From Code to Clicks: Essential JavaScript SEO Best Practices for Higher Rankings

If you are a business/brand owner looking to improve the organic rankings of your JavaScript-based website, then we can help you with all the tea you need!

You might agree that in a fast-paced web development landscape, where JavaScript frameworks like ReactJS and NodeJS dominate, ensuring your website is SEO-friendly can feel like trying to hit a moving target.

Unlike traditional HTML websites, JavaScript-driven sites require a bit of extra TLC to shine in the eyes of search engines. If you want your JavaScript-based website to rank well, it’s essential to guide search engines through your dynamic content with care and strategy.

We at Mavlers have helped 7K+ global clients achieve a 196K+ $ increase in organic revenue. 

To succeed, it’s crucial to understand how and where JavaScript plays a role in your site’s structure and how you can use JavaScript best practices to optimize for SEO success. Spoiler alert: if search engines can’t “see” your content, neither can potential visitors!

But don’t worry—whether you’re working with SEO JavaScript or just curious about JavaScript Google SEO dynamics, we’ve got our in-house SEO analyst, Pratibha Pachar, sharing some tried and tested best practices to ensure your site’s ready to climb the SERPs (search engine results pages) faster than a JavaScript file loads. 🚀

Table of contents

• What is JavaScript SEO?
• JavaScript SEO vs. normal technical SEO
• Key challenges of JavaScript SEO
• How does Google process JavaScript?
• Best practices for JavaScript SEO
• JavaScript SEO for Search Generative Experience (SGE)

Let’s set this ball rolling! 

Source

What is JavaScript SEO?

Imagine your website is a house, and search engines are inspectors. Now, JavaScript is like a hidden attic full of treasures—but if the inspector can’t find the attic, how will they know you’ve got gold up there?

So, JavaScript SEO is the part of technical SEO that ensures search engines can easily find, crawl, and index your site’s JavaScript content, just like they do with HTML. When search engines come knocking, they expect the content to be ready and waiting, but when JavaScript is involved, the rendering process can sometimes require a little extra work to get everything in order.

JavaScript SEO focuses on ensuring that JavaScript-rendered content is accessible to search engines. This is critical for websites built using modern frameworks like React, Vue, or Angular, where much of the content is generated dynamically after the initial page load. Without the right optimization techniques, these sites may struggle to get indexed properly, and that can hurt rankings.

JavaScript SEO vs. normal technical SEO

Now, you might be thinking, “Isn’t all SEO the same?” Well, sort of—but when it comes to JavaScript, it’s a whole new ballgame.

Normal technical SEO

Traditional technical SEO focuses on ensuring that the website’s HTML structure, CSS, and server performance are optimized for crawling and indexing. Everything that Googlebot (Google’s crawler) needs is usually right there in the initial HTML. It’s like laying out a buffet for the search engine bots—they see the menu, grab the content, and index it happily.

JavaScript SEO

On the flip side, JavaScript SEO is more like a fancy restaurant with courses that only appear after the guests (the bots) have already sat down. Search engines need to wait for JavaScript to execute before they can access your content. This can cause delays in rendering and indexing, especially if your JavaScript code isn’t optimized. Googlebot is getting better at executing JavaScript, but you don’t want to keep them waiting too long or show them an empty plate!

While normal SEO deals with making static HTML content crawlable and indexable, JavaScript SEO has the extra challenge of ensuring that search engines can render and understand dynamic content generated by JavaScript. And this, my friend, is where things get interesting!

Key challenges of JavaScript SEO

So, what’s the big deal with JavaScript? Why can’t search engines just handle it like they do with regular HTML? Let’s dive into the main challenges:

1. Rendering

JavaScript relies on rendering, meaning search engines need to process and “execute” the code to fully understand the page. This adds an extra step to the crawling process, and sometimes, search engines might not wait around long enough to see everything. If your site’s JavaScript isn’t optimized, important content may get left out of indexing.

