Search Engine Optimization or better we would say SEO is an essential digital marketing tool in today’s time. It can be hard to grow any business without using good SEO practices. That is why you need to have a detailed understanding of how the SEO elements work. Mastering SEO can get you more traffic for your website and boost its visibility.
SEO can surely increase your website’s visibility but a great user experience is also very important for a website. By using ReactJS for web development, you can create a better user experience for your websites and web apps. But the websites created with ReactJS also have some limitations. They are less capable of SEO. This can create a lot of problems for your web apps that get the majority of its user traffic only through SEO marketing.
In this blog, we will discuss with you the SEO challenges of React websites in detail and also show you some useful ways to address them more effectively.
Challenges of React websites
Today, search engines are heavily relying upon crawling the content that you upload on your websites. This crawling process is totally automatised, so you have to ensure that your website content gets easily understood by the machines. The SEO process will optimize the website’s content so that it becomes easy for the crawlers to understand it. This whole process looks easy at first but the same can’t be said for React-based websites. Let’s discuss the reasons behind this in detail:
1. Site Isn’t Indexed Correctly
If someone searches for your brand name in Google and your website don’t show up in the search result, then there may be an indexation issue with your website. Google will not accept your webpage as it cannot get indexed.
To solve this issue, you can use the fetching feature of Google. Also, you can use internal links to your pages and block the low-quality pages from Google’s index. Include your web page into the sitemap. You can start providing guest posts on the relevant websites of your segment.
2. Single Page Applications
In the old websites, the browser separately needs to request each page of a website. Therefore, an endless reload of pages is created. This is the reason why users do not prefer to use such sites.
To solve this issue developers have started making single page web applications over the pattern of desktop apps. Single Page Applications are offering excellent performance and seamless user experience like native apps. In the SPA, the User Interface and its data can be changed without retrieving HTML. These applications can have a lighter server payload.
Web development can be done easily by using single-page apps. That is why many developers prefer to build SEO friendly web apps with React.
3. Server-side Javascript
Google has a remarkable ability to render client-side Javascript. But sometimes Google crawls fewer pages of a website which can result in lower-traffic for new web pages. Google overestimates that humans cannot make Javascript errors. But this is not true because minor Javascript errors can lead to Google missing content.
Server-side rendering will make sure that there is always some plain HTML for Google boat to read. When the React website gets opened, all the operations get executed directly on the servers. Also, Google can easily index the web pages.
4. Tight crawling budget
Tight crawling budgets can often be an issue for SEO. Crawl budget means the maximum number of webpages that a crawler can process in a specific time. Once this processing time gets up, the bot leaves the site regardless of how many pages get downloaded. If a page takes a long time to load due to the running scripts, the bot will leave that website before indexing.
The best solution to this problem is to stick over the HTML. With every redirected URL, your crawl budget gets wasted. That is why you need to limit your website’s redirects and try to avoid using them twice. Also, correct the HTTP errors of your webpage if it has any.
5. No XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps help Google bots to get a better understanding of your webpages, so they can easily and efficiently crawl your sites.
If your website does not have an XML sitemap, then you should consider getting one. You can make an XML sitemap on your own or you can hire a team of web developers to make one for you. Also, you can make XML sitemaps for your websites by using a sitemap generating tool.
6. Meta title and description
For helping Google with recognizing your website content, you need different titles and descriptions for every webpage. If you don’t do this, then Google will take the same description for every webpage. Also, you are unable to change meta tags while using ReactJS for your webpages.
You need to add metadata into your websites as it becomes easy for the crawlers to understand your webpage’s content. ReactJS automatically adds the metadata that includes the type of content and viewpoint.
7. Page Speed
Slow page speed is another irritating issue that can make you lose your visitors. If your website does not load in less than 3 seconds, your users will go to your competitor’s website. Slow web page speed can adversely affect your user experience.
The solution to the speed issue of your website can be simple to complex. Image compression, improvement in browser caching, server response time management, Javascript minimization, etc are some ways of increasing your webpage’s speed.
Wrapping Up
The challenges that you are facing with your SEO are not the reason for avoiding ReactJS for your web development. Use the solutions mentioned in this blog to sort out the SEO problems for your websites. The web crawlers are getting smarter day by day so SEO optimization will no longer be an issue for using ReactJS for your website development.
I hope this blog has provided you with valuable insights on solving SEO problems. Feel free to contact us if you still have any questions in your mind.