Why is SEO so important?

SEO is the key to increased conversion and confidence in your brand. Higher search ranking placement equates to more organic visitors. Search engine organic traffic – visitors who come to your site through clicking a result in a search engine – is key to many businesses for three reasons:

1. Qualitative – Increased chance that visitors turn into customers.
2. Trustable – Higher confidence in your brand or mission.
3. Low-Cost – Aside from the time and effort spent, having good SEO practices that result in higher search engine ranking is free. There is no direct cost to appear in top organic search results positions.

Three Pillars of Optimization

The process of optimizing a website can be divided into three main pillars:

1. Technical – Optimize your website for crawling and web performance.
2. Creation – Create a content strategy to target specific keywords.
3. Popularity – Boost your site's presence online so search engines know you are a trusted source. This is done through the use of backlinks – third-party sites that link back to your site.

The SEO discipline is broad and has many facets, but as a Next.js developer, the first step is to understand how you can make your web app SEO-ready with some best practices.