What actually mattered building a small SEO site from scratch

For the last few weeks I've been building a fan wiki for a three-player co-op game — nine pages, English, no backend, no accounts, no CMS. It exists for one reason: when someone gets stuck and searches for the answer, this should be the thing that shows up.
I'm a developer, not an SEO person, so I wrote down what actually seemed to matter. Some of it is obvious in hindsight. Some of it surprised me.
A static site is not a compromise for this
The whole thing is static HTML on a CDN. I generate the pages in a build step and push a directory. There is nothing to scale, nothing to keep warm, and the pages load before anyone can decide to leave.
The reason I'd pick it again isn't speed, though. It's that there is nothing standing between the reader and the answer. No login wall, no cookie interstitial, no modal asking for an email. If a page exists to answer one question, then every click you add before the answer is a click that costs you the visit.
Structured data was the highest-leverage hour of the project
I added JSON-LD before I had a single visitor, which felt premature at the time. It wasn't.
Most of a page is written for a person. Structured data is the only part written for a machine, and if you don't write it, a machine has to guess what your page is about. It will guess worse than you would.
The other half is that almost nobody fills it in properly. That's not an advantage you have to be clever to earn — it's the one you get for doing the boring thing your competitors skipped.
For a page describing a game, that meant marking up the game itself, the organization behind the site, and the questions as questions — not as a heading that happens to end in a question mark.
Title, description and heading order are most of the work and none of the fun
Every page needs a title written for a search result, a description written to be clicked, and exactly one H1. This is unglamorous, and it is the bulk of the actual effort.
The one rule I'd pass on: write the outline before you write the page. If you can't list the H2s, you don't know what the page is about yet, and no amount of prose will fix that afterwards.
The surprise: being late didn't mean the topic was closed
We started about two weeks after the game launched. When I looked at the results page there were already a dozen sites covering it, several of them far bigger than us. My first instinct was that we'd missed it entirely.
Then I actually read the top results. Most of them answered the same first question and stopped. Sitting right next to it was a second question nobody had written up.
Being late to a topic is not the same as being late to every question inside it. A small site doesn't win the head term. It wins the sentence nobody else bothered to finish.
Tools get linked to. Pages don't.
This is the part that changed how I plan content.
A guide page, however good, is something people read and close. A tool is something people keep open, and occasionally send to a friend. If pages are your only asset, search is your only distribution. If you have one small useful tool, you get a second and weaker channel — people passing the thing around.
So I stopped planning more pages and started planning things that do something. The smallest interaction that turns "I think it says five" into "it says five".
What I don't know yet
I want to be clear that this is a process report, not a results report. The site has almost no visibility right now and I genuinely don't know whether any of it will work.
What I can say is that the checklist turned out to be short and unexciting. Static pages. One clear question per page. Real structured data. An outline before prose. Something interactive that's worth keeping open. Then wait.
There's no trick in there. That was the part I wasn't expecting.