Technical SEO, Analytics and user behavior: putting it into practice with Lanchix

Daniel Garcia – 29 May 2026

Technical SEO, Analytics and user behavior: putting it into practice with Lanchix

Building a website these days is relatively easy, right? There are tools, frameworks and platforms everywhere... and you can get an app online in a few hours. The hard part starts after that: how do you know people are actually finding your site? How do you understand what visitors do once they're in? How do you tell if a page really works?

And look... a lot of people stop way before that. They build the site, ship it and call it done. They never change the HTML <title>, never swap the favicon, never think about metadata, sitemap or anything around indexing. I'd already had a solid grasp of all of this for a while: technical SEO, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity... this isn't stuff I learned from scratch inside Lanchix. What changed this time was deciding to level up a bit and actually implement it on a real project.

This post isn't a "how I learned SEO from a side project" story. The point is different: talk about why this kind of care matters, and share how I started applying these practices on Lanchix, an aggregator for food spots in small towns. The idea is to bring establishments into one place when their info is super scattered: each one uses a different app, PDF menu, Instagram or another channel, and ordering flows that don't talk to each other. What almost everyone has in common, though, is WhatsApp as the main way for customers to place an order.

The app kept growing, new city and category pages kept showing up, traffic started to come in... and it made sense to stop at just "having a site live" and start measuring, indexing and improving with intent. That's when I set up Search Console, Analytics and Clarity on the Lanchix domain and started treating SEO and behavior as part of the product, not a later detail.

If you follow the blog you've seen posts on Next.js and SSR, SSG and ISR and rendering in the App Router. This piece closes the loop a bit: what happens after the page is live, indexable and getting real visits.

SEO goes way beyond keywords

When we hear SEO, it's common to think only about:

  • keywords;
  • titles;
  • descriptions;
  • showing up on Google.

In practice it runs much deeper. And it starts with simple stuff a lot of people skip: tab title, page description, favicon, link structure, speed... basics that already separate a site that "exists" from one someone actually cared about shipping.

Search engines try to understand:

  • what your page is about;
  • whether the content is relevant;
  • whether users really engage with it;
  • whether the site structure makes sense;
  • whether the experience works on mobile;
  • whether the content has semantic context.

Working with modern apps, like Next.js, especially with dynamic pages per city and category, you naturally run into things like:

  • server-side rendering;
  • dynamic metadata;
  • sitemap;
  • canonical URLs;
  • structured data;
  • interlinking;
  • performance.

All of that weighs on how Google sees the application. On Lanchix I put this into practice: each venue page needs to make sense for someone searching "pizza in Ouro Fino" and for the crawler indexing hundreds of similar URLs.

Search Console: seeing what Google sees

I'd known Google Search Console by name and concept. Setting it up for the Lanchix domain and checking reports regularly was a different story.

With it running, I could see things much more concretely:

  • which pages were indexed;
  • which queries brought users;
  • which pages had impressions but few clicks;
  • coverage issues;
  • mobile issues;
  • indexing errors.

One of the best parts is the performance tab. There you see real searches people run.

Picture this... you open the report and find they're searching for things like:

  • "pizza ouro fino";
  • "hamburguer ouro fino";
  • "delivery aberto agora";
  • "marmita ouro fino";

That's gold, because it shows exactly what people want to find. And it helps you prioritize category, title and content on the right pages.

Another pattern that shows up a lot: pages with lots of impressions and low CTR. In practice that's usually a sign you can improve:

  • title;
  • description;
  • page intent;
  • the experience for people who land there.

Analytics: turning clicks into data

Once I understood how people got to the site, another question came up: okay, then what did they do inside?

That's where Google Analytics comes in. Again: not a new tool for me. What made the difference was using it with intent on the project.

A lot of people use Analytics only for user counts or pageviews... and stop there. Things get much more interesting when you start working with custom events.

On Lanchix, the main user goal is clicking the WhatsApp button to place an order. In that scenario the most important event might not be a pageview at all, but something like:

window.gtag?.('event', 'whatsapp_click', {
  place: 'don-paollo',
  city: 'ouro-fino',
  category: 'pizzas'
})

With that I could answer questions that actually matter:

  • which category converts more;
  • which city engages more;
  • which venue draws more interest;
  • which page drives real order intent.

It's a mindset shift. The focus stops being just "getting visits" and becomes understanding real behavior and intent. For an aggregator like Lanchix that's gold: you know where product and content effort is worth it.

Clarity: watching real people use your app

I'd heard of Microsoft Clarity, but putting it on Lanchix and watching real sessions is what made me value it differently.

Unlike Analytics, which is more about numbers and metrics, Clarity lets you literally watch real user sessions on the app.

So you can see:

  • where people click;
  • how far they scroll;
  • which areas get the most attention;
  • rage clicks;
  • drop-off points;
  • navigation struggles.

And honestly... sometimes a single session recording is worth more than dozens of metrics on a spreadsheet.

It's common to find things like:

  • users ignoring an important button;
  • relevant info buried too far down;
  • cards that aren't intuitive;
  • pain on mobile.

That kind of analysis hits:

  • UX;
  • SEO;
  • retention;
  • conversion.

Still learning (and that's fine)

Anyone who's spent time in Search Console or Analytics knows: the dashboards are huge. Lots of tabs, reports, filters, stuff you only discover when you need it. Mastering these tools 100% takes time... and I'm still getting better at them, happy to say that out loud.

The good news is a little setup already gets you a lot. Verify your property in Search Console, submit a sitemap, check performance and coverage. In Analytics, a basic tag plus a few events that matter for your product. In Clarity, drop the script on the site and you're set: recordings and heatmaps at no cost. You don't need to be an expert on day one to move past "site is live and fingers crossed."

Lanchix is my lab to go deeper bit by bit. Every week I spend looking at reports I learn something new... and I already make better calls than when I only published pages without looking back.

Technical SEO and behavior go together

There's a tendency to put everything in separate boxes:

  • SEO;
  • front-end;
  • product;
  • user experience.

In the end it's all connected. And on Lanchix day to day that shows up all the time.

Slow page? Hurts SEO.

Confusing page? Retention drops.

Weak metadata? CTR drops.

Bad architecture? Indexing gets harder.

Site without semantic context? Crawlers struggle to understand.

Building an app for the general public, with lots of dynamic routes and WhatsApp as the conversion path, I keep coming back to the idea that technical SEO isn't just "show up on Google." It's building pages that make sense for people who use the site and for what indexes it. And that applies to any project, not just mine.

The best part

Maybe the coolest thing is realizing small projects benefit a lot from these tools too. You don't need to have learned everything on the first deploy. You need the willingness to go a little beyond the minimum.

Today you can:

  • host apps for free;
  • build optimized pages;
  • set up Analytics;
  • use Search Console;
  • track user behavior;
  • build programmatic SEO;
  • ship fast experiences with modern frameworks.

And honestly? Seeing a real user find a Lanchix page organically on Google for the first time feels amazing. 😄

If you want to see what I'm improving in practice, check out www.lanchix.com.br.

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