The complete Next.js SEO checklist for 2025

The components of modern SEO

SEO in 2025 goes beyond meta tags. Search engines like Google prioritize page loading performance (Core Web Vitals), mobile responsiveness, structured JSON-LD data, and semantic HTML tag hierarchy.

Configuring Metadata API

Next.js features a built-in Metadata API that automatically inserts headers for titles, descriptions, open graph cards, and canonical links. Put this export in your static or dynamic pages:

// Standard Metadata Export
export const metadata = {
  title: 'Blog Post Title | Portfolio',
  description: 'Learn about Next.js SEO best practices.',
  openGraph: {
    title: 'Blog Post Title',
    description: 'Learn about Next.js SEO best practices.',
    url: 'https://mysite.com/blog/seo',
    images: [{ url: '/og-image.jpg' }]
  }
};

Generating sitemaps and robots.txt

Instead of managing sitemaps manually, add a sitemap.js or sitemap.ts file in the app directory to dynamically fetch slugs from your database and output a valid XML sitemap at build time.