A lot of developers hear "fix your SEO" and reach for react-helmet or Next.js's Metadata API. They add title tags, meta descriptions, maybe an OG image. Then they wonder why nothing changed. Meta tags are table stakes. The real problems are deeper.
The complete React SEO checklist
Level 1: Crawlability (most developers miss this)
- Content in initial HTML response — test with
curl -A "Googlebot/2.1" https://yoursite.com - robots.txt configured correctly — not blocking important pages or Googlebot
- XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console
- No accidental noindex on important pages
- Internal links are real
<a href>tags, not JavaScript navigation
Level 2: On-page signals
- Unique title tag on every page (50–60 characters)
- Meta description on every page (150–160 characters)
- One H1 per page, logical heading hierarchy
- Alt text on all images
- Canonical tags to prevent duplicate content
Level 3: Structured data
- Organization schema — tells Google who you are
- Product schema — for product pages
- Article schema — for blog posts
- FAQ schema — can appear directly in search results
Level 4: Core Web Vitals
- LCP under 2.5 seconds
- CLS under 0.1 (React apps often fail this)
- INP under 200ms
Priority order: Crawlability → On-page signals → Structured data → Performance. If your content isn't crawlable, nothing else matters. Fix that first.
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