An Advanced! Progressive Web Apps and AMP SEO Guide 2019

Written by neatly.io on 4th January 2019

With the increasing technology and use of internet today, the mobile usage has increased manifold. Today, the companies are focussed on developing more mobile-friendly websites to user better user experience.

Keeping this in mind, Google developers in the year 2016, had developed a Progressive Web Apps (PWA) that offers an interactive experience and features of both – a website and a mobile app. Both are modern technologies that will continue to grow in the future and can help to enhance your business.

Let’s know everything about PWA and AMP and how these can help in improving the SEO of your website.

Dive Deeper and Know About PWA and AMP

Having knowledge of PWA and AMP is crucial for improving the SEO of your website. Know about them in detail.

What is PWA?

A Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a web app that uses modern web technologies to provide app-like experience to the users. It is an amalgamation of regular web pages and mobile application.

Why PWA is necessary for your website?

PWA offers a number of benefits over a traditional website.  The advantages of Progressive Web apps are:

  • According to an analysis, the user’s spent 80% of their time on apps and 20% on mobile webs. This will continue to grow every year. Hence, there is a need for more enhanced web app technology to offer a better user experience.
  • It has offline functionality that allows the app to run continuously in the background.
  • It allows lower data usages, especially for the users in the areas of slow internet access.
  • It has a feature of highly responsive layout and easy navigation that desktop website on a mobile device.
  • PWA saves the entire webpage on visitor’s local storage and updates the content only when needed.
  • PWA caches everything in app shell, so, we have the option to have the feel of a regular mobile application.
  • PWA uses a device’s native OS and features. It does not have any hardware restriction. Regardless of the device, all users can experience the same visual interface and content.

What is AMP?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) –the next revolution in mobile web development. They are the pages that are lightweight and loads quickly on mobile devices. It is emerging as the de-facto standard for building web apps as it uses advanced technologies. AMP is aimed at giving the user a great reading and surfing experience.

Why do I need AMP?

AMP is very important for your website as it helps web pages to load faster which improves websites’ visibility and increase user-engagement on the website. AMP has numerous benefits for your website. It includes:

  • It speeds up the website load time. It does not let users wait for page loading and increases more visitors to your website.
  • When your website generates a lot of traffic from the mobile, then AMP reduces the load on the server and hence improves the server performance.
  • AMP web pages are 85% faster than the non-accelerated mobile pages.
  • As there is no need to customize your content, search now can now easily discover your web pages and thus enhances the SEO of your website.
  • AMPs can be accessible on all the devices and are ideal for a mobile solution.
  • It uses optimized data consumption by allowing users to install the website on the home screen without taking them to an app store.
  • If you have AMP then you don’t need to create an XML sitemap, Google will pick the pages by itself.
  • Accelerated mobile pages can be molded in any type of browsers.

A Quick Note on AMP, PWA, and SEO

AMP and PWA are evolving day by day and their SEO implementation has a great impact on Google search ranking of a website.

  • Progressive Web Apps get picked up by Google than any regular pages. If you want your content to get indexed by PWA for SEO ranking on Google, it’s better to have an HTML base and load the Progressive web page over that.
  • AMP page are rel canonical to another page. It means that Goole does not depend on them for ranking.
  • AMP documents loads 2X faster than the regular web pages and are far more recommended than these standard pages.

AMP Vs PWA: Which is better?

AMP and PWA both are new technologies that have changed the mobile world today. Both have unique features of their own. But which one is better? Let’s have a look:

  • AMPs are just web pages and PWAs are mobile web pages with enhanced features.
  • PWAs operate quickly in comparison to AMPs.
  • AMP is suitable for publisher-based website whereas PWA is suitable for an e-commerce website.
  • AMP gets the content in front of the users fast whereas PWA enables rich user experience and engagement.
  • For https website, both PWA and AMP offer significant user experience but for an e-commerce website, you can never ignore PWA.

AMP and PWA work well alone. But they work excellent when used together. Have a look at what are the benefits of combining PWA and AMP together. How their integration proves as a boom to the SEO of your website.

Why Integration of PWA and AMP is important? Benefits of Combining AMP and PWA

As traffic increases from mobile devices now, website speed is a crucial aspect for every website. Seamless browsing engaged more users and it will results in more clicks and re-visits on the website.

AMP is designed to make web pages load fast. AMP and PWA together are referred to as the Mobile’s New Power Couple.  AMP helps in bringing users to your website and PWA helps in keeping them there.

Google developers have been constantly working on increasing the website speed. If we put AMP and PWA together, it can deliver amazing user experience. Harness the power of the latest technologies with the integration of PWA and AMP stories and start off with a bang.

AMP loads landing pages faster than previous technology. AMP provides a preview and delivers content more quickly, but the user wants a place to experience a whole story. That’s where PWA helps. What AMP does for landing pages, PWA does for the whole website. PWA has engagement-enabling features. Therefore it would be beneficial to make landing pages as AMP pages.

It simply means, PWA and AMP together can be a great component to increase the SEO of the website to the next level.

AMP and PWA are actually unique mobile technologies that offer excellent benefits to the publishers on the board. Both technologies complement each other and when combined, greatly help your website.

About The Author:

Aarif Habeeb is a content writer and an SEO expert in Jaipur. He is a Founder of SEOTrainingClasses. He also provides seo training in Jaipur. He is responsible for brand-building via content and social media for his agency. His success lies within his originality and hands on experience in editing and writing. Aarif lives in Jaipur and loves his early morning filter coffee, dessert gazing and reading newspapers. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook