How Do The Accelerated Mobile Pages Affect The Search Engine Rankings
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Ankit Patel - March 16, 2019
- 5 min read
As an internet surfer, how many times have to been put off by the slow loading webpage? It is a known fact about the statistics that about 52% of the users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load the pages. How often have you experienced this?
Thus if you want that you do not lose any readers, you need to take measures to increase the load speed of the pages of your website. You do not want your website to have a higher bounce rate and people going to your rival site because they have a good loading speed.
• Accelerated Mobile Pages
Now, this is possible through an emerging technology called the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs). This is Google’s open-source project that helps the websites to load fast. As you all know, Google is the most favored search engine among the people across the world. The websites vie with each other to get to the top list of the search engine page result. This is possible when your website is optimized for speed loading.
The AMP has an aim to optimize the mobile pages that guarantees a faster loading time and hence an enhanced user experience across many platforms.
* This AMP framework consists of three basic parts that are :
- HTML – The AMP HTML has some restrictions and some custom tags and properties.
- JavaScript – This AMP JS manages the resource handling and asynchronous loading.
- CDN (Content Delivery Network) – This performs optimizations and caches the AMP-enabled pages.
• How do users recognize an Accelerated Mobile Page?
As a user, if you want to know the identification for an AMP, it appears as a lightning bolt symbol as against the conventional mobile pages. These are readily encountered when you search for news or current events.
Take for instance- type in the keyword ‘world news’ in the Google Chrome browser and you will get a carousel of news from different publications with the image in addition to the headline on the top of the page results. This top segment is differentiated as Top Stories and you see the publication name and the lightning bolt symbol at the top of every image attached article link.
• How does an AMP work?
The accelerated mobile page consists of HTML, JS and cache libraries. Some specific extensions and AMP-focused properties accelerate the loading speed of the mobile pages.
What an AMP does is that it essentially gets rid of all the unwanted elements that affect your website’s speed and performance. But, AMP doesn’t mean that you get a text-only page. They do feature rich content like infographics, audio and video files. But what matters is displayed.
Google actually saves the cached version of the AMPs and whenever visitors access them, they are served the copies from the cache.
• How do you make your page an accelerated mobile page?
First of all, know that there are restrictions on which page can be made an AMP. AMPs do not permit form elements and third-party JavaScript. You cannot have lead forms and the comment section. There are some restrictions on the site template and the CSS. The images, videos, slideshows, animated GIFs, and the font have to be AMP-optimized. And, most importantly, you have to have two versions of the page- one is the original version and the other is the AMP version.
If your website works on WordPress, there are Amp plugins available. But there might be some conflict with the other SEO plugins. If you want to do it manually, you have to select the high-priority pages and place several additional tags and a line of code.
• How do websites benefit from the Accelerated Mobile Pages?
- Load fast :
Obviously, there is a difference in the loading time of the AMP-optimized page. They load about four times faster. And the data is optimized by around ten times from the traditional pages to aid the faster loading. Now, you will not have the fear of losing your customers due to a slow website. Your website’s bounce rate will be reduced. - Better ranking :
If you have an AMP it does not directly affect your ranking. But, undoubtedly, a faster loading website is one of the criteria by Google for search engine rankings. So, naturally, if your webpage loads faster, it will be considered by Google for its search engine page rankings. There is every scope for you to land in the top place in the SERP. - Wide reach :
In countries where the connectivity is slow, the speed of the load page considerable affects the reach of the users. But with an AMP, you are sure to have a wider reach. The AMP works better than others even on a slow internet connection. Hence, AMP influences the content distribution resulting in increased traffic. - Content management :
The AMPs were designed keeping the content in mind. It was specifically done to load the blogs and articles faster. So, if you have the right keywords in addition to an AMP, be sure to see that you will be included in the carousel of AMP pages at the top of the SERPs. But remember, even though AMP helps to get you ranked higher, it is up to you to have engaging content. - Ad management :
Most of the popular websites earn money by placing ads. But ads also slow down the loading speed of the website. Many users have adopted the ad blockers so that the page loads faster. But then, the relevance of placing your ads fails with this. You will not earn any money through the ads. Here, the AMP comes into the fore. The aim of the AMP was to ensure that the users get what they want and at the same time, the ad monetization on the mobile web remains effective. The AMPs provide support for a comprehensive range of ad formats, network, and technologies. Surely, AMPs acts as a booster for advertisers and publishers. - Analytics :
Analytics is the core to know your customer. It gives a valuable insight of your ad campaigns so that you know where to tweak and which ad runs the best. The same is with the AMPs here. Google provides basic, but very useful analytics for the AMPs. You can track the data like visitor counts, clicks, conversions, video conversions and much more. It also offers built-in support to Google Analytics so that you can directly track your social interactions and events. - Google Support :
Google actively supports AMPs. It adds AMPs into its organic search results. If you have synced your webpage with the Google Analytics and Search Console, be sure to find a message requesting you to switch to the AMP format citing better eligibility to be shown in the search results and receive special badging.
Wrap Up
AMPs are a boon to websites like the news publications and magazines and to those who publish blogs and articles. Yes, there are many other methods by which a website’s speed can be increased. But if you want to please Google, then go for the AMPs. It will definitely get you ranked on the top carousel. This, in turn, means more visitors and more conversions on your website.
Ankit Patel is a Director of Sales & Marketing at XongoLab Technologies LLP and PeppyOcean, A leading mobile app development companies. In his free time, He likes to write articles about technology, marketing, business, web, and mobile. His articles featured on YourStory, E27, Datafloq, JaxEnter, TechTarget, eLearningAdobe, DesignWebKit, InstantShift, Business Magazine, SimpleProgrammer, and many more.
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