I spent an entire afternoon wondering why my freshly deployed Next.js app wasn't showing up in Google Search — not even for its own brand name. Turns out, I was server-rendering the shell but client-rendering all the meaningful content. Google saw a blank <div id="__next"></div> and moved on. The fix was restructuring a single page.tsx and adding 6 lines of metadata config. This guide covers everything I wish I'd known: metadata, dynamic OG tags, structured data, and automated auditing — all with copy-paste-ready code. Why Next.js SEO Is a Different Beast Traditional SEO wisdom assumes the server delivers complete HTML. Next.js gives you four rendering strategies — SSG, SSR, ISR, and CSR — and only some of them are Google-friendly by default. Google's crawler can execute JavaScript, but it processes pages in a two-wave system. The first wave indexes raw HTML. The second wave (days later) renders JavaScript.…