Update: the site grew, and here's an SEO mistake I almost made

Last time I posted about how DormTool came to be (the freshman move-in disaster + helping my cousin pack). Quick update, plus a mistake I almost made this week that might be useful if you're running a content-heavy site solo.

Progress

The move-out checklist and first-apartment checklist I mentioned wanting to build? Both live now. Up to 13 tools and 20+ blog posts at this point.

This week's lesson

Going through Search Console, I found two pairs of articles quietly competing for the exact same keywords — one pair on calculating GPA, another on cleaning your dorm room. Same search terms, traffic split between two pages, neither one ranking.

Fix: read both articles in full side by side — not just the titles. Similar titles don't necessarily mean duplicate content. I almost merged two other articles (both about rent budgeting) because the titles looked alike, then actually read them and realized they served completely different audiences. Left those alone.

For the two pairs that were genuinely redundant: pulled whatever unique content the weaker page had into the stronger one, 301-redirected the weaker page, and tracked down every internal link pointing to it.

Also caught something dumber while I was in there: one article had zero impressions in Search Console. Turned out it had just never been submitted for indexing. Requested indexing manually, done. Easy to miss, embarrassing when you find it.

Side note

Also looked into a new topic (summer subletting) that seemed like an obvious content gap. Checked actual search volume in Google Keyword Planner before writing anything — turned out almost nobody searches for it. Skipped it. Data over gut feeling, even when the gut feeling seems obvious.

If you're doing solo content/SEO work, hopefully that's useful — check the data before trusting the intuition, and fix what you find instead of just piling on more content.

Same link as always: dormtool.com.