2. Crawl budget

Crawling JavaScript-heavy pages takes more time and resources than plain old HTML. Since search engines have a finite “crawl budget” (how much time they’ll spend on your site), JavaScript can hog those resources, leaving some of your pages uncrawled or partially crawled. It’s not ideal when you want everything indexed.

How does Google process JavaScript?

Google’s relationship with JavaScript is kind of like a love-hate thing. They’ve learned to work together, but it’s complicated. Here’s how Googlebot tackles JavaScript sites:

1. Crawling:

Googlebot first crawls the HTML to get an initial glimpse of your site. It sees the JavaScript files but doesn’t run them immediately—just like grabbing ingredients from the pantry without cooking them yet.

2. Rendering:

Once Google has the JavaScript resources, it fires them up—just like a browser would—and starts rendering the page. This is when dynamic content gets added to the page. However, rendering can take time, especially for complex sites, which could delay indexing.

3. Indexing:

Finally, after rendering, Googlebot indexes the fully loaded page with all its dynamic content. This process can be slow, which is why JavaScript SEO focuses so heavily on making it as smooth as possible.

Best practices for JavaScript SEO

Here’s where we get to the fun part: the best practices that ensure your JavaScript-driven site doesn’t just get crawled—it gets top-notch SEO performance.

1. Optimizing speed for JavaScript SEO

Speed matters! Googlebot’s ability to render JavaScript is resource-intensive, so if your page takes too long to load, you could miss out on being indexed promptly.

How to optimize:

• Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or Dynamic rendering: Pre-render content on the server to give search engines a ready-to-go version of your site.
• Lazy loading: Load images and non-essential content as the user scrolls, speeding up initial load times.
• Minify JavaScript: Minifying your JavaScript files reduces their size, which means faster loading times.
• Async or defer attributes: Use these to load JavaScript files in the background so they don’t block the rest of your page from loading.

2. Handling soft 404 issues

A soft 404 is like leaving a “We’re Closed” sign but still letting people into the store—confusing, right? Pages that don’t exist should return a 404 error, not a “200 OK” status. However, in the case of JavaScript-driven sites, things get a bit more complicated. Since JavaScript frameworks operate client-side rather than server-side, they can’t directly trigger a server error like a 404. This means the page may still return a ‘200 OK’ status, despite being effectively empty or non-functional, which can confuse both users and search engines.

How to optimize:

• Ensure that nonexistent pages return the correct 404 or 410 status code.
• Use JavaScript to detect missing content and trigger the right error response.

3. Optimizing redirects

Redirects can be tricky with JavaScript. The goal is to make sure search engines can follow redirects without getting lost.

How to optimize:

• Avoid JavaScript-based redirects in favor of server-side redirects (like 301s).
• Keep your internal links updated, and minimize redirect chains to speed up crawling.

4. Optimizing robots.txt

Your robots.txt file tells Googlebot what it can or can’t crawl. Make sure you’re not accidentally blocking essential JavaScript files.

How to optimize:

• Don’t block JavaScript files in robots.txt.
• Use Google Search Console’s “robots.txt Tester” to make sure everything important is crawlable.

5. Optimizing links for JavaScript SEO

Links need to be crawlable and accessible to search engines. Don’t hide them in JavaScript, or search engines might miss them entirely!

How to optimize:

• Render important links server-side or in a way that search engines can easily access.
• Use proper <a> tags with descriptive anchor text to help Google understand your link structure.

JavaScript SEO for Search Generative Experience (SGE)

With Google’s AI-driven features like Search Generative Experience (SGE), the game is changing. SGE relies on dynamic content to pull in relevant answers and summaries. Ensuring your JavaScript-generated content is accessible, well-indexed, and optimized becomes even more crucial. If Google’s AI can’t reach your content, it won’t be featured in those fancy, AI-driven results!

The road ahead

JavaScript can make your website dynamic, engaging, and powerful, but without the right SEO practices, it can also make it invisible to search engines. Follow these best practices to ensure your JavaScript-driven site is as easy for search engines to navigate as it is for users to enjoy. 

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