SEO for your app
Good metadata decides how your app looks in search results and in link previews on social platforms and chat apps. Instroc handles this in two layers: sitewide defaults you set when you publish, and per-URL overrides in SEO Routes for pages that deserve their own title, description, or image. This page explains both layers and when to reach for each.
Why this matters
When someone shares your app's link, the platform they share it on fetches your page's metadata and builds a preview card from it: the title, the description, and the social image. Search engines use the same title and description to render your result. If every page of your app carries the same generic metadata, every shared link and every search result looks identical, and a link to your pricing page unfurls with your homepage's text. Distinct, accurate metadata per page makes your links more clickable and your search results more useful.
Sitewide defaults from the publish wizard
Your app's default metadata is set in the publish flow, on the Website Info step. There you upload an app icon that doubles as the favicon, set the app's title, write a description of up to 160 characters, and set the social preview image. These become the metadata for your whole app, and they are what crawlers and unfurlers see for any URL that has no specific override.
For many apps, especially single-purpose ones, the defaults are all you need. Write the description the way you would want it to read under your name in a search result. You can revisit Website Info later through Edit Settings in the publish popover; see Publishing for the full wizard.
Per-URL overrides in SEO Routes
When individual pages need their own metadata, open Cloud > SEO Routes in the editor workspace. Each route entry maps a URL pattern to its own title, description, and social image, and patterns come in two forms.
- Exact: matches one URL precisely, like
/aboutor/pricing. - Wildcard: matches a whole family of URLs, like
/products/*covering every product page.
When a crawler or a social unfurler requests a URL, Instroc checks your SEO Routes first. A matching route's metadata takes priority over the sitewide defaults, so /about can introduce your team while /products/* pages describe your catalog, and everything else falls back to the defaults from Website Info.
A typical setup for a small business app looks like this:
| Pattern | Type | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
/ | Exact | Homepage headline and main social image |
/about | Exact | Who you are, for people researching you |
/products/* | Wildcard | One shared description for all product pages |
Start with the defaults, then add routes only for the pages people actually share or search for. A handful of well-written routes beats dozens of near-duplicates.
What you need
SEO Routes is part of Instroc Cloud, so your project needs Cloud enabled (one click, and Roc enables it automatically for most apps that need a backend; see the backend overview). The metadata applies to your published app, so you also need to have published at least once. The editor preview is not what crawlers see; your live URL is.
Custom metadata works on your included instroc.app subdomain and on a custom domain alike. If you connect a domain later, your routes carry over without changes.
Checking your work
After publishing or changing metadata, the quickest sanity check is to paste your URL into a social platform's post composer and look at the preview card it generates. If an old card appears, that platform may have cached the previous metadata; unfurler caches refresh on their own schedule, so give it some time and try again. Watching which pages earn traffic from search is a job for the built-in analytics, where top pages and top referrers show whether your metadata work is paying off.