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Once you have a progressive web app, do you know how to give it a good search ranking?
I’m here to lead you into the world of discoverability and search engine optimization for Progressive Web Apps. Every search engine has a different way of ranking pages but they all depend on a web crawler to gather information and when you build a JavaScript driven site, the crawler might not be able to find everything. You might need to give it a little help.
While every search engine has its own way of crawling, there are two fairly obvious rules: first – if the crawler can’t see it it’s not going to be indexed, second – everything needs its own URL. This may be a trivial solution for your site. If customers are always searching for a landing page or other static content, but those pages won’t index, it’s unlikely to be found by the search engines.
A PWA does not have to be a single page app. You could add a serviceworker to every page in a website or a multi page app as long as these pages have the same origin and path they will share a serviceworker. Another option is to serve and render the dynamic content and then let the client take over rendering. This lets any crawler see and index all of your content.
You can use these solutions with any crawler since there’s no JavaScript involved and, if you want your app to be indexed everywhere, you’ll have to render it on the server. You can write code that renders on the client or as server-side JavaScript. It’s called isomorphic JavaScript but that assumes you’re using node or another JavaScript server and, if you want an easy test, you can run Lighthouse. It includes some basic SEO discoverability tests.
Lighthouse runs some basic SEO tests as if you have an HTML only crawler. Each test has instructions for fixing or improving shortcomings okay.
So the universal answer is not to depend on JavaScript but Google’s crawler can run JavaScript so you can index client rendered sites as long as you follow some rules. There are about a dozen rules but the top five will take you most of the way.
We’ve already covered the first rule: make your content crawlable. That means rendering it so the crawler can find it. If you’re writing a single page app. The top five rules become these top five tips. Many developers provide navigation links with a hash for the URL and use a click listener instead. These should point to actual paths in your app to trigger changes. You also need to avoid URL fragments…the part that begins with a hash sign. These break many tools and libraries and are now deprecated.
We used to recommend hash-bang prefixes for crawling a jet-powered sites as a way to change URLs without reloading the page but now you should use the history API instead.
The next rule is to use canonical URLs for duplicate content. For example: amp pages normally have a server rendered page and the client rendered amp page. The client rendered page has a link back to the server rendered page. Using the rel equals canonical attribute, the crawler will index the canonical server rendered page. Some developers even shadow their client rendered pages with server rendered pages and use the canonical link to point back to the server. This makes more of the app discoverable.
Tip number 4 also gives you great accessibility – use the native HTML elements whenever possible. Crawlers know what to do with an actual button but won’t recognize a div of class button in the same way.
Finally, use progressive enhancement use polyfills where it makes sense to support older browsers. You never know which version of a browser is used in a particular crawler so play it safe. Some simple changes can improve your data quality and give users much better results. One is to use the schema.org annotations for structured data. They are a predefined schema for common areas such as e-commerce scheduling and job postings. Search engines can use the schema annotations to parse your data accurately.
The same logic applies to the Open Graph protocol which allows any web page to become a rich object in a social graph.
Finally, the Twitter cards provide a rich media card that displays when anyone links to your site from Twitter. It’s important to test your work and work iteratively so the you can see the effects of each change. Testing on multiple browsers is not only a best practice for everyday development, it ensures your site renders correctly on multiple crawlers. Testing with the Google webmasters search console will crawl your site and show the result and you should always pay attention to loading performance. Use tools such as PageSpeed insights or Webpage tests to measure the loading performance of your site. Remember, about 40% of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
Of course, the most important rule is to treat client-side rendering as a progressive enhancement. If you test on a range of browsers you’re probably fine. If you want to be certain, you can use the fetch as Google tool on the site.
I’m gonna give you eight quick tips to improve your local SEO. All right, before we dive into the tips, it’s probably a good idea to really understand what is SEO and why is it so important?
The reason we use search engines is because they have proven time and time again that they provide the best answers to the questions that we’re searching for and if your website doesn’t appear on the first page of the search results, then you’re nowhere.
And so SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it’s work that you do to make sure that you prove to Google and other search engines you’re the best at doing it. So for SEO, I like to use the analogy of all the work that you need to do is like a 1,000 piece puzzle. And you and all of your competitors, you all have the same puzzle and we’re trying to prove to Google and Bing who’s the best, which one of these puzzles is the most complete.
Yours is definitely the best. We know that. Does Google know that? But the thing is not everyone has all 1,000 pieces. Some people are new. Some people have been doing it for a long time and Google doesn’t necessarily care that you have all the pieces in. The thing that Google cares about is that you have more than the next guy. You could have maybe 10 pieces and if you’re in not a very competitive space then yeah, you’re going to appear on the first page. So these eight tips that we’re going to talk about are going to help you to start putting those pieces in to get started on your SEO journey for local businesses.
