I Replaced Google Search With My Own Blog
It took 1,982 articles to get there
I Googled something the other day. A Substack SEO thing. How to structure posts for search. I clicked on the first result that looked useful.
It was my article.
I didn’t even recognize it at first. The title looked familiar, but I click on a lot of articles. Then I saw my name. Then I saw my face. Then I sat there for a second and thought about what just happened.
I Googled my own question and found my own answer. And the answer was pretty good, actually. 😜
This keeps happening more often now.
The numbers
I have 899 posts on Medium. 1,022 on Substack. And some more on my blog. And that’s only the English content.
A lot of overlap between them because I cross-post a lot.
Still, that’s 1,900+ published pieces. Over five years in English. Many of them about the same handful of topics. Apple, creator economy, SEO, productivity, Substack, Medium, writing tools.
At some point, when you write about the same things for long enough, you become your own reference library. You didn’t plan it. You just keep showing up.
How it started
I didn’t set out to build a personal knowledge base. I set out to write articles that people would read and, ideally, pay for.
The knowledge base part was sort of an accident.
I’d be setting up something on Substack and think, “wait, didn’t I write about this?” And then I’d search my own archive and find a step-by-step guide I wrote eight months ago. With screenshots. With specific settings. With the exact workaround for the thing that was bugging me.
Past me was helpful sometimes. Other times, past me wrote something confidently wrong. (More on that later.)
The SEO side-effect
Writing articles on your Substack, Medium, and blog, on topics you actually work with every day means Google starts indexing them. People start finding them. And then your start finding them, too.
I write about Substack SEO because I do Substack SEO. I write about Medium earnings because I track my Medium earnings. I write about Mac tools because I use Mac tools.
None of this is theoretical for me. Every article is something I ran into, figured out, and wrote down so I wouldn’t have to figure it out again.
Turns out, that’s also what makes articles rank. Google likes specifics. Real numbers. First-person experience.
I didn’t optimize a lot for this. I just wrote about what I know. And what I know happens to be a good niche.
What I search for
It’s interesting how specific some of these searches are.
“How to schedule Substack posts without sending emails.” Found my own article.
“Medium two story limit per day.” Found my own article.
“Cookie banner GDPR.” Found my own article. (Okay, I found a LOT of articles for that one. But mine was in there.)
The pattern is the same. I run into a problem. I think, “someone must have written about this.” I Google it. And the someone is sometimes me. Even AI sometimes recommends my own articles now. Pretty cool.
Still, a weird feeling, too. Like finding a note you left for yourself in a jacket pocket.
The compounding thing
Blogging long-term means each article is a tiny investment. Most of them do nothing for months. Some do nothing forever. BUT… a few of them start showing up in search results. And once they do, they keep showing up.
My $0 marketing stack article explains this a bit.
That’s the compounding effect. You don’t see it for a long time. And then one day you Google your own problem and your own blog is the answer.
I’ve been writing online for almost 20 years at this point. With many short and long breaks in-between. The compounding only kicked in when I started writing consistently in English and focused on a few topic clusters.
Before that, it was just scattered content in two languages going nowhere in particular.
Downsides
Some of my old articles are wrong. Not opinion-wrong. Factually wrong. Platforms change. Pricing changes. Features get removed. I wrote about a feature that doesn’t exist anymore. That article still gets traffic. That’s not great.
Updating old articles is somewhat tedious. I have 1900+ of them and many need a refresh. I keep a mental list. The mental list keeps growing. (I should probably write it down somewhere.)
There’s also the echo chamber problem. When your primary reference is yourself, you may stop looking for other perspectives. I Google something, find my own article, and just go with whatever I said last time. Without checking if anything changed. Without reading what anyone else thinks.
That’s lazy.
Also, not every article I wrote is useful. Nope. Some of them are thin. Some are repetitive. I’ve written about Medium vs Substack at least four times from slightly different angles. Is that a knowledge base or just someone who keeps forgetting what they already said?
Probably both.
Why I keep doing it
Can’t help it I guess 😅
Before I had this archive, I’d spend 30 minutes searching for an answer, reading three different blog posts from people I don’t know, written for audiences I’m not part of, with advice that may or may not apply to my setup.
Now I search, find my own article, and know EXACTLY how it applies. Because I wrote it about my situation. With my tools. For my workflow.
It’s not a replacement for Google. Obviously. It’s Google with a filter that prioritizes someone who knows my exact context. Me.
If you want to do this yourself, write about what you do. Write about the problems you solve. Write about the tools you use. Be specific. Use real numbers. And do it for years.
If you want to get your Substack content ranking in search, I put together a Substack SEO guide that covers the technical side of it. But the core strategy is just: keep writing about what you know.
The Bottom Line
I have almost 2,000 articles across 2–3 platforms. That took five years of consistent writing and about fifteen years of inconsistent writing before that.
I didn’t plan to become my own search engine. It’s fun to see, though.
The cool part isn’t that I can find my own articles on Google. The cool part is that I wrote enough to have an answer for a lot of the questions I keep asking.