Patrick Hathaway Co-Founder & CEO
Over the last few years, we have seen 'JavaScript SEO' evolve from being a specialized niche of technical SEO to a discipline that basically everyone agrees is important.
As is often the case with new technologies, there was initial uncertainty that JavaScript would be widely adopted, which to some extent led to reluctance in a lot of SEOs to invest time into learning about it. By now, however, it's very clear that JavaScript is taking over as the language that powers the web, and the impact it has on crawling and indexing can be significant.
I predict that these trends will only increase, as the web becomes more dependent upon JavaScript, and more technical SEO issues caused by client-side rendering will fly under the radar of developers who are not conditioned to look for them.
The problem we have now is effectively a skills gap in the SEO industry.
The report shows that a third of respondents aren't comfortable:
It shows that there's plenty of work to do. We as an industry need to work harder on improving our tools to make it easier to detect, explore and report on JavaScript issues. We need a focus on education and training to ensure that SEOs have the support they need to approach JavaScript SEO with confidence. And we need both recognition and desire from SEOs themselves that this is an area for improvement.
Let's see what we can achieve by next year.
We've put together some resources to kickstart your JavaScript SEO learning... View the JavaScript SEO Hub
We're also offering free on-demand training in JavaScript SEO - it's 3 modules delivered via email, covering the understanding, auditing, and communication of JavaScript SEO issues.
