Any successful venture consists of two parts: a good product and successful marketing. Both these factors are symbiotic in nature with one helping the other while failure in one of them will mean the doom for the other. There is no point in having a great marketing strategy if the product is not good and similarly a great product is of no use if the consumers do not know about it. Search Engine Optimisation is the best form of Online Marketing these days as most people begin their online activity by typing what they need directly on Google or on other search engines. Hence this makes figuring well on search results a matter of priority for websites. Craftily positioned words help attract and convert website visitors into customers. However, making a sale is not just about keywords. The website’s “health” matters quite a lot too. This includes the general layout, design, attractiveness, compatibility with browsers, loading time and a host of other factors. In fact loading time is the critical factor which determines a website’s traffic. No one wants to wait for a slow and unresponsive site when there are thousand other places which will get the job done faster.
And with a huge amount of traffic being generated from mobiles many e-commerce websites are thinking of going “app-only”. Surfing the net from handhelds is catching on with the public. Why go through the trouble of opening up your personal computers when everything that can be done on a PC available on a mobile phone too. However, it is a very common and observable fact that opening websites on your phone is a tedious task. Even with good Wi-Fi speeds sites suddenly become unresponsive on mobile phones. Internet browsers on the mobile want the mobile experience to be the same as while sitting on their laptops but that is seldom the case. Accelerated Mobile Pages are the solution. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a gift from Google to the internet community. As the name suggests pages using the AMP code will have accelerated speeds and far less opening time than standard websites. This is just like the option of instantly opening up articles on Facebook which are characterised by a lightning sign in the corner. It is claimed that an average AMP page loads in less than half a second while a typical mobile site takes three seconds to load.
AMPs are a god send for content publishers. Google has always cared about providing as much information as fast as possible. This was evident in their recent logo change too which loads faster than their previous one. It has always been evident that to increase traffic on one’s websites loading speed and content should be top notch. Not using AMPs is only viable for those who cannot allow for distinction in how the pages are viewed over phones and computers. Since the primary objective of AMPs is speed, it requires sacrifices elsewhere. But for SEO purposes AMPs are the way forward.
Here is why:
- AMPs are directly linked to lower bounce rates. You do not want your website visitors to get frustrated while waiting for the site to load and click on the back button. Time spent on your website and not on loading the website is time well spent.
- It has not been officially confirmed yet but AMPs are bound to improve website rankings on search engine results. Google results are gradually placing more and more importance on a site’s functionalities such as does the site work, how fast does it load and the like. Thus a faster site means a more visible site.
- AMPs are good news for ads as well. Google admitted that ads are important and help generate free content on the internet. Thus even though AMP will focus on displaying the content to the website visitor first, it does not compromise too much on ads. A longer visitor engagement time means a better chance for the ads to be viewed. Accelerated Mobile Pages are a win-win situation for every party.
There are some limitations though. Sites relying on web forms for leads and feedback will not be able to use them since AMP will not be compatible with JavaScript. However this is a small trade-off and Accelerated Mobile Pages have been created for mainly one thing that is reducing loading time on mobile phones. This it does perfectly. Several publishers like Twitter, BBC etc. are changing their websites in accordance with AMP with WordPress making the AMP plug-in available too.
