Progressive Web Apps How Do They Impact Your SEO Strategy

Posted on April 3, 2019 by Creative Team

Progressive Web Apps: There has been a humongous change in the pattern of mobile uses. Now people use their mobiles for most of the works.

This has attracted the attention of mobile companies and app developers. Companies are more focused on developing mobile-friendly apps.

With a huge demand for mobile apps, Google introduced Progressive Web Apps (PWA) that are providing an experience of the web as well as mobile.

The Progressive Web App (which indeed is not actually a mobile app) still provides the basic experience of a mobile app by enabling shortcuts of the PWA on the home screen of a mobile device, push notifications, and other functions of a mobile app.

So for a startup, PWA is a beautiful asset, which can arrange a web view as well as mobile app experience for its customers in low investments.

But like everything in the world has some problems, PWAs have some limitations which might affect the SEO strategy of any company. But there are techniques, as listed below, to mitigate these SEO challenges with PWAs. Let us know more about PWAs below.

How do Progressive Web Apps work?

Progressive web apps are like normal web pages or websites but the user can have the facilities of working offline and push notifications. It is an advanced version of existing web technology.

We can find these apps in general search engine results like other normal websites. There is also no need for separate download or installation required for such apps. If the PWA is published online it can be linked to any host supporting HTTPS.

Even though the user is offline the app still works utilizing the cached data. This gives benefits not only to the startup company looking to develop mobile platforms but also to their users.

Some Convincing Stats about PWAs

Forbes' PWA loads in 2.5 seconds on mobile phones compared to its 6.5-second load for its previous site.

Impressions per visit have been increased by 10 percent. After Forbes' redesigned their mobile experience as PWA, a 43 percent increment is found in sessions per user.

Lancome’s Progressive Web App has seen a 17% increment in conversions and 51% increment in mobile sessions all over the world with a 53% increment in iOS alone.

Progressive Web Apps - Do Google Bots Crawl PWAs?

Google considers every webpage of PWA as a Javascript. Whenever a new URL is created for PWA, the Google bot will crawl it as it does with other pages on the web.

There can be some crawlability issues with PWAs sometimes. So the developers should build a PWA where crawlers can access Javascript.

Search Engine Optimization Tips For PWAs

  • You should avoid the AJAX-Crawling scheme on new sites.
  • It is important to make sure that the required resources are not blocked by robots.txt.
  • You can make use of Google Search Console Fetch and Render tool to see how Google bots see your page.
  • Some search engines and web service providers may not support Javascript or they might support a different subset.
  • You should reduce the number of embedded resources on the page as these might not be fully loaded.
  • While using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) you should use an accurate sitemap file to signal any change on the website.

PWA for your online Business: Yes or No?

Every business knows its own requirement. It's is not very much compulsory that every business should have PWAs.

If the business is with a low-scale website, fewer contents, quick loading time a traditional website is all you need. But for large-scale websites with a high amount of media files, high loading time, and has multiple features PWAs are most preferable.

PWAs are the lite version of your traditional websites. PWAs require a little more effort for optimization than traditional websites. Thus PWAs are the next generation of online interactivity.

A few years back client-side web application was a nightmare to SEO but today businesses can safely embrace PWAs without any negative impact on SEO.

Thus, there are few limitations with PWA’s optimization on search engines but it is possible to overcome them with a strategic approach and can be implemented in large-scale businesses.

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