SEO (search engine optimisation)
Making your pages easy for search engines to read, understand and rank, so people find the product without paid ads.
Updated October 2026 · with examples from our own builds
What does SEO mean in practice?
Technical SEO is the part a developer controls: each page has its own title and description, the full content is in the HTML, links preview properly when shared, and robots.txt, a sitemap and structured data tell search engines what's on the site and what to skip. Content does the rest, and no markup rescues thin or duplicate pages.
SEO problems are silent. A site can look perfect in a browser while serving no titles to Google or WhatsApp, and nothing flags it until someone notices a bare link preview.
A rebuild is rarely needed. Most fixes sit in the layout and metadata layer, and a careful retrofit can leave the page code alone.
SEO at a glance
- Check first
- Titles, descriptions and link previews on real pages
- Biggest risk
- Thin or near-duplicate pages published at scale
- Owners
- The developer for the markup, the founder for the content
Where has SEO come up in our builds?
In June 2026 a WhatsApp link to protonfit.com previewed as a bare card. The root layout was a client component, so Next.js ignored the site's metadata; we made it a server component, gave each route its own server layout and metadata without touching the 22 public page files, and added icons, a share image, robots.txt, a sitemap and Organization structured data.
An SEO engine with a page registry, metadata length budgets, JSON-LD builders, a sitemap index, robots rules, llms.txt and per-page social cards sits under the site, and its own audit passes 74 pages with no failures or warnings. City hubs publish only when all five of their resources are sourced, so no thin city page ships.
Common questions about SEO
Do I need to rebuild my website to fix its SEO?
Rarely. Most technical SEO lives in the layout and metadata layer. Proton's retrofit added per-route metadata, icons, a sitemap and structured data without editing any of its 22 public page files.
Will publishing lots of similar pages help my rankings?
Not if they say nearly the same thing; search engines treat templated near-duplicates as low value. Petym publishes a city hub only once its local facts are researched and sourced, and holds the rest back.
Related terms
Sources
Planning a product and not sure where SEO fits? Ask us, or browse all 116 terms in the glossary.