The Impact of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on SEO and Digital Marketing
Over the last few months, SEO strategists, online publishers, and digital marketers have been raising great concerns about the impact of AMP on SEO and digital marketing as well as the changing search engine algorithms.
On, February 24, 2016 Google introduced the long awaited for Accelerated Mobile pages (AMP) project into its mobile search results. According to this project, publishers can now create mobile optimised and responsive content with pages that can load many ways faster in a matter of seconds.
Not only are they becoming Google’s default preference pages in Google search results, but also AMP pages easily adapted to WordPress and other javaScript based sites.
What is this AMP anyway, and what is it all about?
The AMP project is a fast way of tracking content to mobile devices. According to this project, the AMP pages can load four times faster and use eight times fewer data than the traditional mobile-optimized pages.
The net effect of the project is that it improves the traditional way of serving content on mobile devices and the mobile users can easily see articles with basic text images much faster than the traditional formatted content.
How does Google AMP work?
It uses a specific format of HTML called AMP HTML when stripping down presentations of content which includes pre-processing text formatting and image embedding tags.In addition to using AMP JS files for loading all external resources, it also uses the AMP Cache or the AMP CDN content delivery network to heavy lift or grabs your recent content and re-position it over the world web.
How does Google AMP affect SEO? Is Google AMP a ranking factor?
If you’re new to SEO, you may have missed reading about Google’s mobile –friendly updates (https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2428675/which-ranking-factors-are-important-for-mobile-sites#), but one or two of the mobile ranking signals are page speed and user experience. The faster a site is when it loads, the more it caters for mobile devices and users. So, the high speed and mobile readiness of the Google AMP is a high ranking signal in the search engine results pages(SERPs).
Googe AMP is not effective for non-publishers. It only caters for new type articles and blog posts which mean brand sites and e-commerce sites that do not focus on articles and blog posts can not benefit from the AMP HTML SEO efforts- instead they have to focus on the traditional HTML content formats.
Google AMP may cause your domain Authority to suffer
Because most sites will be linking to google.com instead of your domain, chances are that your site will have fewer links. And yet one of the factors for ranking in the search engines is determined by the number of root domains.
The impact of AMP on digital marketing
Increases paid search impressions.
With the AMP-enabled articles having actionable and engaging catchy headlines, users can easily click on them, which results in increased number of paid search impressions over a given period of time.
Increases content viewership and readership
Not anymore for digital marketer’s readers to wait. With the accelerated mobile pages, content loads faster in a matter of seconds, unlike the javascript based web pages which need relatively more time to load heavier media such as videos and pictures.
Provides better content, promotional and monetisation platform
Because AMP pages appear on Google’s newsreel and are ranked among the top pages, it provides a better platform for promotional content -which easily translates into traffic.
On the other hand, AMP can also impact digital marketing negatively.
For example. AMP pages don’t have external style sheets or javascript –which means brands have decisions to make on whether to have design complement content to attract visitors or else they pull out of the AMP as of now. Some brands may not wish to use dull pages in a struggle to attract return visitors to their sites. And the use of experimental AMP components carries more risks of bugs. So, brands will need to incur more costs to hire developers to help them debug every page.
More changes in the way publishers create content inline ads
For publishers who rely on high-bandwidth over designed ads to capture attention, there’s a likelihood of customers blocking their ads.However, with the Google’s ads partnership there’s a possibility of improving the ads with the AMP spec ads compliance to reduce the burden of blocking the ads.
Conclusion
The fact that Google stresses the site speed as one of its ranking signals, the integration of the AMP is more likely to have a greater impact on SEO and digital marketing in general.
