How to Make Your React Website SEO-Friendly?

Lead conversions are always better if your website ranks as it starts getting a lot of traffic. When discussing JavaScript libraries that enhance your website SEO-friendly, React JS and SEO come into play, with React JS standing out at the top.

This article will help you make the React website SEO-friendly, address the challenges you will face in optimizing for SEO, and highlight the React SEO best practices to follow.

What is a Single Page Application?

A single-page application (SPA) revolutionizes web app design by loading all its content through a single HTML page, enhancing responsiveness and user experience.

Through JavaScript APIs like Fetch and XMLHttpRequest, the page dynamically updates its content, creating a seamless and interactive browsing environment.

The SPAs are essential to website development because of their user-friendly flow and responsiveness. If you want to make the Single-page applications quite SEO-friendly, then it will be a difficult task.

But if you are using the JavaScript framework for front-end like Vue, Angular and ReactJS, then it will be easy.

Why Should You Use React?

Here are the reasons why you should use React:

Code Stability 

Whenever you think of using ReactJS, you should never be worried about the stability of the code. When you need to change anything in the code, the changes should be done in a particular part, but the parent structure will never be changed. This is one of the reasons why ReactJS should be selected because of stable coding.

Workable development toolset

While working with ReactJS, the coding procedure can be simplified because you have a developer toolkit. This toolkit will make the development procedure easy and help web developers save time. This toolkit is compatible with both Firefox and Chrome and is accessible as a browser extension

React JS is declarative

In React JS, the declarative nature of the DOM is emphasized. The interactive user interface can be created with the changing components, and ReactJS updates its DOM automatically.

It means that you are never required to interact with the DOM.

Making interactive user interface debugging all of them is straightforward. You need to change the state of the program and also check the user interface should look good.

Changes can also be implemented without thinking about DOM.

Allows you to speed up the development

The ReactJS will help developers use every component of the application for both client-side and server-side, allowing the developers not to spend a lot of money on coding.

Many developers can work with the application’s components, and the amendments made will not cause any issues to the application logic.

What is SEO, and what are its benefits for you?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is best known for increasing the quantity and quality of web traffic for the website and increasing the ranking and visibility on search engines.

The primary objective of SEO is to enhance the visibility of a web app in search engines such as Google and Bing, ensuring it appears prominently when the target audience searches for specific keywords.

Most SEO efforts are concentrated on optimizing apps for Google, which held a remarkable 92.16% search engine market share in 2020, as reported by StatCounter.

Backlinko reveals that 75% of all user clicks are directed to the top three websites in search engine results.

“In contrast, websites appearing on the second results page and beyond receive a mere 0.78% of clicks. Consequently, digital businesses are fiercely competing to secure a coveted spot on the first page of search results for SEO React JS websites.

React and SEO: What’s the trouble?

ReactJs is known to be one of the open-source libraries of JavaScript that can be used for making responsive and fast user interfaces.

It is one of the best choices for creating static, single-page, and dynamic web apps.

The web platform is made with the help of a technology stack that can resemble various levels of SEO-friendliness.

Indexing SPA is Challenging

The SPA concept is to showcase a single page at a time. Also, the rest of the data will be loaded only when required. The user can browse the whole website via a single tab; the other pages are also gone.

The concept is quite the opposite of traditional multi-page applications. Also, these SPAs are responsive and faster; users will receive a seamless access experience. But here, the issues will occur when discussing SEO for SPAs.

The SPAs also take time to reflect the required content on the Google bots and if the bot can be seen crawling the web pages.

It will interpret it as empty if it does not have access to the content. If the Google bot can’t see the content, it will revert the website or app ranking.

Code Errors in JavaScript

HTML and JavaScript web pages are crawled differently via Google bots. Even a single error in JavaScript code can render page crawling impossible.

This is because the JavaScript parser will never accept any mistake. In this case, both the character and parser will be joined at a point that can stop the current script parsing and will interpret it as SyntaxError.

Also, it is a single typo or error, and it will make the whole script irrelevant. If the script has some issue, then the content will never be visible to any bot. 

Also Read : Best Practices and Tips for React Architecture from Community Experts

Challenges to Making React JS Website SEO-friendly

ReactJS SEO is quite a difficult task, but once it is done, it will help you with great results and improve your Google ranking. Here are specific challenges that you need to know:

Additional loading time

Loading and parsing JavaScript will take a lot of time. As JavaScript requires network calls to fetch content, users might experience delays while waiting for the requested information.

Prolonged wait times can negatively impact the website’s ranking by Google bots. 

Sitemap

It is a file that you need to mention all the data about the website page and can also express the page’s connection. It can lead search engines to crawl the website correctly and quickly. Also, React SEO friendly practices are essential, as React will never have an in-built system for creating sitemaps.

If you use Router for React to handle routering, you must look for tools to develop sitemaps. Also, it is a tiresome procedure.

Absence of Dynamic Metadata

Single-page applications are dynamically crafted, offering users a seamless experience by presenting all necessary information on a single page.

But whenever we talk about SPA SEO, the metadata will never be upgraded on the spot when the crawlers need to click for the SPA link.

If the Google bots start crawling on the website, they will interpret it as empty, as the specific file cannot be indexed via bots.

The developers can also fix these issues of page ranking by making separate pages for the bots.

Also, developing individual pages can lead to challenges based on the business expenditure, and the ranking procedure will also be affected.

Best Practices to Make Your React Website SEO-friendly

In this section, we will have a look at the solutions for React JS SEO. Let’s have a look:

Create dynamic or static web apps

The SPAs are challenging to access by Google for SEO. Dynamic or Static web apps will help as they start using server-side, which will help Google pods crawl the web platforms hassle-free.

Here, selecting SPAs is optional, and it will never depend upon the marketplace you are in. For instance, if all website pages have something helpful to offer to all the users, you will find the dynamic website the best choice. If you are planning the landing page promotion, you need to choose a static website.

URL case

Google bots treat pages differently if their URLs contain uppercase or lowercase characters. Now, these two URLs will be distinguished due to their case differences. To avoid these issues, you can generate the URL for the lowercase.

404 code

Whether it is any page having the error in its data, it will always run into 404 code. Try setting up the files in route.js and server.js at the earliest. File updating with route.js and server.js can increase website or web app traffic.

Never use hashed URLs

This isn’t a significant problem, but Google bots don’t recognize anything after the URL hash. The Google bot will never have a look-after soup like https:/domain.com/; it is always enough for the Google bot to crawl it.

With the help of <ahref> if it is required

A common mistake in SPAs is altering the URL using a <button> or <div>. This issue stems from something other than React but how the library is implemented. The problem is that the search engines and the Google bot will process the URL and can search for the URLs to crawl in <ahref> elements.

If the <ahref> elements are not found, the Google bot cannot crawl over the URLs or even pass PageRank. To resolve this, we can define links using <ahref> tags, allowing Google bots to fetch and navigate the pages correctly.

Conclusion

If you combine ReactJS with SEO, there will not be a significant issue as it was many years ago. Nevertheless, ensuring SEO with React for single-page applications, the most common type of website built with React, remains challenging. Making Your ReactJS Website SEO-Friendly and dominate SEO rankings with Reactjs Development Company

For making the SPA visible for the search engine and crawlers for indexing, the users can opt for server-side or pre-rendering. Both approaches must spend much time, effort and money to ensure SEO-friendliness.