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The world is now a place, where we have a 24x7 4G internet connection on mobile devices, turning every second person into a Nomophobic. There was a time when we used to wait until midnight to start surfing the internet so all sluggish websites loaded faster. The only option we had was to wait forever because of the poor internet connectivity and sluggish websites. But now the picture is completely changed as nobody wants to wait for web pages to load. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the importance given to load time. Speed matters, more than ever to increase website ranking. This is where Accelerated Mobile Pages come in. Read on to know more.
Increase Website Ranking And Conversion By Reducing Page Load Time
Does your web page take more than 3 seconds to load?
“We’re seeing an extremely high response-time for requests made to your site (at times, over 2 seconds to fetch a single URL). This has resulted in us severely limiting the number of URLs we’ll crawl from your site.“
-John Mueller, GOOGLE
There could be reasons like too many plugins to heavy images to a bulk of redirects to dense codes to too many ads. This could still be making your web page sluggish and turn out to be a hindrance to increasing website ranking.
| Use tools like - Google PageSpeed, Pingdom, WebPagetest and GTmrtrix to analyze your web pages and their load time |
Since 2010, Google considers page load time as a ranking signal and apparently penalizes slow-performing mobile pages and high page load time could be contributing as a hurdle to increase website ranking. The importance of fast loading pages is also extended to those publishers who generate revenue via advertising. If your webpage doesn’t load before the visitor bounces back, you won’t be making any money on all the ads. And who would want to complicate ad revenue generation any further!
Will your mobile optimized website suffice or do you need more to increase website ranking?
Mobile is the new normal now and this Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends Report confirms that by highlighting that users are continuing to shift from Desktop to Mobile web for content consumption. Further emphasizing on the importance of the mobile web, Google has initiated - Index mobile first, according to which Google algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. All this makes it obvious for you to tilt their focus towards mobile web. Though the question (rather a doubt) that arises here is, whether a mobile-optimized website is the only thing you’ll need to increase website ranking?
By acknowledging that most of the searches are taking place via mobile web, and optimizing your website for the same, you have really done a great job. However, you might still be witnessing high bounce rate and face problems to increase website ranking as a Mobile optimized website doesn’t help you in decreasing the page load time. When it comes to reducing the page load time and bounce rate, all that you need here, is Google Accelerated Mobile Pages.
Accelerated Mobile Pages: Future Of Mobile Web
As of last year, there is a new entry in the alphabet soup of web standards: Accelerated Mobile Pages. You may have already noticed the small gray lightning bolt logo in your Google search results, but if not — start looking.
Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP) is a new Google initiative to build a better, more user-friendly mobile web by introducing a new ‘standard’ to create an ideal mobile web experience for all. Basically, this new standard is a set of rules that form a simpler, lighter version of HTML. And pages built in compliance with AMP are sure to load super-quick on all mobile devices.
Ever since its launch in search results in February 2016, Accelerated Mobile Pages has been in the SEO news. However, despite all the buzz around the project, SEOs and webmasters keep treating it quite warily. Is Accelerated Mobile Pages yet another Google fad to come and go within a few months like many of them did before? Or is the project here to stay and form the future of mobile?
AMP’s predecessors: Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, and Snapchat Discovery have all had similar goals (making the mobile experience better for the user) all while actually making it more difficult for news websites to monetize their content in the very saturated online content market.
Delivering The Ultimate User Experience With Accelerated Mobile Pages
The fast loading time and the less complex structure makes the end result is a very clean, minimalistic mobile page that focuses only on what is absolutely necessary ensuring an ultimate user experience.
[Tweet "Faster mobile pages + readable content = better user experience"]
How Accelerated Mobile Pages are different from Facebook Instant Articles
Facebook Instant Articles appears only in the Facebook app, where a reader doesn’t have to rely on any outbound link and can easily read any article inside the Facebook app itself. These articles are built using HTML5, and publishers are required to submit a properly formatted sample to be approved by Facebook before they can begin distributing via Instant Articles. Once approved, publishers are able to syndicate Instant Articles directly either through the Instant Articles API or with a secure RSS feed.
Accelerated Mobile Pages appear inside your mobile web browser on google search result page. On the other hand, Facebook Instant Articles are like a whole new version of traditional mobile pages optimized with a faster load time.
