In 2020, it’s essential that your website is using a mobile-first strategy. Not only do you need to ensure that your experience on mobile is a positive one for your users, but search engines in recent years are prioritising mobile versions of websites and content to index and rank websites organically. Read this article to discover what AMPs are, and why you should be using them.
What is AMP?
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs) are lightweight HTML pages that are stripped back in comparison to their desktop counterparts. This creates a better user experience, super-fast load speeds and makes the website easier to use on smaller screens and devices.
Google launched AMPs to ensure that mobile web pages load as quickly as they can. The goal from Google with this project is to create web pages and ads that are fast, and that perform as best as they can no matter which device they’re being viewed on.
AMPs have been used since 2016 or so, and they’re indexed and displayed as a priority in the SERP (search engine results page) for mobile and tablet devices. This is especially important as mobile internet access now exceeds desktop globally, so it’s important to prioritise the experience of the majority of users.
How do I make an AMP?
You can create an AMP by creating two versions of your webpages — the original (usually desktop) version and the AMP version for mobile devices. Google will index the AMP version of your website, with the aim that your accelerated mobile page will benefit from an improved rank on mobile devices than the desktop version.
There are several elements to setting up AMP, and three basic parts. AMP HTML, AMP JS, AMP CDN. If this all sounds overwhelming or you’re not overly familiar with JavaScript or HTML, speak to an expert (like us here at Blue Bee!) to help you find your feet.
Will AMPs help my SEO?
We’ve spoken a lot about organic rankings in this article, and that’s because a key benefit of using AMP is that your SEO will improve. Quicker load times and brilliant mobile-first user journies will give your organic rankings as boost, and will help you outrank your competition on the search engine results page – especially if they’re not using AMP.
Outside of the SEO benefits, an increase in page load speeds should also lead to improvements to your user’s experience on your website. These may include reductions in bounce rate, users spending more time on the website and viewing more pages, and this will result in more traffic and conversions.
Thinking about creating accelerated mobile pages? Whether you need a tip or two or for us to do it for you, we’re here to help.