Speed matters for SEO. For ShelfSync, our client, it’s especially important because a lot of their traffic comes from search engines. They already had an SEO-friendly blog, but it wasn’t enough.

The problem

ShelfSync’s blog and application were on separate domains. That might not sound like a big deal, but splitting SEO across two domains weakens results as you effectivly split your authority between two websites (as google views differnt domains as different businesses – even if they are the same business). They also wanted to keep everything on a single domain to make it easier for customers to remember and log in.

Why it matters

For a SaaS company like ShelfSync, a lot of traffic comes from answering questions people are already searching for. Every blog post is a chance to appear before competitors. The faster the site loads and the more optimized it is for search engines, the better the chances of being seen first and considered by potential customers.

The options

• Option 1: Keep the blog on it’s current CMS (content management system) and redirect to blog posts via the application. This is surprisingly complicated as it involves creating psuedo-pages on the application website for search engines and then redirecting to the blog post when clicked. This would be very challenging to keep in sync and up to date when more and more blog posts are written.
• Option 2: Build the blog functionality into their application so both the blog and product are on the same domain, but we needed to be sure that we build the blog to be super fast and SEO friendly so they didn’t lose any of their SEO rankings.

What we built

We built a blog system inside the Next.js application. Markdown content is stored in a database and rendered as HTML when a page is requested. The pages and data are cached and delivered through a CDN for fast load times. This means that our client can write blogs posts in their favourite markdown editor and simply save it to their application database to publish their post.

The system includes SEO-focused features like a meta-data builder, proper heading structure, and a sitemap generator submitted to Google to ensure pages are crawled and ranked effectively.

Challenges

Building someting this technical isn’t always easy but we managed to overcome every challenge using our expert knowledge. We encounterd issues with caching, database errors, and sitemap generation. But in the end we got the system working perfectly and everything is handled automatically and blazingly fast.

Result

By moving the blog into ShelfSync’s Next.js application and using high-speed caching, page performance improved significantly. Blog posts started ranking higher on Google, driving more clicks and bringing more users to the platform.

Any way we can help you?

If you’ve got a simmilar problem to the one ShelfSync had, please reach out to use. We’re happy to hop on a short free discovery call to discuss your problem and suggest some possible solutions. You can view our portfolio here.