Why AMP is critical to your mobile SEO

There has been much talk of late about AMP which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. These are HTML optimized pages that, when created and deployed, will greatly speed up the loading of your pages on any mobile device. Google has said that it is not currently a ranking factor but that may soon change. If you have not figured this into your current SEO marketing strategy, you really need to do so.

Normal non AMP pages have been slow to load and many mobile sites have been struggling with it because the ads on their pages have been loading much slower than the content and many clients who are paying for banner ads at the top of a page are not being seen as visitors are scrolling down before the ad even gets a chance to load.

An official statement from Google says that AMP , “is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly anywhere.”

According to the Google gods, what AMP does, essentially, is to pare down and strip away any extraneous material from your pages so that this stripped down version loads much faster that a standard site seen on a desktop or laptop. AMP will prevent users from having to wait for as long as 30 seconds or more for a mobile site to load. In reality, any effective site, regardless of where it is seen, must load in less than four seconds or the users are likely clicking away.

The AMP streamlining process doesn’t use Java and the coding is highly simplified. Another way AMP speeds things up is to retrieve your site from its own dedicated servers rather than having to access the site servers which, of course, slows things down further. Even though Google has said that AMP or mobile sites is not a ranking factor, being mobile friendly and loading speed are, indeed, serious SEO ranking factors. Many AMP enhanced sites are now seeing improved rankings.

With regard to ad revenue, the AMP sites will display fewer ads to increase speed but, though it is still too early to tell, this could balance out and even increase ROI because users are staying engaged longer because of the faster load times. When AMP is incorporated into your mobile site and overall SEO strategy, engaging users faster is a sure way to increase your rankings over time as well as getting some positive bounce for your brand awareness because you are coming up faster than your competitors.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer