The Importance of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) | LSEO Digital Marketing Services
- Updated on: 2017-08-07
- Read original article here
Google announced at its AMP conference in New York that AMPs would be expanded to a number of search engines across Asia. Yahoo! Japan and Chinese search engines Baidu and Sogou have adopted AMP potentially giving access to over a billion users.
Many e-commerce websites, news publishers, and high-authority domains have adopted AMPs across the US. Bing, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Ebay, Tumblr, the Washington Post, and over 860,000 domains currently use AMP worldwide.
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) officially launched in October 2015 to create faster mobile results for media organizations. Although not officially adopted by a majority of mobile website, AMPs offer a number of favorable features that could significantly boost your mobile web rankings and engagement rates.
AMPs are an open source platform that any website can adopt with the right technical specifications. AMPs HTML framework creates stripped down versions of existing webpages with cleaner code that load nearly instantaneously.
AMPs are modeled the same as HTML5 with limitations based on JavaScript code. They work the same as content delivery networks, which are free to use. What many people don’t realize is that AMP’s are loaded from a Google cache and clicks are not directed to a publisher’s native website.
Users have probably encountered AMPs in their mobile searches, which are distinguished from conventional mobile web pages by a lightning bolt symbol. Depending on the vertical, AMP webpages are also hosted in their own ‘above the fold’ carousel. Most users will readily encounter these web pages in a search pertaining to news or current events.
AMPs do not affect search rankings, though they load faster. When faced between indexing and ranking two identical web pages, Google will serve the AMP copy. If there is a desktop copy of the same webpage, the desktop copy will serve as the canonical.
While AMPs do not factor into Google’s search algorithm, their speed has a definitive influence over your webpage’s ranking. Aside from reserving its own ‘above the fold’ carousel, many have theorized that AMPs will become an influencer in the future for its mobile algorithm.
According to Google’s AMP Project, around 70% of conventional web pages take around 7-10 seconds to load. On the other hand, AMPs load in under a second. Consider these statistics fromKissmetrics: 47% of consumers expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less and a majority of web users will abandon a web page that doesn’t load in 3 seconds. Every 1 second delay in load time could decrease your conversion rate by 7%.
Faster load times surely equate to higher conversion rates and engagement metrics. Areportby Adobe last month found that top US publishers are receiving 7% of their traffic from AMPs. The same report found that AMPs had an increased engagement rate and dwell-time among visitors than conventional webpages.
There are currently hundreds of millions of AMP documents across the globe and 10,000 developers who have submitted their own AMP code. In the competitive mobile sphere, AMP could grant you the boost required to increase your rank, engagement, and conversions.
