In the era of mobile first, the PWA is gradually taking hold and is of interest to more and more people. Does this web application optimised for smartphones help with SEO?
Natural referencing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) defines the methods used to optimize a website and increase its visibility on search engines.
Being well referenced means that your website appears among the first results of a web search made by a user.
The display of search results depends on two elements.
- Indexing is when robots gather information from the website and save it in a database.
- The algorithms that then use this information, and through a specific calculation, return the sites in order of relevance to the search performed.
The objective is then, by playing on the various levers favouring referencing (content, site structure, metadata, etc.) to try to appear as high as possible in the browser searches.
SEO is in fact the main channel for acquiring visitors to a website. To find out more, we invite you to read our previous article.
Google favours mobile first
In recent years, search engine searches have increasingly been conducted on mobile devices, which are becoming the main channel for accessing the internet.
Following this trend, Google now favours mobile websites in terms of referencing. This new turn of events follows the launch of a new technology by Google: AMP. The Accelerate Mobile Page (AMP) consists in improving the loading time of pages on smartphones.
Today, everything seems to be moving towards a constant improvement of the user experience of mobile versions of websites.
The PWA: an SEO friendly application?
A Progressive Web App is a website that functions in the same way as a traditional application. This implies one very important element: the PWA is a search engine friendly application.
Indeed, its content is directly accessible by the indexing robots, which offers them significant visibility. On the contrary, a classic mobile application is not natively perceptible by these robots, and remains in the background on search engines.
However, to maximise the natural referencing of a PWA, it must be thought and developed as a website and not as an application. It is necessary to take into account the different elements that can favour SEO:
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Each page must be indexable
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Use of real URLs
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Well-configured HTML structure
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Maximising the UX
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Proposal of qualitative content
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Use of keywords and links
As the PWA is optimised for mobiles, it will naturally be promoted by Google. In addition, this new type of application offers advantages in terms of better visibility, such as a significant improvement in the user experience, the security of the application via HTTPS, or the increase in the speed of page loading.
