Technical SEO Checklist for Next.js Sites
Metadata, canonicals, structured data, and crawlable architecture — the SEO foundation every App Router site needs.
Sanjay Kr. Singh
Founder & Lead Engineer, Bitcraftly
Content quality still wins, but technical SEO decides whether search engines can understand and trust your pages. On App Router sites, most of that foundation is code: metadata APIs, structured data, and clean URLs.
Use the Metadata API consistently
Every indexable route should define title, description, canonical, Open Graph, and Twitter fields. Share a helper so pages do not drift. Detail routes should use `generateMetadata` with real content — never placeholder copy that stays indexed.
Ship structured data that matches the page
- BreadcrumbList on nested marketing and content pages
- Article or BlogPosting on editorial detail pages
- CollectionPage or ItemList on listing pages
- Keep JSON-LD in sync with visible content
Keep the crawl surface honest
Maintain `sitemap.ts` and `robots.ts`. Do not index thin scaffolds. Prefer one canonical URL per piece of content, and avoid duplicate hubs that rewrite the same story.
Release checklist
- Unique title and description per page
- Canonical path set
- OG/Twitter image with correct dimensions
- JSON-LD validated against visible content
- Internal links from listing → detail and related posts
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