PWA SEO

Introduction

PWA SEO (Progressive web apps) is the new launch that has been made for mobile tech. So we can describe they blur the line between web content and app.

But it does not lower the strength of the web. So let us see more about it since the research shows that users spend more time on mobile apps than a website because of offline accessibility, excellent user experience, SEO friendly, ease of access and making PWA go through the top in terms of fame.

And there is no denying that PWA is encouraged by users, digital marketers and developers. PWA SEO offers excellent opportunities and impacts linkability and indexability. Moreover, compared to mobile apps, PWA belongs to WWW world, which means you can find the PWA content on google too. And this means you need to make a whole lot from PWA. PWA SEO seems to optimize directly to improve users’ experience, leading to a conversion boost. Moreover increases engagement and better the performance of the app.

PWA SEO (Progressive Web Apps) uses Javascript

Since PWA SEO uses JavaScript, google deliberately sees any other published PWA as a javascript site, and Google bots will crawl it as usual. Due to this, some issues can occur, like crawling and indexing problems and developers should be aware of all these things.

Now you are maybe thinking why these issues occur. First, of course, we all know that websites always condense or generate HTML code on the server because it is the easiest way to ensure the content’s direct linkability.

But when it comes to web apps, use a client-side for rendering where content is updated on the web during browsing, and it does not reload the page. Due to this, the server side is used during navigation directly to an URL, and on the client’s side, it only happens after the initial page is loaded.

Tools that can Improve JavaScript PWA SEO

Google Search Console

Google search console will help you to fetch URLs with the feature called Crawl > Fetch as Google. With the help of this feature, google will not only present raw HTML response but also process and render javascript. It also has another fantastic feature called Crawl > Sitemaps that will help google to know all the pages on your website exist.

Cross Browser Testing Tool

PWA SEO is known for engagement, great user experience and reliability. This is why checking that your PWA apps work the same on every platform is essential. Chrome developer tool’s device, mobile-friendly test tool, or browesershot.org can help you ensure your PWA is cross-browser compatible.

LightHouse –

Lighthouse is an open-source automated tool that will help you improve your PWA SEO and let you know if everything is in line. If you work it as a chrome extension or a command line tool, it will tell you if PWA loads fine with a bad connection or offline connection. It serves good practices for accessibility.

The PWA SEO Checklist

Focus on Performance

No one likes to wait long for a page to load. This is why we would love to mention this: for better performance of PWA SEO, you need to measure page loading performance. This will eventually improve user experience.

No doubt googlebot does not get frustrated with the slow-loading page, but your users get frustrated. So use good measuring tools like PageSpeed Insights or Web Page Test. Especially testing before launching your app will bring better results. Please don’t do it after launching your application.

Specify Canonical URLs – PWA SEO

Another good PWA SEO practice is using re-canonical when serving content from multiple URLs. If you don’t use this, you can cause indexing issues when the same content is available on various URLs, irrespective of domains. In addition, it can create problems of duplicate content violation. So it would help if you avoided these things.

Design PWA for Different Devices

It would help if you worked on your progressive web apps to provide the same user experience on every device. The app should have the same work, performance and display no matter what the device is. To do this, your PWA should be responsive by design with fonts, buttons, margins and more elements.

Correct External Linking

Google will never index all external links in your PWA. This also applies to internal links. So you need to add a href attribute in anchor text because google bot analysis only that and not JavaScript links. So Google bot will definitely crawl and index the href link but not the onclick link.