Last week our agency site hit a 100/100 "Health Score" with 0 errors on Ahrefs' Site Audit — on a domain that's only a couple of months old. Here's exactly what we did, in case it helps someone else building on Next.js.
The stack
Next.js (App Router), fully static where possible, deployed on Vercel. ~1,000 articles across 6 languages, generated at build time. No CMS bloat — content lives in typed data files, so every page is fast and crawlable.
What actually moved the needle
1. Real structured data, not decoration.
One interlinked @graph (Organization + WebSite) defined once, referenced by every page. Each page adds BreadcrumbList, and content pages add BlogPosting / FAQPage. Clean, valid, no orphan nodes.
2. hreflang done right.
6 locales, each page enumerates its live siblings + x-default. We generate every locale's static params so internal links never 404 — and gate not-yet-live locales with robots: { index: false, follow: true } instead of breaking the graph.
3. Core Web Vitals as a hard rule.
The LCP heading is static — we skip hero animations because they cost ~12–15 mobile PageSpeed points. Images are all sized + have alt text (Ahrefs flagged 0 missing).
4. Internal linking as a system.
Every article links to a few topical siblings + the money pages, with keyword anchors. Result: 0 orphan pages, PageRank flows to the pages that matter.
5. Multi-engine indexing with IndexNow.
A daily GitHub Action diffs the live sitemap vs a state file and pings only new URLs to Bing / Yahoo / DuckDuckGo / Yandex / Seznam. New pages get indexed in hours, not weeks. (Google doesn't use IndexNow — that's still sitemap + crawl.)
6. Freshness signals.
dateModified + sitemap <lastmod> update whenever content actually changes, and we surface an "updated" date on-page.
The honest part
Technical SEO gets you eligible to rank — it doesn't rank you. Our Domain Rating is still 0; authority (real backlinks) is the slow part. But a clean, fast, well-structured site means every bit of authority we earn converts faster.
I run MPO Web Studio — we build fast, custom-coded sites. Happy to answer any Next.js/SEO questions in the comments.
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