PWA SEO: How To Optimize Progressive Web Apps for Search

In the early days of the internet, store websites were essentially digital brochures with basic navigation. The advent of Web 2.0 transformed the web from static pages to user-driven content and interactive services. Suddenly, you had new features like responsive mobile site design and ecommerce capabilities.

Today, you can create websites with unmatched flexibility and customization through progressive web apps (PWAs). Built with JavaScript, these sites offer app-like functionality without needing a native app download.

If you’ve ever browsed a website with lots of inventory—like St. Frank or Taylor Stitch—you’ve interacted with a PWA. Ideal for sites with extensive catalogs or bespoke features, PWAs allow developers to custom-code and preload the browsing experience. Plus, they have numerous search engine optimization (SEO) advantages; Google’s enhanced JavaScript rendering makes indexing PWAs straightforward, eliminating the need for special optimizations.

Here’s more about PWAs, how they can improve your SEO efforts, and how to implement PWA optimization tips for the best organic results.

What is a progressive web app (PWA)?

Progressive web apps (PWAs) are websites that use HTML, CSS, and modern JavaScript frameworks to provide an app-like experience with smooth navigation and animations. Although you access PWAs through web browsers like traditional websites, they’re coded to behave like apps, making them fast, dynamic, and capable of working with low-quality internet connections by caching data.

When you visit a PWA site, the entire code base loads, unlike traditional websites that reload code with each new web page. This makes navigation between PWA pages noticeably faster.

PWAs are especially useful for highly customizable sites. For example, an ecommerce platform like Moe’s Home displays real-time stock levels by connecting the site to its warehouse system.

How do PWAs work?

PWAs take an app-like approach to web development by loading a single JavaScript file. Like Instagram, the site loads entirely first, then dynamically updates content based on user interaction.

Traditional websites, on the other hand, rely on server-side rendering, where the main server processes all of the site’s data and sends it to the user’s browser. PWAs use client-side rendering, where the browser processes JavaScript code to load only necessary page elements rather than the entire HTML document from the server.

Benefits of using PWAs

1. Better user engagement
2. Mobile-friendliness
3. Push notification capabilities

Ensuring your site has an excellent user experience is crucial. Implementing a PWA can enhance performance, accessibility, and engagement. Here are three PWA benefits:

1. Better use engagement

PWAs create a fast experience, making it easy for customers to jump quickly between pages, as each page doesn’t need to reload. They also afford high levels of customization with interactive elements and personalization according to the user’s behavior. These features help keep the user engaged for longer, improving session duration.

For example, after switching to a PWA, the kitchenware company GoodCook saw a 30% increase in session duration by implementing ecommerce functionality on recipe pages, letting users directly shop for the cookware needed to prepare their meals.

2. Mobile-friendliness

Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it crawls a site’s mobile version to determine its ranking on search engine result pages. PWAs provide a seamless mobile experience with responsive design (i.e., when your website adapts to screen size) and service workers, which cache frequently used resources like images and scripts for faster retrieval.

3. Push notification capabilities

PWAs can send push notifications to users, similar to native apps, even when the user isn’t openly interacting with the website. For example, sending a push notification to subscribers when a new collection drops. This can increase traffic from returning visitors.

Tips to optimize PWAs for search

1. Submit a sitemap
2. Create custom URLs
3. Monitor and analyze performance
4. Optimize metadata and schema
5. Consider hybrid rendering
6. Test to make sure your content is indexed

Traditional websites usually serve static HTML directly from the server, making them easy for search engines to crawl. By contrast, PWAs use JavaScript to generate content dynamically, which can be more difficult for search engines to process. Here are five tips to optimize your PWA to maintain strong search engine rankings:

1. Submit a sitemap

In traditional websites, content is directly tied to the back-end code. In a PWA, content is dynamically generated by JavaScript. What the user sees doesn’t necessarily reflect the code. This can cause Google crawlers to misinterpret the page, affecting rankings. Simply put, if Google doesn’t understand your page or how to crawl it, it won’t rank.

To mitigate this, submit a comprehensive XML sitemap to search engines, ensuring key pages are easy for Google bots to index. Also, use Google Search Console and its robots.txt tester to check for any blocked resources that might hinder crawling.

2. Create custom URLs

Traditional websites have unique URLs for each page (eg., www.yourwebsite.com/collection/product-1), and the URL changes with the content. PWAs, however, can update page content dynamically using JavaScript without changing the URL or loading a new page. The lack of URLs can prevent search engines from indexing your content because they rely on URLs. To resolve this

• Give each page a unique URL. By using the HTML5 History API, for instance, you can assign a unique URL to each dynamically generated page in your PWA without reloading the page, allowing the user’s address bar to reflect the current content state.

• Remove hashtags from URLs. These are often used in PWA navigation.

• Use canonical URLs. Canonical URLs are the preferred version of a page accessible through multiple URLs; they prevent duplicate content issues.

3. Monitor and analyze performance

Integrate your PWA with analytics tools like Google Analytics to make sure your SEO efforts are effective. If Google can’t crawl or process your JavaScript, it will impact your search rankings and organic traffic (i.e., low to no rankings and traffic).

Audit your website using Google Search Console’s Core Web Vitals tool to identify and fix issues like poor interactivity or layout shifts. Google PageSpeed Insights can also give you information and recommendations related to your PWA’s mobile-friendliness. Performance analysis is an ongoing process undertaken quarterly to biannually.

4. Optimize metadata and schema

Metadata helps search bots understand your page, while schema markup provides specific details to search engines. Optimizing both ensures your PWA is easily understood by crawlers and improves content ranking. Here are some tips:

• Give each page a unique title tag, including the target keyword.

• Implement meta tags like “index” and “follow” to guide search engine crawlers.

• Add structured data with schema.org for elements like product review, ratings, and prices.

5. Consider hybrid rendering

Hybrid rendering merges client-side and server-side rendering, giving your PWA the best of both worlds. On the initial page load, the PWA uses server-side rendering, making the entire HTML document accessible to search engine crawlers. Then, as the user interacts with the website, client-side rendering takes over to give the user that smooth, app-like experience that’s so crucial in PWAs.

6. Test to make sure your content is indexed

To see if search engines are correctly indexing your page’s content, copy a string of text from the page. Open the HTML source by right-clicking and selecting “View Page Source” (not “Inspect”). Use Ctrl + F to search for that text in the source code to verify that it’s present. Then, enter the following Google query to see if the content is indexed:

site:[URL] “[text]”

For instance, to check if “cats have nine lives” is indexed on https://www.example.com/cat-facts, use:

site:https://www.example.com/cat-facts “cats have nine lives”

If the search returns your page, especially with the text highlighted in the snippet, your content is likely indexed.