The key here is preloading, meaning that Google begins caching and pre-rendering content before you even tap on an article. Preloading has been around for a long time, but Google has taken this technology to the next level. By cutting out JavaScript and slow-loading parts of HTML, Google AMP is able to dramatically decrease load times. Per Google, AMP articles load 4x faster than standard web pages while using 10x fewer data.
How Accelerated Mobile Pages Drive Discovery To Increase Website ranking?
The speed ultimatum
People on the web are always multitasking and have no time to wait for your website to load. The one thing that AMP does for you, is increasing mobile performance – creating much faster mobile pages that load instantly – actually, around 0.7 seconds, but you get the idea. We can't overestimate how important this is.
Prioritizing mobile web
When mobile web searches are now more common than desktop web searches, it makes complete sense for Google to give more weight to mobile searches than desktop searches, when it comes to page ranking and optimizing your pages with Accelerated Mobile Pages lets you leverage this opportunity.
Less Complex
A quick glance at AMP standards will tell you that there’s a lot less than a developer puts together for a website. It’s a lot less complex and a lot more convenient. AMP includes no third-party JavaScript, no inline styles, no external style sheets, input elements, and several other tools that developers are accustomed to using. A most responsive design has ways of handling these web objects, but there's no place for them in Accelerated Mobile Pages. That's a good thing!
Leverage AMP Analytics
It’s not enough to send traffic to your mobile browser pages. You also have to know how they arrived at your site. AMP analytics will assist you in the same. With AMP analytics tools in place, tracking users and site performance becomes easy, you can determine where people came from, which pages they viewed and so on.
To prevent multiple analytics tracking from slowing down a site, Google has implemented the philosophy of “measure once, report to many”. There are two paths to enable analytics functionality with AMP for your website:
- The Amp-Pixel Element: This is a simple tag that can be used to count page views as a typical tracking pixel would, using a GET request. There are a number of variables that can be passed through it, such as DOCUMENT_REFERRER and Title.
- The Amp-Analytics Extended Component: This is a bit more advanced than the amp-pixel. It is likely what you’ll use to implement analytics on your site because it allows for a greater level of configuration for analytics interactions.
- If you aren’t trying to get Google Analytics working, amp-analytics is the way to go. You will need to add the necessary JavaScript library in the <head> and then configure it via some JSON markup in the <body> section of your page.
- If you are interested in Google Analytics in AMP, check out the Google’s AMP Analytics section on their developer page. It has several examples of implementations.
Challenges with Accelerated Mobile Pages: Publisher Feedback
In Google I/O 2017, the amp team addressed all these challenges and highlighted the steps being taken to resolve each of them. You can watch the complete video.
Bad News
: All AMP pages look the same
Good News:
Alike webpages, amp pages are styled in CSS and are fully customizable using via the custom library of AMP components. This library allows for a creative page design. The AMP team is even planning to release a set of templates with light elements to help you start with some beautiful and interactive Accelerated Mobile Pages. For those who do not have designing resources, can use <amp-start>. This AMP library is constantly growing with new additions like Perabox that allows you to add 3D effects to your webpage.
Bad News:
A hard time measuring the success of amp pages
Good News:
The fact that amp pages leverage platform catching and rendering makes it a little bit challenging to measure their success. However, in the last few months, Google has launched link and form substitutions to help publishers in attributing page visits back to AMP pages. Google also published a document that can be used while collecting analytics directly.
Bad News:
AMP URLs displayed in search results
Good News:
AMP URLs are not easy to copy and paste, it is a bit frustrating to not be able to see the original article. For this, google search has recently rolled out a button across mobile web. This button appears in the header section that users can tap to display the publisher’s link and tap on the link itself to ‘canonical’ and long press to ‘copy-paste’.
Bad News:
Don’t monetize well through ads
Good News:
To this, the amp team Google shared that many publishers confirmed that they have experienced 90% higher CTR, 70% higher viewability and better monetization on AMP pages as compared to their non-AMP pages. The team has also launched AMP-ads which loads load 6x faster, will be 3x lighter relieving the browser of the burden, have no third party JS, with no malvertising -leading to 13% more revenue. There are a couple of tools like Selter’s Ad Creator present on the web that can help marketers create these AMP-ads without any technical knowledge.
