Google AMP
Google’s AMP roll out didn’t necessarily dominate world headlines when it happened, but it did send shockwaves through the communities of those that do business online and create content for websites. Knowing what the particular focus and changes are is necessary in order to keep your online business from suffering. In fact, hopefully you can find ways to even take advantage of it when you know the 3 ways of just how Google’s AMP roll out will affect your business. Keep reading to learn the exact specifics that you need to know.
What exactly is AMP?
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. It’s part of Google’s new focus on mobile devices. For a long time, mobile users of smaller electronics like smartphones and tablets had to suffer downloading web pages meant for desktop computers, whose screens have been growing in size. This made things either really tiny for smartphone users or lots of scrolling and zooming in and out.
AMP is an effort to streamline how pages are created for mobile devices so that they load much faster, which is critical on data-limited plans. Your business can now use AMP HTML to streamline website content to strip out cumbersome various scripts and deliver streamlined content to mobile devices, which poses a choice as to whether or not to do it.
Why would my business bother recreating all our content through AMP?
Because the mobile segment of the Internet is the fastest growing segment of online traffic. Look at the sluggish and sometimes slowing growth of desktop sales versus smartphones and tablets. Consider how even desktop and laptop users are spending more time online on their smartphones. If you want to make sales to all these users, you need your content to be there and loading fast.
Even if you currently get some mobile traffic without AMP content, you might be losing out surfers that never wait for your content to load. A third of mobile users back out and go elsewhere if something doesn’t load right away. If content takes as long as 10 seconds, the number of people hitting the X or Back keys or buttons roughly doubles. AMP streamlines content to improve loading times anywhere from 15% to 85%.
How is AMP impacting search?
This is where things can get a little complicated. It appears for now that sites optimized for organic searching are getting their links and listings posted below AMP content in the search results.
When you consider how few results show up on a mobile screen to start with, you’ll realize that organic links are really suffering here. The flip side of that is that they’re suffering from being below AMP content. Simply by taking part in AMP content, your business can get back on the cutting edge.
Google believes the near future of the Internet is mobile device traffic, and is looking to make things easier for mobile users through AMP and other projects. Stay on top of things about how Google’s AMP will affect your business, and you can maintain and even grow its sales compared to those slow to stick with the cutting edge.
