Google’s AMP Project: What You Need to Know

Isaiah Bollinger

Isaiah Bollinger

In October of last year, search engine giant, Google, announced that it was rolling out the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. Designed to help mobile search users gain faster access to more tailored, relevant and useful content, AMP seeks to increase the load speed of pages on mobile devices to near-instant proportions, thus improving mobile user experience and making mobile content easier to access. Here’s what marketers need to know about this exciting new development:

How Does AMP Work?

AMP works by simplifying complex coding languages like CSS, HTM and JavaScript. To make a mobile page load more quickly, AMP strips these elements down and creates streamlined pages that contain only the most relevant content in the form of images, videos, ads and text. According to Google, AMP-enabled pages load an average of 85 percent faster than standard web pages.

Why Does AMP Matter?

It’s no secret that Google has been pushing to improve mobile search for quite some time. In the last few years, Google has released several mobile-friendly algorithm updates and just recently boosted the importance of its mobile ranking signals. The reason Google has been so intent on improving the way mobile search delivers results is that late 2015 was the first time that mobile search surpassed desktop search — a significant trend shift that shows no sign of reversing.
In addition to the fact that mobile search is now the primary mode of search, mobile users are also incredibly discerning: Right now, 40 percent of people will leave a website that takes more than three seconds to load. With this in mind, Google’s focus on delivering high-quality, fast-loading mobile pages is highly understandable.

Three Considerations for Adapting to AMP

Adapting to AMP can seem intimidating, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Here are a few things marketers adjusting to AMP will need to think about:

1. Each Article Published Will Require Two Versions

Because AMP improves load times by stripping down the elements of a page, marketers will need to maintain two versions of each page they publish. While the non-AMP page will support things like lead forms and comments, the AMP-enabled page will not.

2. Images and Videos Will Require Careful Updates

AMP does affect pictures and videos, and marketers who want to format them correctly will need to amp-ing elements in their images. On-page images will also need to abide by width and height requirement.

3. Google Will Need to Be Alerted to Your AMP Pages

To help Google discover and rank your AMP pages, it’s wise to inform the search engine that you’ve implemented AMP. Do this by adding a simple canonical tag to the original version of your content.

The Future of AMP

While AMP is a large change in the world of online marketing, it has the potential to help marketers boost the effectiveness of their online content in a large way. Because Google will give ranking preference to AMP-enabled pages that load quickly on mobile devices, companies that adopt AMP today are better equipped to rank well on Google’s SERPs shortly. What’s more, AMP helps deliver more useful and relevant content to today’s mobile users, which can help boost customer loyalty, increase conversions and establish your brand as an authority in your industry.
Sources:
https://www.ampproject.org/
https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/opinion/2430844/google-s-amp-project-what-will-be-the-impact-on-publishers
https://moz.com/blog/9-things-about-googles-mobile-friendly-update
https://searchengineland.com/google-boost-mobile-friendly-algorithm-coming-may-244941
https://searchengineland.com/its-official-google-says-more-searches-now-on-mobile-than-on-desktop-220369
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/googles-amp-speeding-web-changing-works/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/googles-amp-update-what-expect-how-adapt-your-content/158581/
https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/amp-img.html
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/google-will-now-favor-pages-use-fast-loading-tech/

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