SEO Remediation Design

Goal

Improve crawl hygiene, canonical consistency, metadata quality, structured data, and trust signals for Expert Study Guides without large risky content rewrites.

Chosen Approach

Use https://expertstudyguides.com as the canonical host because the Docusaurus config already points there. Keep remediation incremental and commit-sized:

1. Crawl surfaces: add robots.txt, align sitemap metadata, and keep generated URLs indexable.
2. Metadata and schema: improve global title templates, Open Graph/Twitter defaults, homepage metadata, Organization, WebSite, and BreadcrumbList schema.
3. Landing pages: fix the Guides index title and descriptions for subject hub pages.
4. Trust pages: add clear About, Contact, and Editorial Policy pages.
5. Quality checks: add a local SEO audit script that catches regressions in canonical host, homepage title, robots, and weak front matter.

Scope

This pass focuses on high-confidence technical SEO items from the backlog:

• Canonical host consistency.
• robots.txt and sitemap declaration.
• Homepage title and description.
• Guides index title and description.
• Subject landing page titles and descriptions.
• Sitewide structured data where Docusaurus can render it safely.
• Footer/navigation links to trust pages.
• A repeatable script for future SEO checks.

Deferred work:

• Bulk URL slug renames and 301 redirects, because this can break existing indexed URLs unless deployment routing is known.
• Full content expansion for every guide.
• Backlink/outreach work.
• Search Console CTR rewrites, because query data is not available in this repo.

Architecture

Most changes live in Docusaurus configuration and content front matter:

• docusaurus.config.js owns canonical host, navbar/footer, sitemap options, and default social metadata.
• src/pages/index.js owns homepage metadata and JSON-LD.
• docs/Index/Index.md becomes the user-facing guides hub.
• Subject docs/*/index.md pages get unique, search-intent-aligned titles and descriptions.
• static/robots.txt is served at the root.
• scripts/seo-audit.mjs provides a build-independent regression check.

Testing

Verification uses:

• npm run seo:audit for SEO-specific assertions.
• npm run build for Docusaurus compile, links, and route generation.
• git diff --check before commits.