SEOs need to adapt

Until recently, it’s been too easy to get away with not understanding the consequences and opportunities posed by PWAs and service workers.

These were cutting-edge features which sat on the periphery of what was relevant to search marketing, and the aforementioned wariness of many SEOs towards JavaScript did nothing to encourage experimentation. But PWAs are rapidly on their way to becoming a norm, and it will soon be impossible to do an effective job without understanding the mechanics of how they function. To stay relevant as a technical SEO (or SEO Engineer, to borrow another term from Mike King), you should put yourself at the forefront of these kinds of paradigm-shifting developments. The technical SEO who is illiterate in web development is already an anachronism, and I believe that further divergence between the technical and content-driven aspects of search marketing is no bad thing. Specialize!

Upon learning that a development team is adopting a new JavaScript framework for a new site build, it’s not uncommon for SEOs to react with a degree of cynicism. I’m certainly guilty of joking about developers being attracted to the latest shiny technology or framework, and at how rapidly the world of JavaScript development seems to evolve, layer upon layer of abstraction and automation being added to what — from the outside — can often seem to be a leaning tower of a development stack. But it’s worth taking the time to understand why frameworks are chosen, when technologies are likely to start being used in production, and how these decisions will impact SEO.

Instead of criticizing 404 handling or internal linking of a single page app framework, for example, it would be far better to be able to offer meaningful recommendations which are grounded in an understanding of how they actually work. As Jono Alderson observed in his talk on the Democratization of SEO, contributions to open source projects are more valuable in spreading appreciation and awareness of SEO than repeatedly fixing the same problems on an ad-hoc basis.

Beyond SEO

One last thing I’d like to mention: PWAs are such a transformative set of technologies that they obviously have consequences which reach far beyond just SEO. Other areas of digital marketing are directly impacted too, and from my standpoint, one of the most interesting is analytics.

If your website is partially or fully functional while offline, have you adapted your analytics setup to account for this? If push notification subscriptions are a KPI for your website, are you tracking this as a goal? Remembering that service workers do not have access to the Window object, tracking these events is not possible with ‘normal’ tracking code. Instead, it’s necessary to configure your service worker to build hits using the Measurement Protocol, queue them if necessary, and send them directly to the Google Analytics servers.

This is a fascinating area that I’ve been exploring a lot lately, and you can read the first post in my series of articles on PWA analytics over on the Builtvisible blog.

That’s all from me for now! Thanks for reading. If you have any questions or comments, please leave a message below or drop me a line on Twitter @tomcbennet.