SEO professionals and webmasters knew it was going to happen. They tried to prepare themselves. They saw it rising over the horizon but nothing mankind could do could stop the domination of the AMP from Google!
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an advanced method of getting better performance from webpages listed on Google. Google had announced this new feature back in 2015 so it’s not like people hadn’t been warned, they were just on the edge of their seats wondering when they would be allowed to use it and what its effects would be.
AMP is like a super editing/cleaning service. It literally transforms the HTML on a website so that the site delivers performance at a higher level. It just beats up on JavaScript and other scripts, eliminating them from the page and gets to the bottom of the necessary content that the page is displaying. It will allow for a far more rapid response from the webpage and will bring the kind of fast performance the massively growing mobile market demands.
This addition of AMP ramps things up a bit for webmasters and mobile web design all over the place. It doesn’t mean that all your old webpages need to be redesigned. If the world had to do that it would cost immeasurable amounts of money and time and effort. AMP does it for you, but there’s still some work you need to do too.
AMP was only available for specific content and webpages like those that appear in the To Stories Google carousel.
No more. Now Google is cutting loose the training wheels and AMP pages are coming from Google on the entire spectrum of the valuable mobile organic Search Engine Results Pages aka SERP.
This advance in mobile SEO was inevitable as the mobile market is now the dominant market. Desktop and laptop are still around, but the majority of people don’t want to be bogged down with a computer so they love the smaller devices for surfing the web, shopping, social media, and gaming. Far too many times webmasters load their pages with all sorts of bells and whistles that drive people crazy waiting for the site to load or to actually interact with the content on the page. Mobile is about tightening things up, making things work fast and without trouble. Google’s AMP will take care of most of that and make the mobile experience more palatable worldwide.
Expect the world of mobile web design to panic to a variable degree. There will be experts scrutinizing the AMP performance down to the last molecule. They’ll want to make sure their sites are optimized to better take advantage. It’s just another thing the SEO expert has to take into account in their never ending battle to get those top positions on Google. Nowadays the SEO expert has to keep on top of any and all Google changes as well as market changes and technologies and techniques. So when a new system or feature emerges on the scene like AMP, they’ve got to master all cause and effect as fast as possible.
What’s this mean for mobile SEO overall? It means taking that extra step to assure your webpages are not only desktop friendly but mobile friendly to the max. The statistics following the implementation of the AMPs will tell the true tale and those stats will have to be scrutinized to the utmost to determine what AMP is doing and why.
Overall, only time will tell the full effect of AMPs, so it’s best to have a fair weather eye out from now on.
Image credit: Affordable SEO Company