How I Structured SEO for a 20+ Page Indie Site Without Hiring an Agency

Faizan e Bahoo Chaudhry — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:09:44 +0000

I've been building I Am Bored solo, a small games-and-blog site, and doing all the content strategy and technical SEO myself instead of outsourcing it. This post is the actual architecture I landed on: how the content is clustered, what schema goes where, and how internal linking is structured so the site reads as one coherent thing to Google instead of a pile of disconnected pages. Sharing it mostly because most "SEO for developers" content stays abstract, and I wanted to write something with real, checkable examples instead.

The Core Problem With Most Indie Site SEO

Most solo projects end up with a flat pile of pages: a homepage, some feature pages, a blog with no real structure connecting the posts to each other. Each page might individually be fine, but none of them reinforce each other, so Google has no signal that the site has any depth on a given topic. Topical authority isn't really about page count, it's about whether your pages form a legible cluster instead of a scatter plot.

So before writing anything, I mapped out what the actual content clusters should be, and built every new piece to slot into one of them.

Cluster 1: Location-Based "Bored At X" Content

The pillar here is 50 Things to Do When Bored at Home, and every spoke off it follows the same structural pattern: bored in class, bored in the car, bored in a waiting room, bored at night, and bored on a Zoom call.

Each spoke deliberately shares the same shape: split by device availability or environment constraint, one genuinely relevant external citation (not a generic "studies show" link), and a link back to the pillar plus sideways to relevant games. Consistency here matters more than novelty, once a reader (or a crawler) understands the pattern from one post, every other post in the cluster reads as "more of the same trustworthy thing" instead of a one-off.

Cluster 2: Party Games and Questions

This is the highest-traffic-ceiling cluster on the whole site: 150+ Never Have I Ever Questions and 200+ Would You Rather Questions, both paired with actual working interactive versions of the game embedded on the site, not just static text lists like almost every competing page in this space.

That pairing is a real structural advantage, not just a content angle. A list-only competitor page and a page with the same list plus a working game are targeting the same keyword, but they're not really the same product. I built both posts to link to the toy explicitly and repeatedly (contextually, not spammed), since that's the actual differentiator worth reinforcing.

Cluster 3: Game Strategy Guides

Every strategy post in this cluster links to its game two ways, and vice versa. How to Beat 2048, Whack-a-Mole High Score Tips, Flappy Bird: Why You Keep Dying at the Same Pipe, and How to Draw a Perfect Circle Freehand all follow this pattern.

This cluster had the best competition-to-effort ratio of anything I researched. Whack-a-Mole specifically had almost no dedicated strategy content anywhere online when I checked, most competing pages are the game itself with a single throwaway tip. Writing an actual, specific technique breakdown (eye tracking, hand positioning, pacing as difficulty ramps) for a topic with that little existing competition is about as close to a guaranteed foothold as SEO gets.

One honest note since I want this post to be accurate, not just a highlight reel: I initially assumed a couple of these topics (Flappy Bird tips specifically) had near-zero competition based on general reputation, and when I actually checked live search results, that assumption was wrong, there's real, recently-published competing content there now. Worth actually verifying competition live rather than trusting a topic's older reputation, I got burned by that assumption more than once during this project.

Cluster 4: Fiction

Four original short stories live under /blog/fiction/: The Stenographer's Echo, The Floor That Isn't There, The Camera Trap, and The Neighbor Who Waves First.

These use a distinct schema type, ShortStory instead of Article, which is a small detail but worth doing correctly, it lets Google (and eventually AI answer engines doing direct retrieval) understand these pages as a different content type from the listicles, not just more blog posts competing for the same intent.

Schema Strategy, By Content Type

This is the part most "add schema to your site" advice skips: which schema type for which content, and why.

Games: Game/SoftwareApplication plus FAQPage for the how-to-play block
Listicle/informational posts: Article plus FAQPage, matched word-for-word to the visible FAQ copy (schema and visible content drifting apart is a real, checkable trust signal Google can penalize)
Technique posts with sequential steps: Article plus HowTo, like the 2048 strategy guide, where the steps genuinely are sequential and benefit from being marked up that way
Fiction: ShortStory, no FAQPage, since forcing an FAQ onto a piece of fiction breaks the reading experience for no real SEO benefit
Homepage: WebSite with a SearchAction, plus a conservative FAQPage covering only what's genuinely visible on the page ## The Technical Foundation Underneath All of This

None of the content strategy matters if the technical basics are wrong, so briefly, what's actually running under the hood: Astro static output, @astrojs/sitemap for automatic sitemap generation, canonical tags pointing to the final production domain even while still testing on a preview URL (small thing, saves a real headache during domain migration), and a robots.txt that's deliberately minimal, allow everything except nothing, since there's no admin panel or checkout flow to hide.

What I'd Tell Past Me

Build the cluster map before writing anything, not after. I wrote a handful of posts early on before I had the cluster structure clear in my head, and went back later to retrofit internal links between them. It worked, but it's meaningfully more effort than just knowing the cluster a post belongs to before you start writing it.

If you're building something similar solo, the actual takeaway isn't any single tactic here, it's that a pile of good pages and a cluster of good pages are different products, even when the page-level content quality is identical. The linking structure is the part that's easy to skip and expensive to retrofit.

DEV Community: Faizan e Bahoo Chaudhry