Technical SEO
This skill makes a SaaS findable by Google and shareable on social — and fixes the specific trap of a Vite SPA serving near-empty HTML that crawlers can't read.
Analogy: an SPA is a book with a blank cover and blank first page until you open it and read aloud. Search crawlers and social bots only glance at the cover — if it's blank, they walk away. SEO here is printing a real cover (server-rendered head tags) so they see what the book is about.
The SPA problem (state it upfront)
A Vite SPA serves near-empty HTML; content and meta tags appear only after JS runs. Social crawlers (WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn) don't run JS at all, so share previews need tags that are injected server-side or prerendered — client-only react-helmet alone won't show a preview on WhatsApp.
Be precise about Google, though. Googlebot does render JavaScript: for one production SPA, Search Console's URL inspection showed the fully rendered page indexed. So do not migrate frameworks for Google alone — check your own site in Search Console first. What remains true: rendering is deferred, social bots never run JS, and you should not assume AI crawlers do. Prerender the public routes for those reasons.
Discovery (max 3 questions, only if unknown)
- Which pages need SEO — public marketing/landing/pricing, or also app routes?
- Is the broken thing indexing (Google) or social previews (no image on share)?
- Can you prerender marketing routes to static HTML, or must it stay a pure SPA?
Step 1 — Per-page head tags
Use react-helmet-async to set per route: unique <title>, <meta name="description">, a canonical link, and OpenGraph + Twitter Card tags:
og:title,og:description,og:image(1200×630),og:url,twitter:card=summary_large_image.- Always absolute URLs in
og:image/canonical (relative URLs break previews). - Set
<html lang>and one canonical per page to avoid duplicate-content issues.
Step 2 — Make crawlers actually see them (the high-impact fix)
- Marketing/landing routes → prerender to static HTML with
vite-ssg(or React SSR). Crawlers get real content + OG tags in the initial response. This is the single highest-impact change. - Pure CSR SPA, OG tags only → the "OG proxy" pattern: a Vercel function +
vercel.jsonrewrite that detects social/bot user-agents and serves HTML with the correct meta injected.
Step 3 — Ship the crawl files
robots.txtin/public: allow crawl of public routes, block private/app routes, and point to the sitemap (Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml).sitemap.xmlgenerated at build time (viavite-ssgoutput or a sitemap plugin), listing public URLs with<lastmod>. Submit it in Google Search Console.
Step 4 — Structured data (JSON-LD)
Add <script type="application/ld+json"> blocks:
Organization+SoftwareApplication/Producton home/pricing.FAQPageon FAQ sections.BreadcrumbListwhere relevant. Validate with Google's Rich Results Test.
Step 5 — Performance is SEO
Core Web Vitals feed ranking. Hand off to the frontend-performance skill: code-split routes, lazy-load below-the-fold images, serve modern image formats, keep third-party scripts async/minimal.
Field notes — check the live output, not the code
Each of these shipped past a green build:
- No
robots.txtorsitemap.xmlat all, no canonical tag, andlang="en"on a Spanish site. Request the files; read the<html>tag. - A sitemap split in the middle of every URL and a broken
Sitemap:line — the base URL came from an environment variable with a trailing newline. Open the sitemap in a browser. - Apex →
wwwanswered 307 instead of a permanent redirect. - The social image rendered with the system font because it was generated from a
file://page where the web font never loaded. Look at the actual image. - A font subset fell back silently: only
latin-extwas loaded, and that subset does not contain the basic Latin characters — it extendslatin, it does not include it. - Analytics proxied through a rewrite located every visitor in a data center (see
deploymentfield notes).
Verify ownership by domain in Search Console and submit the sitemap there; it is also the only reliable way to see what Google actually rendered.
Output
Deliver: the react-helmet-async head component with OG/Twitter tags, the prerender or OG-proxy setup, robots.txt, the sitemap generation step, and the JSON-LD blocks for the key pages.
Reference
Google Search Central docs, react-helmet-async, antfu-collective/vite-ssg, Vercel functions / vercel.json rewrites.


