Local service business on Sanity and Vercel: SEO in the repository

A junk removal company's website ran on a modern stack: Sanity for content, Vercel for hosting, and GitHub for code. It had the classic problems of a client-rendered site, and the fixes had to go through code.

The problems

• Client-side rendering, so crawlers received thin HTML.
• Duplicate titles and meta descriptions across many pages.
• Heading structure problems.
• Soft 404s: missing pages returning a success status.
• Missing or inconsistent canonical and structured data signals.

Who did what

The developer implemented the substantial infrastructure changes, including prerendered HTML and deployment improvements. I handled the SEO side: setting priorities, specifying what each page needed, reviewing the developer's changes, and verifying the live result independently. I also made code-level metadata changes myself through GitHub, in a pull request that was reviewed and merged.

Why it matters

Many businesses now run on headless CMSs and JavaScript frameworks where there's no SEO plugin to configure. The work happens in templates, routes, and build settings. I can read that code, propose and make changes through the team's normal review process, and check what crawlers actually receive after deployment.

It also means changes are reviewable: every edit has a commit, a reviewer, and a way back.

How it was checked

Crawls before and after the prerendering change, raw HTML fetched from production, Search Console's live test, and a review of titles, descriptions, canonicals, and status codes across the site.

Status

Core fixes deployed and verified; a final audit is under way. See developer specs and implementation QA.

Updated October 5, 2026