Most search engines and crawlers use server’s response directly, not allowing you to alter it with javascript. So yes, what you need is server-side rendering. Or, you can use tools like gatsbyjs, react-static. Basically, they render your components into HTML files beforehand.
A major benefit of react-helmet is when you have multiple components in a tree with <head> tags, and you have <meta> tags with the same attributes/values. For instance, if on your index page component you have: const html = renderToString(<App />); <html> <head> <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0″> <meta name=”description” content=”This is the index page … Read more