Building an SEO-Friendly Web App With MERN Stack - What All You Need to Know!

Creating a strong online presence is now more than a just having a website and social media. It's about providing all the necessary content for your organization’s business objectives and not just the front end of your digital presence.

Therefore, building a web application becomes crucial as a mobile app can help boost your brand. But with so many technologies available in the market, it is often difficult to choose the right web app framework. But when it comes to web app development, one popular technology is the MERN stack.

Well, more than a technology, it is a software design approach that allows you to have rapid development of scalable, testable, and maintainable web applications to suit any organizational needs.

In this article, we will explore what MERN is in detail as well as how it can be used for SEO-friendly web app development. But before that, let’s know why SEO is so important for your web application or website.

Importance of SEO For Your Web Application

In the present digital world, SEO plays a crucial role in making a website or mobile app successful. Therefore, businesses often remain concerned about how to SEO optimize a website or a web app.

SEO is crucial in keeping search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo fair. In normal words, SEO is the way a search engine determines what website to rank at what position in the search results. SEO has huge importance when it comes to making your web app successful.

The search engine is known to utilize web crawlers to determine a website’s ranking on the search results. In case you’re wondering what’s a crawler, well, it is basically a bot that regularly visits pages of a website or an app to ensure and analyze if they are as per the specific criteria established by that particular search engine.

Web App SEO: How Crawlers Work?

React-driven websites and web apps are becoming more and more popular as the technology is being backed by some tech giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more. The reason behind the spike in the popularity of React technology is that the framework is fast, responsive, and supports animation-rich applications.

But there’s a thing - web apps built with React technology possess limited SEO capabilities. Optimization of a web app or a single-page application is challenging but not impossible.

When search engine bots visit a web app, they won’t be able to crawl the page. If you want them to crawl the web page, the content should already be updated in users’ browsers.

In case search engine bots don’t find any relevant content on the web page, they will treat your web app or website as poorly built or blank. As a result, they won’t be able to index your web application or website.

Another crucial piece of information that you should know is that these search engine bots carry a limited time period in which they crawl the web pages of the web app or website.

What is MERN Stack?

MERN Stack is a combination of powerful and robust technologies that are used to create highly scalable web applications. This dynamic JavaScript framework is user-friendly and helps you make the website and web app responsive. This is also the reason why MERN Stack is a preferred choice for many businesses both startups and established ones.

The four technologies that are a part of MERN Stack:

• React - a JavaScript library used to build user interfaces
• Node.js - an open-source cross-platform JavaScript for backend APIs and traditional websites.
• Express - a backend web application framework for Node.js
• MongoDB - a cross-platform document-oriented database program.

What is The Purpose of MRN Stack?

The MERN stack is a full-stack JavaScript solution that can be used to build web applications. It was created by Swizec Teller, who wanted an alternative for the MEAN stack.

The main difference between these two stacks lies in their core technologies - while MEAN stands for MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and NodeJS. These technologies are used by programmers to create dynamic web apps with data that are seeded from the database.

On the other hand, MERN consists of React (a user interface library), Redux (an application state container), and Express (a web framework).

Components of MERN Stack

There are a number of MERN Stack components that make app development a lot easier with this web app framework. Let’s have a look at them.

• MongoDB

An open-source, document-oriented, and cross-platform technology, MongoDB is a database. It is known as a database that stores data using collections and documents in JSON Format.

The size, content, and number of fields in the document can vary from one another which facilitates the change of data structure over time. Let’s have a look at some of the features of MongoDB:

1. Scalable environments
2. Ability to run over multiple servers.
3. Supports master-slave replication.
4. Comes with MapReduce and aggregation tools.
5. Support ad hoc queries
6. Uses JavaScript instead of Procedures

• Express

A backend web application framework for Node.js, Express helps simplify the task of writing server code. It works in a way that a developer doesn’t need to rewrite the same code. Being a lightweight web app framework, Express supports the easy creation of scalable web applications and APIs.

