Server Side Rendering For Dummies (& Non-Technical SEO Decision-Makers)
Your engineering team just mentioned they are rolling out a new type of product landing page built with REACT or Angular or some other hipster tech name you may have seen out of the corner of your eye on your Twitter SEO feed. Your gut says this could be an SEO problem, and your gut is probably right. You search Google for “react SEO issues”, “react and SEO”, “what is server side rendering”, “google server side rendering and seo”, etc. and you get a lot of smart bloggers giving you way too much information on how this technology works, when you really just need a few bullet points that you can hand to an engineer so you can move on with making that sweet pitch deck for the C-Suite.
This one’s on me*:
- A lot of modern sites use “Single Page Applications” (SPAs) which have performance/UX benefits
- SPAs usually return an empty HTML file initially which screws your SEO. Google is getting better at figuring this out, but I wouldn’t trust it.
- When you render the app on the server first (using pre-rendering/server-side rendering) the user (and bots) get a fully rendered HTML page which = SEO
*There is a lot of detail beneath the surface in terms of how to best implement this stuff, how to test and troubleshoot it, etc., but for now you just need the dev team to fully render the HTML on the server before it gets fetched, and you need them to think you are not totally clueless. Now go knock out that pitch deck, Killer…
And for extra credit, get used to throwing around the following phrases with confidence:
SEO for single page applications
Technical SEO with Angular content
React server side rendering
Client side rendering
Page components
Static html
Initial state
Fetch and render
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