Google Shares Four Essential SEO Tips For Making Single Page Apps

Google’s Martin Splitt recently shared some SEO tips and tricks when it comes to making single page apps. His advice for SEO agencies and business owners will prove useful in making their single page apps discoverable by search engines.

Single page apps (SPA), unlike multiple page applications (MPA), download all the data as soon as a user clicks the page. Facebook uses SPA, which is why when users click the “like” button on a photo, it instantly becomes “liked”. This means the page does not reload every time a user clicks something.

On the other hand, MPAs need multiple UI design layers because they consist of different pages, which, in turn, consist of a huge amount of content. Some examples of these applications include e-commerce websites, forums, blogs, and the like.

SPAs are different from regular HTML-based websites because they heavily rely on JavaScript. JavaScript is used to make the HTML specifically for single page apps, which then creates the page. It is also necessary to load the content when a user navigates to different parts of a single page app; this allows SPAs to load content without having the need to reload the whole page.

The biggest challenge when using SPAs is that JavaScript makes it difficult for pages to be crawled and indexed by search engines. SPAs usually use JavaScript to wrap all of its content in a single layer, making it barely discoverable.

Splitt gave four SEO tips when dealing with SPAs: cover code paths, treat views as URLs, optimise title and descriptions for each view, and improve how the app deals with errors.

1. Cover all code paths

If an SPA is functioning well but its content can’t be rendered by Google’s mobile-friendly test, the issue is likely due to unsupported code.

Take, for instance, an SPA that retrieves the user’s location info. If there is no code path that tells the app what to do if it cannot get the user’s location info, it’s going to have some problems.

However, if the example app had a code path that tells the app what to do in such a scenario, Google will have no problem rendering the content. For this reason, Splitt tells SEOs and webmasters to “cover all code paths” when making SPAs.

2. Treat views as URLs

The URL in the address bar should always change each time a user navigates in an SPA. This is because Googlebot uses URLs to determine different pages within an SPA. So, if the SPA has only one URL, then Google will only treat it as a home page and nothing else, leading to a decrease in rankings.

Splitt tells SEO agencies and website owners to treat the views as URLs by using the history API and link markup with href attributes.

3. Optimise titles and descriptions

SEOs should optimise views for SPAs, giving them their own unique titles and descriptions. This can easily be done by doing a little bit of extra coding with JavaScript.

4. Dealing with errors

SPAs mostly experience issues with invalid URLs. For instance, an SPA will often show an error message while the server shows an HTTP 200 status code.

Splitt recommends changing the default status code for individual views in an SPA, such as creating a view that acts as a 404 code, one that acts as a 500 code, and so on. This will redirect users to the appropriate view when encountering such errors.

Whether you need help with single page applications or multiple page applications, it always helps to have a professional SEO agency working on the job. If you are looking for the best SEO specialists in the UK, look no further than Position1SEO’s expert team!

With our free, in-depth SEO audit, we can help you determine any overlooked issues that have been negatively affecting your website rankings. What’s more, we offer a wide range of effective, white-hat optimisation services that are guaranteed to give your website a much-needed rankings boost.

If you’re interested, give us a call via 0141 404 7515 or email us at office@position1seo.co.uk today!