How I wish that were the case. Content on a personal website--no matter how excellent--will be invisible and nobody will ever see it -- unless you do heroic SEO or get lucky in an inexplicable way.
Personal anecdote: I created a website on a particular subject that interests me. I've been told by friends and strangers that it is extremely well written and gives a better explanation of the topic than anything else they've seen (at least during the period when I worked on the site). The site has no analytics, no ads, nothing controversial. Just a clean design with text, diagrams, and photos. Google will not find my site using any appropriate keyword. Not even after pages of search results. But Google has indexed it. If I search for "an exact sentence from the site quoted like this", Google finds it.
Self-hosted content in today's web does not survive on merit alone even when it's focused, useful, and free. That's been my experience anyway.