Why You Should Adopt Accelerated Mobile Pages

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If you spend any time in the SEO world, chances are you’ve heard of Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short.

Even if you’re not in SEO, you’ve likely already encountered AMP in your own Google searches, whether you realized it or not. AMP pages commonly appear in the “Top Stories” news carousel of the Google mobile results. They’re differentiated by a special card with a lightning bolt symbol in the corner:

When you click through to one of these articles, you’ll notice it looks somewhat different than the “normal” mobile version of the website (i.e. what you would see if you visited the site directly by typing in the url). The formatting is simplified, distracting banner ads and popups are missing, and there’s an extra bar at the top of the window displaying the website URL:

These are AMP pages. What’s the big deal? Well, Google likes AMP. In fact, Google helped build AMP, and is heavily invested in making it the “future web.”

If you care about your organic rankings in Google, you need to care about AMP, too.

What are Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?

In a sentence, AMP is an open source framework for creating faster mobile pages. If that’s sounds a bit technical for you, here’s what you need to know.

Accelerated Mobile Pages enable you to load your website faster for mobile visitors. In a world where we’re increasingly using our smartphones to search the internet, speed is of the utmost importance.

AMP pages load your site content twice as fast as a normal, mobile version of your page. That’s a huge improvement.

AMP speeds up load time for your visitors by removing all the extraneous elements that tend to slow down a page. Instead of specialized fonts, the AMP framework use a standard set of fonts and color palette that loads quickly. Extra banners, advertising sections, and popups are blocked.

In essence, AMP analyzes all of the resources on your page content, determines which can be removed and which can be loaded faster, in order to deliver your page content in the most efficient way possible.

How Can You Implement AMP on Your Website?

When Google announced the AMP project back in fall of 2015, news sites and publishers were some of the first to hop on board because Google gave AMP content special treatment in the news carousel.

In the past few years, the AMP project has grown significantly. You can now implement AMP on a variety of page types, including:

• Blogs and article pages
• E-commerce landing pages
• Form pages

If your site is hosted on WordPress, there are several free plugins available that simplify much of the implementation process for you. AMP for WordPress is the one we recommend, since it’s backed by both WordPress and Google.

However, it’s likely you’ll still end up wanting to manually code AMP into some of your web pages, especially your home page and key landing pages. For that, Google’s Developer Resources for AMP or the AMP Project can walk you through the process step-by-step.

5 Benefits to Adopting Accelerated Mobile Pages

AMP does take a bit of work to implement. However, that work pays off in the boost to your organic rankings. Here are the top SEO benefits of adopting AMP for your website:

• AMP loads mobile content faster. This July, Google is making mobile site speed an official ranking factor for mobile search results. Enable AMP now so you’re ready for this change.
• AMP enhances the mobile experience. Because AMP loads quickly and removes many annoying elements of a website (like ads), early research indicates mobile users tend to spend more time on AMP-enabled websites. This dwell time sends positive site signals back to Google, helping boost your rankings.
• AMP makes it easier for visitors to engage with your website. Because AMP standardizes page elements, it’s easier for users to fill out forms, click your CTA buttons, and buy from your brand. A better user experience typically translates to better SEO rankings.
• AMP content enjoys a special, featured spot in the mobile search results. Get more clicks for your website with increased visibility in the AMP carousel.
• AMP gives you a competitive edge. Add AMP before your competitors, and you’ll see your keywords rankings outpace theirs. (Don’t wait too long, though – nearly 1 million websites have already implemented AMP.)

Get AMPed for Accelerated Mobile Pages

The longer you wait to implement AMP, the more you’re letting your website miss out on valuable organic search traffic. AMP up your website, and AMP up your SEO. Your visitors will thank you for it.

For help developing an AMP strategy for your website, contact Your Marketing People.