Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) are a relatively new concept that has swept the internet by storm. At launch, a lot of people weren’t so sure whether AMP would be beneficial for people and publishers or not. A couple of years later, people were starting to ask businesses and websites to implement using the more mobile-friendly pages. AMP was created by Google back in 2015 as a caching infrastructure meant to increase the loading speed of a webpage when viewed on a smartphone. It’s worth mentioning that AMP is not owned by Google with over 160 Ad platforms and 15 content management systems (CMS).
They created their own modified version of HTML to make it as light as possible while integrating performance-oriented components that help process media quickly. AMP servers are cached by many powerful providers like Google and Cloudflare. The loading speed of pages is almost instantaneous, which is a great feature for any news or story website. The question remains, is AMP good for SEO and digital marketing?
Speed
It was announced back in 2018 that the loading speed of a page affects its ranking on the search results page. This meant that whether a website has good content or not, could be unsubstantial to its ranking. Several studies reveal that the bounce rate, when a user visits a page and leaves, is drastically increased to 90% when it gets closer to the 5 seconds mark or more. This means, even if your page is ranking well on a search engine, a traffic or conversion hinderance will impact the site negatively if the page is loading slowly. AMP is making it much easier for websites to load instantaneously on mobile phones to decrease the bounce rate and improve rankings.
Conversion Rate and Compatibility
A business website has two main goals, increasing traffic while making sure the conversion rate is high. Recent research claims that a 100-millisecond delay in the loading of the page or website can negatively impact the conversion rate, decreasing it by 7%. As mentioned by AMPWPTools, it’s important to be able to provide a fully functional website while also being supported by efficient AMP. Less-functional AMP can cause a decrease in traffic and conversion rates. It’s not difficult to find different AMP plugs and themes to improve your AMP. SEO is greatly aided by AMP thanks to its ability to significantly increase conversion rates.
AMP-Only Search Filters
A lot of people are preferring to see AMP rather than traditional websites on their phones, especially those who are expecting to read the text. There are filters available in Google and other search engines that allow you to only see AMP pages, giving websites that use it at an advantage compared to their traditional counterparts. It provides a formidable boost to news publishers that find themselves at the lower end of the search results.
AMP Stories
AMP stories were launched a couple of years ago and integrated a lot of functionalities being used by social media and have proven to be effective. Google AMP’s Store is providing content formats that are aiding publishers with extra storytelling features that closely resemble those of social media. While it wasn’t heavily utilized at launch, it’s gaining a lot of traction thanks to swiping features, loading images quickly, and the overall instantaneous experience. It can be a powerful SEO tool as Google can show the stories directly in the search engine result pages.
The Future of AMP
It’s obvious that AMP is seeing a lot of positive reinforcement from many people and its future is looking bright. While the initial acceleration was a bit slow due to some subpar marketing campaigns, a lot of people are starting to realize the true potential of AMP. The rate of adoption of AMP is increasing dramatically. Last year alone, 31 million domains have all adopted AMP. To put the increase into perspective, it’s more than 15 times the adoption rate of a couple of years ago.
Things to Be Aware Of
Since AMP is fairly new, it’s a bit harder to track the statistics and analytics compared to traditional websites. It’s recommended to reconfigure AMP pages to be tracked with your domain in the Google Analytics tool for accurate analytics. It can be a hindrance to SEO campaigns when you’re not able to accurately track performance, making it important to set up your AMP correctly to be able to track it easily.
Even though AMP is still at the stage of infancy, its potential is growing rapidly as it’s constantly developed and upgraded. It’s quite a worthy investment when you’re trying to give your SEO a boost while also future-proofing your website.
