SEO optimization starts with what Google can read

SEO optimization for a small business usually starts with keywords, and on a modern site it has to start one step earlier: whether the page Google fetches has anything in it. This site is a React app, and a React app sends an empty page and fills it in with JavaScript.

Crawlers, link previews and AI assistants that do not run JavaScript saw nothing on every URL. The fix was to render every route to real HTML at build time, each with its own title, description, canonical address and structured data already in the file. A check then fetches the built site over HTTP, because a host that quietly sends /contact to the home page would serve the home page's title on every URL, and a check that only reads files on disk would never notice.

Old addresses count too. When the portfolio moved from /projects to /works, every old URL got a permanent redirect to its real case study, so links people had already shared kept working and kept their value.

None of this makes a site rank on its own. Over the last three months this site collected 105 impressions in Google Search, almost all for its own name. Rankings come from pages that answer what people search for, which is what this journal is for, published on pages Google can read.

SEO as a job of its own starts from 500 euros with us. The technical side is part of every build on the web design page, and why a business needs a website beyond a social page covers the part a platform never gives you.