Understanding AMP: What Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Project Means for Your Business

It’s been nine years since Apple debuted the first iPhone in 2007, and since then, smart phones and other mobile technology have changed the way we use the internet. By 2014, the global number of mobile internet users had surpassed the number of people accessing the internet on a desktop or a laptop. Today, American adults spend 51% of their screen time on tablets and smartphones. Mobile is here to stay, and for businesses, it’s more important than ever to have a mobile friendly website with fast load times and a good user experience.

You’ve probably noticed that a lot of websites just don’t seem to work that well on mobile. They’re slow and clunky, they take forever to load, and the layout is less than pleasing. Add in millions of popups and intrusive ads that slow things down even further, and trying to read a simple article on your smart phone can be quite an ordeal. When mobile sites load too slowly or don’t display correctly, people won’t stick around. Having a mobile friendly website isn’t optional, it’s imperative if you want to keep up with your competition.

Google AMP: Speeding Up the Mobile Browsing Experience

AMP stands for "Accelerated Mobile Pages," and it’s Google’s latest initiative to motivate web publishers to make sure their websites work on mobile. Back in February 2016, they officially integrated AMP listings into their search results, marked with a special "AMP" designation. Today, there are over 600 million AMP pages across hundreds of thousands of domains.

What AMP actually does is speed up load times on mobile devices. It does this in two ways. First, it requires that web developers use a certain narrow set of technologies to create web pages. For example, they’re discouraged from making heavy use of JavaScript, which is notorious for slowing down websites.

To use AMP, you generally create a separate version of your site, which conforms to Google’s guidelines and specifications. This involves paring everything down to a minimum. While AMP pages do work in laptop and desktop browsers, they may look a bit stark.

Is AMP Necessary for SEO?

Google is definitely showing some preferential treatment to pages that use AMP, at least in search results on mobile devices. In mobile searches for news stories, AMP results show at the top of the page in the "News carousel". There is an unusual catch, though: if someone decides to link their friends to your article, the link points to Google.com (e.g. www.google.com/amp/yourcoolsite.com/pagename/amp). This content is hosted on Google’s AMP cache servers, so when people are linked to it, they’re still staying within Google’s ecosystem.

Broadly speaking, AMP is not a ranking factor per se, although AMP pages can crowd out other pages in the News carousel. However, despite the fact that AMP doesn’t factor into Google’s search algorithms in its own right, it still has indirect effects that can impact SEO. AMP pages for mobile can increase your website’s clicks and impressions, reduce its bounce rate, and improve the overall user experience.

It’s also worth mentioning that while AMP pages themselves don’t directly affect your organic search rankings, your website’s mobile friendliness is a ranking factor. Even if it weren’t, there are very good reasons for both generalized mobile-friendly web pages and for AMP itself.

With people spending more and more time on their smart phones and tablets, mobile is now the number one way that people access the internet. Smart phones aren’t a novelty gadget anymore, they’re the norm. Creating a good user experience for mobile users is important not only for SEO, but for your overall engagement and the success of your site. Embracing AMP and other technologies is essential for creating a successful web presence in an increasingly mobile-oriented digital landscape.

Kris is a reputed writer and blogger and he loves to share his articles in different internet community over the years.