With that being said, let’s have a look at some most important features of Express.

1. Single-threaded and asynchronous
2. Robust API
3. Supports code reusability
4. Fast and scalable
5. Faster server-side development
6. Provide templating engines

• Node.js

Built on Google Chrome’s JavaScript Engine, Node.js is an open-source server-side platform that is used to build server-side and networking applications. It comes with a rich library of JavaScript modules that made web app development easier and more convenient. Here are some features of Node.js

Event-driven and asynchronous
Highly scalable
Fast in code execution
Single-threaded model with event looping
No buffering

• React

React, often known as React JS framework, is basically a JavaScript library that allows developers in creating a responsive user interface. Unlike other technologies, React JS is known to use a comprehensive programming language to create repetitive DOM elements. Let’s have a look at the features of React JS

1. JavaScript Syntax Extension (JSE)
2. One-way data binding
3. Extension
4. Component-based architecture
5. High performance
6. Virtual DOM
7. React Native
8. Declarative UI

Pros of MERN Technology

Now that you are well aware of all the components of MERN Stack, let’s have a look at all the pros of this technology.

• Full Stack

MERN technology comes with a full-stack development environment. It supports end-to-end development. And as a result, a business doesn't need to worry about other technologies as they get everything in MERN itself.

• MVC Architecture Support

MERN is known to support MVC or Model View Controller architecture which makes the workflow a lot easier for app developers.

• Great Community

MERN has a great community behind it and the reason is JavaScript. There are tons of resources related to MERN for developers. Each of its resources is well-documented and provides scalable solutions.

• Open Source

One of the best things about using the MERN stack is that it is open source. All four components of MERN are open source, and thus, it means you don’t have to worry about licensing.

• Testing tools

In case you don’t know, MERN comes with a wide set of testing tools for developers to test software.

Cons of MERN

As they say, every technology has two aspects - positive and negative. Now that we already know the pros of MERN, let’s have a look at the cons. While the MERN stack is a solid solution for your organization to build a web app or software, there are still a few things that the technology doesn’t have.

The MERN stack is a front-end framework that does not have any content management system (CMS) capabilities and so it requires the use of an external CMS or backend solution to support your organization's business objectives.

The MERN stack provides excellent application performance and scalability but does not offer comprehensive security measures. Developers who are familiar with JavaScript will find it difficult to get started due to Node.js as the backend language and React being used for front-end purposes in this case.

Top Brands Using MERN Stack Technology

React is the most popular technology of MERN Stack that has helped many renowned organizations to build their digital portal. For example, Airbnb is one such organization that has created an incredible digital experience through its web app built on react.js.

Not just Airbnb, but even the tech giant, Microsoft has backed React to build Skype. And not to forget, Facebook is another React JS website or web app.

Now if we talk about MERN, there are some global brands that have used MERN Stack technology, Let’s have a look at them:

• Instagram: Instagram is another social media platform that has used React. The platform has exceptionally used React JS UI and brought the Post Promote feature using the technology.
• UberEats: The world-famous online food delivery platform, UberEats has also used React technology to make its restaurant dashboard more appealing.
• Walmart: Similarly, Walmart also used React Native technology to boost its hybrid app performance.

What’s The Right Time to Choose MERN Stack

It is very crucial to choose the perfect-fit technology that suits best your business requirements for your digital product. With that being said, let’s have a look at some key points to consider when choosing MERN Stack for your business.

• When you want to scale faster
• When you already have native apps
• When you have a tight budget
• When you want to create MVP fast
• When you have hard deadlines

With that being said, here we come to the end of this post about building an SEO-friendly web app using MERN Stack. Now if your concern is about hiring the best mobile app development company, Auxesis Infotech is your one-stop solution.

With years of experience and a team of highly skilled and qualified tech experts, we provide exceptional web and mobile app development services to businesses of all scales and sizes, and from different industries.