Introduction
Smartphones and apps have become a lifeline in consumer’s daily lives. Many organizations has started considering a “mobile-first†strategy in their IT roadmap to increase customer engagement, provide superior user experience and to stay ahead of the competition.
One of the latest technology disrupting the mobile ecosystem is Progressive Web Apps or PWA.
What are Progressive Web Apps?
Alex Russell, a software engineer at Google I/O developer conference released its mobile site – Progressive Web Apps, a new technology that combines the best mobile and web technologies to provide an exceptional user experience. It offers similar functionalities of a native Android and iOS apps making it a popular technology among the developer communities.
Progressive Web Apps delivers an interactive experience by providing an app like user experience to a user on a mobile browser. PWA is designed to provide PWA is designed to provide a reliable, fast and engaging experience to the user.
a reliable, fast and engaging experience to the user. It loads faster and seamlessly works on all mobile devices.
The in-built intelligence of PWA captures user behaviors and preferences which allows the app to deliver a personalized experience to its users.
Key Benefits of Building Progressive Web Apps
Push Notifications: Instantly allow users to get summary of all the updates or messages
Engaging: PWA does not require any installation and provides an app like look and feel to the users providing a superior experience. It works well on desktop, mobile or tablet.
Responsive: Provides responsive layout that help users to easy navigate on a mobile device
Access to Other Services: Provides access to various services including geolocation, camera, other hardware access, microphone and screen orientation access
How does it work?
The two underlying properties of Progressive Web Apps are – Application Shell Architecture and Service Workers.
9 SEO Best Practices for Progressive Web Apps
Every upcoming technology has its own set of inherent advantages and challenges. And with PWA, there are a lot of question raised regarding its indexability and crawlability. In this blog, let’s understand how PWA impacts the SEO.
PWA uses JavaScript for its published pages and creates a separate URL which allows the search engine bots to crawl the page, just like the other web pages or websites. However, it is important that the developers are aware of the technical limitations which can hinder Google bots to crawl and index the site so that they code correctly.
Google has recently released some of its best practices to address the crawlability and indexability issues of its PWA sites.
Outlined below are some quick tips and techniques that can help you to keep your PWA site optimized:
- Search engine bots do not index URL which uses a “#â€. To get maximum benefit from the SEO, it is advisable to use clean search-friendly URL structure without using a “#â€.
- Include canonical URLs to serve the content to the users from multiple URLs in order to avoid any content duplication.
- Ensure that Robot.txt file is made available and accessible for the Google bots to crawl and index all the pages.
- Leverage Fetch and Render tool in Google Search Console to discover your PWA site and test to know how Google bot views the page.
- Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check if the PWA load faster.
- Limit the number of embedded resources in the page which enables the page to load and render faster.
- Manage an accurate sitemap and make sure to update it accordingly to the website changes using Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP).
- Test PWA site on different browsers to provide an exceptional user experience across all browsers.
- Remember to migrate old sites that uses AJAX crawling scheme and remove “meta fragment tagsâ€. Avoid AJAX crawling on the new site.
Conclusion
In this rapidly changing business environment it is critical for businesses to leverage new technology and innovate quickly to become successful and stay relevant. Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is an emerging technology that aims to deliver astounding user experiences on the web. Building a superior-quality PWA has immense benefits for the companies, however, it is also important to understand the underlying technical complexity during implementation to ensure that it benefits the SEO and keeps the brand visibility intact.