From Instant Articles To Google AMP
When it comes to widening the content reach, Facebook Instant Articles have been working precisely well for many publishers, but as I mentioned earlier, they reduced the possibility to almost zero for someone to consume that content on a publisher’s website. This has an adverse impact on their overall SEO and SERP. This is one of the reasons that will impact Facebook’s ability to woo publishers
All this led to a good news for all AMP fans out there. Facebook is trying to salvage instant articles by providing support for Google AMP. In May, Facebook announced the release of a new software extension. This software lets publishers easily transfer content formatted for Instant Articles to Google AMP.
Overcoming The Dilemma - Should I Implement AMP
AMP has seen to be working really well for publishers. Below are the stats collected since the launch of AMP in 2016.
Are you a publisher with following objectives?
- Seeking to establish strong user engagement on the mobile web as most of your search is taking place via mobile.
- You wish to increase mobile traffic to your website.
- Want to ensure that users stay longer on your website and thus reduce the bounce rate.
- Have understood the importance of page load time to increase website ranking
- You don’t want to get penalized by Google for a sluggish website.
- To increase website ranking, you need to decrease page load time to boost your google ranking.
If you can relate to these objectives then you must give a spin to AMP. It’ll reduce the page load time and also reduce bounce rate helping you to increase website ranking. Your original content page would be the mobile browser friendly version that users will see, but you’ll also have the AMP version of that specific page, which will definitely speed things up.
Which platforms and browsers does AMP support?
Google AMP supports the latest two versions of all major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera. They have their functionality extended to the desktop, phone, tablet and the web view version of these respective browsers. Besides that, the core AMP library and built-in elements should aim for very wide browser support. It accepts fixes for all browsers with a market share greater than 1 percent.
How To Start Using AMP: Actionable Tips
One good thing about AMP is easy integrations for many CMS platforms. For most of the platforms, AMP has released its original plugins and extensions. These plugins and extensions are easily accessible in the plugins/extension directory. Here's a list of few plugins/extension for your reference.
AMP -
With respect to the CMS platform you are using, all you’ll have to do is install and activate the AMP plugin. This will help you to increase website ranking. For further design and layout changes, you can always get elements from the AMP library and modify your AMP pages as required.
For platforms like Hubspot, you can enable AMP within HubSpot in two ways:
- Enable AMP within the "Publish or Schedule" tab of an individual blog post. Select the checkbox and publish the post to convert the post to AMP format. Google caches this content they will index the AMP version.
- Enable AMP for all your past posts, and any published in the future. Within Content Settings, you can enable AMP and configure settings such as font, text color, logo, and more.
Prepare For The Future (Together)
Contribute to the AMP development
Google Amp is an open source project and welcomes contributions from everyone. This project lives on Github and 400 developers are already contributing to its development with their own codes. AMP team has made it possible for contributors to become a part of the team’s weekly design reviews on the hangout. This has made this project more transparent and to increase the level of engagement. All you’ll need to do is raise an issue on Github and flag it as an agenda for next meeting. If you are not a developer, you can refer to tutorials to understand how to create your first AMP agenda. Go to bit.ly/helpamp and start contributing.
Over to you
It’s a wake-up call that brands need to realize that page speed plays a vital role to increase website ranking. It needs more importance and time investment. And this is exactly what Google AMP can help you with. AMP has a huge impact on the Google ranking. It is a new addition to the SEO tactics that you should follow.
Resources
http://www.scribblelive.com/blog/2016/04/25/3-ways-improve-google-serps-with-content-marketing-and-seo
https://www.link-assistant.com/news/smx-east-2016-recap.html
https://www.upwork.com/hiring/development/facebook-instant-articles-vs-google-amp/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/05/facebook-will-let-publishers-convert-instant-articles-to-google-amp-and-apple-news-formats/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/25/15692076/facebook-instant-articles-google-amp-apple-news-publishing
http://www.adageindia.in/digital/facebook-just-lost-a-big-battle-to-google-for-publishers/articleshow/58849611.cms
https://thenextweb.com/google/2017/02/06/google-fixing-amps-screwy-url-problem/#.tnw_7rrf8ruL
https://digiday.com/media/publishers-excited-google-amp-traffic-wonder-revenue-will-follow/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGyF5Uh3w1M
