My SEO Strategy as a Solo Developer

I built API Alerts. It’s a notification routing service for developers. I’ve been working on it for a while now and it’s at the point where the product is solid but nobody really knows about it.

I ran an Ahrefs authority check today. apialerts.com is at 2.9. mononz.com (this site) is at 0. Literally zero. That’s where we’re starting from.

I don’t have a marketing budget. I don’t have a team. I have a blog and some spare time between my day job and playing with my cat. So here’s what I’m actually doing.

The problem

I can build things. I’m pretty good at that. What I’m not good at is getting people to find them. I built API Alerts, I built Hooks (a free webhook tester), I built Hapi (API health checks). They all work. They’re all useful. But if nobody knows they exist, it doesn’t really matter.

SEO feels like the only sustainable option for a solo dev. Paid ads cost money I don’t want to spend. Social media is a treadmill. But content that ranks on Google keeps working while I sleep.

What I’m doing

This blog. You’re reading it. I’m writing here on mononz.com about what I’m building, then cross-posting the good stuff to dev.to. The canonical URL points back here so that Google credits mononz.com as the source. dev.to gives me reach and community discovery, mononz.com gets the authority over time. That’s the theory anyway.

Free tools as awareness. Hooks and Hapi aren’t just side projects. If someone searches “free webhook tester” or “api health check tool” and finds one of my tools, they also find API Alerts. They’re top-of-funnel plays that happen to be genuinely useful on their own.

The API Alerts blog. Product-focused content that targets high-intent keywords. Stuff like “how to get CI/CD build notifications” or “monitor GitHub Actions with push alerts.” People searching for those are already looking for a solution. That blog lives at apialerts.com/blog.

dev.to and Indie Hackers. Cross-posting from here when a post fits those audiences. The dev.to community is great for reach and the domain authority doesn’t hurt. I also have an API Alerts dev.to org but I’m honestly not sure how much I’ll use that vs just posting from my personal account.

Twitter/X. I have @api_alerts set up. Haven’t posted anything yet. I need to start.

What I’m not doing

I’m not doing outreach or guest posting. I’m not buying backlinks. I’m not doing keyword research spreadsheets. Maybe I should be, but realistically I know I won’t keep that up. I’d rather spend that time building things and writing about them.

Will it work?

I genuinely don’t know. Domain authority of 0 is humbling. But it was always going to start at 0 and the only way to change that is to start publishing and see what happens.

My friend has a personal blog and one of his posts ranks 3rd on Google for a specific Swift query. He didn’t write it for SEO. He just wrote about something he cared about and it happened to be something people search for. That’s basically my entire strategy. Write about real stuff, publish it consistently, and hope some of it sticks.

Check back in 6 months and I’ll let you know how it went.