Next.js SEO Checklist for Startup Landing Pages
Everything a Next.js landing page needs to rank — metadata, structured data, performance, and more.
Next.js gives you all the building blocks for great SEO — server rendering, the Metadata API, sitemaps — but none of it happens automatically. A Next.js app with no metadata configured ranks about as well as any other unstyled HTML page.
This checklist covers what we configure on every landing page we build or audit, roughly in order of impact.
Metadata: Titles, Descriptions, and Open Graph
Every page should have a unique title and description that reflects what's actually on it — not a single generic title repeated across the site. Open Graph and Twitter card metadata control how your pages look when shared on social platforms, which affects click-through rates even when it doesn't directly affect rankings.
- Use Next.js's Metadata API, or generateMetadata for dynamic routes, on every page
- Set a title template so page titles stay consistent with your brand
- Add Open Graph images sized correctly for social previews
Structured Data (JSON-LD)
Structured data helps search engines understand what a page represents — an organization, a service, an FAQ, a product — and can unlock rich results like FAQ accordions or breadcrumbs directly in search listings.
- Add Organization and WebSite schema sitewide
- Add Service or Product schema on relevant pages
- Add FAQPage schema for any page with an FAQ section
- Add BreadcrumbList schema to reflect your site's navigation hierarchy
Core Web Vitals & Performance
Page speed is both a ranking factor and a conversion factor. Next.js's image optimization, font optimization, and code-splitting help by default, but they need to be used correctly — large unoptimized hero images are still the most common Core Web Vitals issue we see.
Sitemaps, Robots.txt, and Canonical URLs
A sitemap helps search engines discover every page on your site, especially ones that aren't well-linked internally. Robots.txt tells crawlers what not to bother with. Canonical URLs prevent duplicate-content issues when the same content is reachable through multiple URLs.
- Generate a sitemap.xml that includes every public page, including dynamic routes
- Add a robots.txt that points to your sitemap and disallows any private routes
- Set a canonical URL on every page, especially ones with query parameters or multiple paths
Content Structure & Internal Linking
Search engines use your site's internal links to understand which pages are most important and how they relate to each other. A page that's never linked from anywhere else on your site is hard for both users and search engines to find.
- Use one H1 per page that describes what the page is about
- Link related pages to each other — services to each other, guides to relevant services
- Make sure every page is reachable within a few clicks from the homepage
Common Next.js SEO Mistakes
A few issues come up repeatedly in Next.js apps specifically, often because they're easy to miss in the App Router's file-based structure.
- Client components that should be server components for SEO-relevant content, since content rendered only on the client can be slower for crawlers to index
- Missing metadata on dynamically generated routes — forgetting generateMetadata
- Images without width, height, or alt attributes, hurting both performance and accessibility
Frequently Asked Questions
Does App Router make SEO easier?
In some ways yes — server components and the Metadata API make it straightforward to set per-page metadata and render content that's immediately visible to crawlers, without extra configuration.
How long until SEO changes show results?
Technical fixes like metadata, structured data, and performance can affect how pages are indexed within days to weeks, but ranking improvements, especially for competitive terms, typically take longer and depend on many other factors.
Do I need a blog to rank?
Not necessarily, but having more genuinely useful, well-structured pages on relevant topics generally helps. The key word is genuinely — pages that don't offer real value rarely help and can sometimes hurt.
Related Reading
Want your landing page audited?
Our Landing Page Sprint includes a full technical SEO pass — metadata, structured data, performance, and internal linking.
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