SEO with Next.js

SEO - Search engine optimization: the process of making your site better for search engines One of the most important tasks I was assigned since I joined my current company was to make the website searchable in the Internet. Thus, to make the website optimized for the search engines. Additionally, after making the website searchable, increase the rankings position in search engine results page (SERP).
SEO is particularly important because it can bring organic traffic to your site.

Next.js framework for SEO

As soon as I heard of SEO, I thought of using Next.js for SEO. One can see why by reading their docs or their learn section : Introduction to SEO

Why is SEO so important?

SEO is the key to increased conversion and confidence in your brand. Higher search ranking placement equates to more organic visitors. Search engine organic traffic – visitors who come to your site through clicking a result in a search engine – is key to many businesses for three reasons:

1. Qualitative – Increased chance that visitors turn into customers.
2. Trustable – Higher confidence in your brand or mission.
3. Low-Cost – Aside from the time and effort spent, having good SEO practices that result in higher search engine ranking is free. There is no direct cost to appear in top organic search results positions.

Three Pillars of Optimization

The process of optimizing a website can be divided into three main pillars:

1. Technical – Optimize your website for crawling and web performance.
2. Creation – Create a content strategy to target specific keywords.
3. Popularity – Boost your site's presence online so search engines know you are a trusted source. This is done through the use of backlinks – third-party sites that link back to your site.

Importance of SEO Next.js provides you a lot of freedom and the tools you need in terms of technical SEO.

• It offers different rendering strategies:
  • Static Site Generation (SSG)
  • Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
  • Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR)
  • Client Side Rendering (CSR)
• Head tag implementation for the site's metadata such as :
  • title, description, open graph, canonical, structured data and JSON-LD.
• Good DX environment to make your site performance optimized

All of them which are fundamental for a website's SEO.

SEO in C2C ecommerce company

I will write more about the long journey and ongoing journey of improving the company's website's SEO. One of the first steps improving the SEO was implementing and migrating from a create-react-app template to a Next.js framework.