MARTIN SPLITT: When you are building websites,
or web apps with JavaScript, you don't
want to end up accidentally making your content
inaccessible to crawlers.
Crawlers, like Google's Googlebot,
help you make your content available and discoverable
for users searching for it.
As part of your development process,
you are probably already using tools
to make sure your code works with different browsers
and devices.
Using the tools we will cover in this video,
you can also make sure that your content
is discoverable for crawlers.
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A good first step to check your website or web app,
is the mobile-friendly test.
The main purpose of this tool is to show
you potential issues with your content on mobile devices.
But it can do a lot more than just that.
Enter any URL and run the test to see if your page is
considered mobile-friendly.
If you want to run this for your local development server,
use a tool such as Ngrok to get a publicly available URL.
Once the test is completed, you will not only
see if your page is mobile-friendly,
but also a screenshot of your page as a Googlebot smartphone
crawler would see it, along with the page-rendered source code.
If you see that some of your content is missing
or the page doesn't render the way you expect,
you can check if there are any recommendations for you,
or dive in deeper by looking at the detailed report that also
shows you which resources have been loaded,
and all JavaScript logs.
But there is one more tool for you
to make sure your site is working well with search.
The Search Console.
It is a great way to find out how your website or web
app is doing in terms of being discoverable in search.
We will only briefly cover it here,
but make sure to check out our in-depth videos
and documentation.
Among many other things, Search Console
shows you which of your pages are indexed by Google search.
The URL inspection feature in Search Console
lets you see the status of the URL as well.
It shows you the most recent index data about the page,
if it is indexed at all, when it was
last crawled, if it is mobile-friendly,
and many other things.
You can also run the live test version, if needed.
Search Console also offers many more reports
to help you identify and solve problems with your website.
Search Console will even proactively message you
if there are any known issues.
To get started, verify your site to get reports and insights.
It is also definitely worth checking out
the documentation and videos about Search Console.
If you use structured data, you can use the rich results test
to check if your pages are eligible for rich results,
and even get a preview of such results in the search pages.
The test will also show you errors,
and provide guidance on how to fix them.
Search Console provides a rich results report
that gives you a site-wide overview
of your structured data status as well.
And it shows information in the URL inspection tool.
You can also use the structured Data Testing tool
to check for a broader range of structured data features.
Some structure data is not supported
as rich results, but still important to provide
useful information to Google and others, like breadcrumbs.
The structured Data Testing tool can
either be used as a development sandbox, where
you can enter some markup and see how Google would pick it
up, or you can use it as a way to test your structured data
implementation by entering a URL and getting
a report on the kind of data that we detected,
along with arrows and warnings.
Past just content and structure data, speed is important too.
Your goal, as well as ours, is to provide users
with useful results and a great experience.
Performance is a big part of that.
If you are not using performance auditing tools,
like Lighthouse, you should definitely start doing so.
On top of performance audits, Lighthouse also
provides a growing number of accessibility and SEO audits.
In combination with the other tools,
such as the mobile-friendly test and Search Console,
they all provide different levels of insight
into your web content.
Lighthouse also provides insights
into the speed and performance of your pages.
Among many other elements, speed is
one factor for ranking your page in search.
So following the guidelines and recommendations
that Lighthouse provides, is great for happier users
and better ranking.
Last, but not least, you can and should
check if your pages show up in search.
For instance, if you look for some of your content,
say the title of a blog post or one
of your specific products within search,
you should find some results.
If you have found this video useful, consider sharing it.
There are many more JavaScript SEO
episodes coming out soon, discussing
topics such as JavaScript frameworks
and dynamic rendering.
But in the meantime, check out our Webmaster Help
Center and our Webmaster Forum.
You will find the links for these in the description below.