A React SPA should have unique metadata per route, crawlable anchor links, clean canonical URLs, a complete sitemap, structured data that matches visible content, optimized images, strong Core Web Vitals, and server-side rendering or prerendering for pages where crawler reliability matters.
Route metadata
Every indexable route should have a unique title, meta description, canonical URL, Open Graph metadata, and Twitter preview metadata.
Avoid using one global title and canonical for every route in a business website.
A technical checklist for making React single-page apps easier to crawl, index, and cite.
Crawlable links
Internal navigation should use anchor links or React Router Link components that render anchor tags with href attributes.
Click-only divs and buttons can hurt crawl discovery even when users can navigate normally.
Performance and rendering
Compress large images, split JavaScript chunks, lazy-load below-the-fold sections, and set dimensions on images to avoid layout shift.
Consider SSR or prerendering for high-value landing pages if organic search is a major acquisition channel.
Common questions
Google can render JavaScript, but technical SEO, links, performance, and prerendering still matter for reliability and non-Google crawlers.
Yes. A sitemap helps discovery of canonical routes, especially when content is rendered client-side.