontend Developer

I have a big task coming up at work: building a solo project where SEO is critical. It will be built with 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 it was live, 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 the traffic. Yandex indexed my pages much faster and gave me far more detailed error reports, which helped me fix issues I probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

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