Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and their Impact on Natural Search Results

Mobile at this point of time has revolutionized the way users consume data, and today with an increased number of smartphones and tablets, people are accessing a large amount of content through their mobile phones. With that said, publishers need to concentrate on how to reach mobile web audiences with a unique user experience which in turn increases the engagement time. But this is not the case which the user is experiencing right now. Every time a user starts browsing web pages through mobile it takes too long to load these pages, which makes the user close that page and never come back. Here, the publishers are losing the opportunity of earning ad revenue. That’s because, on the other end of the publisher we have the advertiser, who is facing a hard time to make consumers pay attention to the adverts they produce and promote. As the pages load pretty much slow, making users abandon that website. So what is the solution for this? Then Google AMP i.e Google Accelerated Mobile Page is the answer.

What is Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Google AMP is Google’s new open source project which is designed to increase the performance of mobile web pages, by making them load content with lightning speed. In 2015, Facebook and Apple launched Instant Articles and News App, which are similar to Google AMP project. Google countered those projects with its new project for mobiles called AMP. With AMP, Google provided a solution to the most important question of mobile experience and engagement problem.

So what is the unique aspect of AMP which can differentiate it from other projects is that it is entirely built on the present web technologies. Which will allow publishers to host and manage their own content as well as advertising and the ability to provide an optimal mobile experience to their web consumers.Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) does this in so many ways, such as including only asynchronous scripts, preserving all the third party snippets of JavaScript out of the critical path and measuring all resources statically.

The result? An extremely lightweight web page that loads incredibly fast.

What is the use of Google Accelerated Mobile Page( i.e, AMP)?

Accelerated Mobile Page will allow publishers to match up their content templates with google’s open source framework called AMP HTML. It helps to simplify CSS, HTML as well as Javascript codes, which will result in the strip down of the pages that only includes the most important content i.e text, videos, site ads, images and more.

Publishers who opt into the AMP HTML framework will be benefited with increased site speed since that templates developed shares common elements and components, this will lead to a 15 to 85% increase in performance, as per Google

What is AMP HTML?

AMP HTML is a subset of HTML for authoring content pages such as news articles in a way that guarantees certain baseline performance characteristics. In easy words AMP HTML is a unique way to optimize web pages to load them instantly on consumer devices, mostly mobiles. This is designed to support smart caching, predictable performance, with modern and beautiful mobile content. As the AMP HTML is completely based on the present web technologies and not on the template-based model, website owners can continue to host their own content, work on their user experiences and can easily integrate with their advertising as well as business model. All this is done within a technical architecture which is optimized for speed and performance 

How do Accelerated Mobile Pages work?

Accelerate Mobile Pages are similar to any other HTML web pages, but the set of technical functionalities are limited which is defined and governed by the open source called AMP. Similar to all the other pages, Accelerated Mobile Pages will load much faster in any web browser which are available now and also in any app web view. The main aim of AMP is speed, So AMP files take advantage of all the technical and architectural reach which prioritizes to provide the user a faster web experience. Here the goal is to build a more useful technical core between pages that speeds up load times but not to homogenize how content looks or feels.

Adding more to this, AMP files can be cached in the cloud so that it will reduce the time of content reaching mobile user web. With this type of framework, a web publisher can control their content and different platforms can easily cache the content produced for much more optimal delivery speed for the end user.Google also stated that cache can be used by everyone without any cost and also added that all the AMP’s will be cached by Google cache.

Impact on Organic Search Results

Mobilegeddon is the first of its kind mobile algorithm which was released last year, as the name itself suggests the importance of Mobile, Google made Mobile Friendliness as one of its ranking factors. The website which passes the mobile-friendly test started appearing on the first page of SERP and that websites which are not mobile friendly had been suppressed to other pages maybe second or third.

With Google AMP, it is very much clear that Mobile Friendliness gained much more importance than ever. AMP is specially designed for mobile experience whether it maybe the speed of the website or user interaction, this would lead you to get a boost in search ranking. Google started showing up its AMP pages with a Lightning Bolt in Green ( Shown in fig below) on SERP, which is clearly indicating the user to experience these Lightning Fast Mobile Pages. When Google News Box was introduced then it made few pages to go down in search, with the same issue repeating now with the AMP module disrupting the search page by appearing at the top of SERP and making all the remaining pages go down.

So for those who will not opt for AMP can observe a decrease in impressions and most importantly clicks, even if you are at the top in organic results. As the top position is taken by the new king AMP in SERP, organic results will be pushed which results in losing your true ranking.

With the recent changes made to google paid ads, it is more unlikely for traditional results to show up at the top.

If you act now and opt into the AMP, you may see an increase in the traffic, maybe for a short term as more players get into the game. Take the first mover advantage now

With that said, AMP is a huge game changer and Google with this move is expecting the entire ecosystem of mobile to follow its guidelines of google own vision of what a better mobile web looks like. Anyways with faster loading speeds and better experience on all mobile devices combined with AMP features is a great move.