-Tip number one for local businesses.
Everybody needs this – you need to create or claim your Google My Business Profile. Google My Business is this tool that Google has created that allows users to see all of your business information in one place. If you don’t have a profile, you need to go create one and if you haven’t claimed your profile meaning that your profile exists but you didn’t necessarily do it or some other user created that, you need to claim it so that you can update it with all the right information. You need to make sure it’s in your control. Don’t let it out to the world for anyone to add. It’s yours.
-Tip number two is that you need to optimize your profiles.
It’s great to have it created but if you don’t have all the information that Google is looking for, then they’re not going to recommend your business over someone else. So that means having your business name correct, your address, your phone number, your hours of operation. Those are the basics that most people do, but optimizing it really means going a level beyond that so adding photographs, adding your logo, adding pictures of your building so that when people are actually going to your business, they know what it looks like. If you’re a restaurant, include pictures of dishes and what you’re known for so that way people have lots more information when they’re looking at your Google My Business page. So those are the key things that you need to do to optimize. If there’s reviews that are outstanding, you need to respond to all of those reviews.
You need to encourage your customers to go and leave reviews because that also plays a part in how you’re going to rank against other local business profiles.
-Tip number three is you need to add your business to relevant business directories.
These are other sites where their main business is promoting other businesses like yourself and so you need to make sure that your business not only is there but the information is correct and the great thing, it’s an easy back link. It really helps with your SEO to make sure that your business, anywhere people are looking at these business directories, your business shows up.
-Tip number four is to add your business address to your website.
It sounds pretty plain and simple but a lot of websites don’t have that. So again, to increase your rankings, this is one thing that not only Google and Bing are looking for, but so are your users. If they’re wanting to visit your business, they want to have the address very prominently placed.
So put it in the footer. Have a separate page about your location. Just make sure that it’s there, visible, and very prominent. – All right, so should we put a Google Maps thing on the site too? – Yeah, that helps. That’s visual. People can click it. They can see exactly where you’re located, the cross streets, so that’s always helpful as well so just make sure that you actually have the address called out and written out next to that.
-Tip number five is to make sure that your NAP is consistent across the web.
What’s NAP? – Name, address, phone number. So you need to make sure that those three things are consistently formatted everywhere. So pick one and then update it on your website. Update it on your Google My Business and then update it anywhere else where your website appears. If you don’t own those websites, email the owner and say, “Hey, can you update this?” And most likely they will but just make sure it’s consistent everywhere.
-Tip number six you need to update your home page’s meta title and meta description.
The meta title and meta description are things on your website that you control how your website shows up on the search results. So whatever the meta title is, that’s what will appear on the search engine results page and then the little description below.
This is a great opportunity for you to let your clients know what you’re about. So if you are a coffee shop in Seattle, maybe you should have that in your meta title and description. Put your location. Put more information about your business so that way your users know what you’re about. Most website builders or applications that you use have a section for you to add a meta title, a meta keyword, and meta descriptions. If you don’t know how to go in the backend and do it, which most of us don’t want to, right? So if you need help, just contact whoever you’re hosting your site with.
They’ll probably be able to help you get that information there because if you don’t set anything Google will just assume whatever it wants to put there and it may not always be relevant to what you want to invoke to your audience.
-Tip number seven is just to make sure that all of your other SEO elements are in place.
Make sure that you have great content on your website. Make sure that your source code is formatted in the way that Google likes to see it. Make sure that you have a great number of high-quality backlinks that are pointing back to your site.
All of this will help with your local SEO. It’s super relevant to make sure your site is structured in a way that Google basically wants on your site, those H1 tags are important, it’s basically a code on the site that says “This is my most relevant tag line,” if you will.
So only one H1 tag per site. Images are super important because Google cannot read images but it can read text so that’s that little description there. Most website builders or applications like Word Press have a place for you to add those.
-Tip number eight is to consider launching paid ads or Google guarantee.
If you’re not getting the results fast enough or the traction that you need using steps one through seven and appearing in the organic sections, then this is where paid ads and the Google guarantee comes in. You can consider doing these things. Paid ads, obviously it’s pay to play. You appear right at the top of the search result. It’s amazing but once your ad budget is gone, you no longer appear there. But people click on the ads. They’re very effective. – So I love paid ads. It gets you right to the top.
The Google guarantee is basically paid ads supercharged. So you could pay, anyone really can pay to have their business appear in the paid ads but the Google guarantee takes it to the next level where if someone purchases the service through the Google guarantee and they’re not happy, they can get their money back, which is really awesome. So it’s Google vetting certain businesses and making sure that they provide a great experience. There’s extra levels you have to do to qualify for the Google guarantee but it’s really great and stands out in the search results and people love it.
Those were our eight quick tips to help improve your local SEO. I hope you liked it.
